14,366 karma · joined January 30, 2018
The absolutists have not thought it through. Fallibilism always wins.
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Privacy & Agency Rant:
While we missed the boat on Internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier of neural tracking.
Thanks to the BCI, we will soon be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login and faster typing. Next, there will be a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding.
Then, thought crime will become a literal thing. If particular thoughts are not outlawed outright, they will at least prevent you from certain activities.
> Proposed neuro-rights include the right to identity, or the ability to control both one's physical and mental integrity; the right to agency, or the freedom of thought and free will to choose one's own actions; the right to mental privacy, or the ability to keep thoughts protected against disclosure; [0]
For a great breakdown on the SOTA (2023) tech, and the long term implications, please see this podcast with full written transcript.
> Sean Carroll & Nita Farahany on Ethics, Law, and Neurotechnology [1]
[0] https://www.cirsd.org/en/horizons/horizons-winter-2021-issue-no-18/its-time-for-neuro--rights
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-nita-farahany-on-ethics-law-and-neurotechnology/
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
This had to spill over into Codeberg as well, right?
It appears to be just that:
> The vote follows ongoing efforts by Codeberg to prevent automated software (bots) from taxing its infrastructure with excessive network requests. Authors Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Otto Richter, and William Zijl argue that AI companies are shifting costs to others and damaging online communities in the process.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/23/codeberg-gi...
OMG. I just finally scrolled through all of these replies, and yes! I was extremely dismissive about their financial means by at least one order of magnitude. Solid catch, and I genuinely apologize for my stupidity.
We are strip-mining the oceans' remaining bounty.
When I lived in that commercial fishing area, I learned about bycatch. That is a top-tier euphemism for destroying the entire ocean ecosystem/protein-provider, where sometimes only 3% of caught biomass makes it to any table. [1]
Shrimp is by far the worst. Please stop eating shrimp. If you knew the truth, and respect efficiency, you would never eat wild shrimp again.
I went from thinking that seafood was a good thing, to now mostly eating chicken. We are such morons with how we treat the seas. BTW, I love spearfishing. If that is how I got my seafood, then not only fun, but no waste/bycatch.
I would imagine that LLMs would be uniquely susceptible to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
Extremely subsidized agentic search is very superior to Google at the moment, and of course it is. Google is a public company. The AI summary model has to work instantly, is likely as dumb as a 8T param model, and gives you incorrect details constantly. This sucks so much for Google. If you click on "AI Mode," suddenly the facts become more accurate.
Of course, if I want a real answer I happen to go to claude.ai, set it to a the best model, wait for a minute, and use many watts of energy. Slow agentic search that takes many seconds, and is greatly subsidized, is certainly better. This should not be a surprise, should it?
I think it was on a sub like r/singularity that I saw a post along the lines of "of course most people think that 'AI' sucks, as normies are interacting with 8T param models."
tone: genuinely confused about the world, not criticizing
I believe that was an investment into controlling the next platform, so what happened on iOS with could never happen to them again.
What's far crazier and more applicable to the current balance sheet is the $14.3B acqui-hire of Alexandr Wang. But, what do I know?
Starlink is undeniably some of the coolest tech I have ever seen. However, I was once one of Musk's biggest fans and defenders, and I am no longer that.
He really was the best of us, going all-in on physics-based ideas, not giving any f's about money... until the Tesla payout. That appears to have broken his brain. He went from a real truth-seeker, to a financial engineer. I get it, how could that much money not change one? I bet it would change 99.9999% of us.
As far as musktradumus, he once stood in front of a very warbley Starship prototype and answered "yes, this specific article is going into orbit." It took many more years, and many more articles to even start to get close.
FSD is still incoming, maybe. Tesla created a special call center in Las Vegas to deal with the fact that Tesla greatly over-promised the range on all their vehicles.
It is so hard to logically accept either possibility. I am there with everyone else.
I wish I lived in boring times.
This was Opus agentic search, that's all. Opus-based agentic search is far superior to Google, but if I said I "googled it," I guess that would be fine?
I stated that openly so that others didn't waste Kw of energy asking the same thing.
Is it that at Anthropic, you are technically an IC due to the fact that all of your direct reports are Claude agents? That sounds about right, doesn't it?
While I certainly have no hand in steering the ship, agentic building brought me out of hibernation/mild depression. I am neither young, nor rich. However, I still had lots of product ideas, and now I am able to create and test them in days. And yes, I am actually making sales now.
I got into this early at Sonnet 3.5 release time, so I went through initial AI psychosis almost two years ago, but still today, I am more excited to wake up and work than I’ve ever been in my life.
The interesting thing to me is that the belief that Anthropic is going achieve something like AGI appears to have really spread through SV. If not AGI, at least greatly disturb their old cushy SaaS jobs.
Also, I still do believe some people just want to work on "cool" stuff.
edit: not just CTOs and CPOs, I mean John freakin Jumper, who got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, left his VP role at DeepMind to have no reports, and be an IC at Anthropic.
I find this whole trend extremely interesting.
> Can washing remove Cyclospora?
> No. According to the CDC, there is currently no method known to completely eliminate Cyclospora from contaminated fresh produce. [0]
Thoroughly cooking your lettuce, and other vegetables, is the only way to reliably decontaminate in this case.
If you want to eat fresh vegetables, the correct solution is separating sewage from irrigation water.
[0] https://extension.psu.edu/ongoing-cyclospora-outbreak-highli...
I know crypto mining in TX can operate like this, but that's boring.
Desalination and carbon capture are both energy restricted, that sounds a lot more interesting. However, the deployed equipment has to be cheap if you only have 3hrs per day of free power, right?
Unfortunately you are correct, as Ruski Mir's greatest export is corruption.
The West suffers from the Paradox of Tolerance, and is generally unprepared to deal with Moscow's political operations.
The good news is that those are just three countries, and the EU is made of many more.
The crazy thing to me is that all that Europe wants is for Moscow to join us in the 21st century, and just stop murdering your neighbors.
Apparently this is too much to ask of the old guard. But, we all went through this and eventually became "normal countries." Russia will as well one day, and the Russian people will be one of the greatest beneficiaries of this maturation.
I have family on the USA side of the islands. Kenmore Air is subsidized, but the trees are so darn tall that at many homes, Starlink is not an option. (they like the trees and use directional microwave, which sucks for Zoom)
No, I disagree, maybe. The terrestrial Internet was literally designed to route around a nuclear war. That was its initial purpose, was it not?
Starlink needs ground stations, which are visible from orbit, and can be Shaheded... unless every Starlink terminal can also become a down-link.. which would be cool. However, then it all still relies on terrestrial fiber, right? Or, then that would be a Starlink-only WAN?
I don't want to call out a specific HN'er, but he is an HN hero. Years ago, in person, he told me he was bored. I tried to convince him to work for Starlink in Redmond, as what could be cooler than working on an entire new satellite laser-based Internet 2 backbone?! This was back when GMaps labeled that office "A Place of Worship."
I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was questionable. My point here is that this is all very complicated, and while Starlink is the coolest tech in my lifetime, it still relies on terrestrial fiber in the end.
Please, help me work through this. I am likely very confused.