dinfinity

50% is very generous. In the video it isn't even consistently above his body half the time. It is also constantly a good 80cm above him, so even a slight bit of side wind makes it fully useless to keep you dry.

Any wind speed above 20m/s is also going to just blow it straight out of the air or at best heavily reduce flight time.

And then there is the little issue with having a mini lawn mower constantly above your head: loud and dangerous.

Having said that, we can still applaud the creator for bringing their idea to life.

Nonsense. The assholes creating shitcoins with the explicit intent to pump it and dump it get rich off it every time dumb saps buy into it. Sad but true.

> They are incredible compared to "no labs at all"

That is a nonsensically low bar. You basically destroy the entire scale by labeling the bare minimum as such.

> Mudflation aka hyperinflation aka situations where "the money printer goes brr too fast"

That is not what mudflation is at all.

>> They are toy universes.

> So are most experiments, fundamentally.

Nonsense. Most experiments are performed on actual real world stuff rather than an analogue of it: something like looking at how actual food affects actual humans rather than what happens when feeding virtual characters virtual apples. Limited or narrowly scoped real world experiments != toy universe experiments.

An inbetween category would be (human) drug experiments on mice, which are real world and where the results still don't generalize to humans often.

> Your examples seem easy to build toy universes for.

Yeah, no shit. My point was that those are horribly incomplete and don't generalize: "These games do not include many of the complexities of the real world and can thus provide few insights that generalize to the real world on a macroeconomic level."

Your examples are incredibly inadequate compared to the real world and have exactly 0 predictive power in said real world. In recent decades, the entire field of economy has been dumbfounded by the (lack of) effects of quantitative easing and the central interest rate on inflation in the USA and the EU. Maybe try telling them that they should look into the economy of Animal Crossing /s.

The article spends multiple paragraphs on exactly this. Did you read it in its entirety?

"This can be a difficult idea to swallow. Imagine you’re looking out at a countryside scene. You see rolling hills, the vibrant sunshine and a herd of cows. You hear the birds, smell the fresh cut grass and feel the wind on your skin. Surely you are conscious of this whole scene all at once. But we know that working memory has a capacity that is far too tiny to fit all of this information in at one time. If consciousness arises from working memory, then how can I be conscious of all this stuff at once?

Indeed, some philosophers and scientists have argued in just this way, saying that consciousness overflows the capacity of working memory. If this is true, it would be a problem for those who think that consciousness arises from working memory."

You are overstating this. Mudflation does not transfer to the real world well, if at all. Very few skill-capped bits of DLC for real world activities.

These games do not include many of the complexities of the real world and can thus provide few insights that generalize to the real world on a macroeconomic level. They are toy universes. I'm not saying they are useless, far from it, but they are not "incredible labs for macroeconomic experimentation".

Try determining the effect of raising the central bank interest rate within a game of your choice. Or changing the minimum wage. Or the effects of investing in education. Etc.

To be fair, macroeconomics can hardly be called science, though. It is incredibly hard to falsify a lot of the theories given the lack of possibilities for experimentation. It is far closer to philosophy than to any of the even remotely hard sciences.

Nothing to do with ideology, but with the nature of the field. Take epidemiological research in the areas of food and medicine: incredibly hard and expensive to get right and even then with often tenuous results. Now try doing that with ridiculously heterogeneous nations influenced by potentially almost everything on the planet.

It's a small miracle that economists manage to get some useful insights out of the data, but we should definitely be aware of how weakly most of them are supported (don't start talking about "error bars" with economists).

The man in the room is comparable to a human hand, and the magic rulebook to a human brain.

This in the sense that we can easily retain human "understanding" by stripping away almost all parts of the human body or replacing them with fairly trivially made replacements, except for the brain.

In the Chinese Room the equivalent is the magic rulebook: We have no idea how to construct/replace it, yet people somehow handwave that away whilst simultaneously confidently asserting it does not understand anything.

Exactly. The translation back to words is the final step, so in a way very similar to what the post describes.

Improvements in model performance have been made exactly by having intermediate steps stay in the form of internal representations rather than words.

I assume that they also have mechanisms to check that the content itself is legal to broadcast. Checking the loudness and rejecting based on them in that process should be trivial.

They have a "stable volume" toggle, actually. I don't see ads, so I don't know whether it works for those.

> Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem?

This is a fallacy (tu quoque/whataboutism). You're changing the subject to distract from the fundamental problem in libertarianism and implying that some other strawman is just as bad.

Without solving the fundamental problem, libertarianism will never work for anything but toy societies.

> Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind their words.

I think this is at least in part a combination of rosy retrospection and attentional bias: A lot of human writing was always trash. Absolute dogshit with regard to the quality of writing, but there was no "AI slop" label to attach to it. How would you, pre-LLMs, have placed a comment on the writing style if a post was badly written? From what I've seen it would be a "this is marketing/SEO-speak" or some similar comment, deriding the author for being uninformed or of ill intent.

We've now become so allergic to AI slop that anything that even smells like it triggers almost immediate disgust and attachment of that label to the content (even if it is the same old human written trash).

I guess LLM-assisted posts do change the dynamic a bit: the intent is more often benign with a desire to write something good, but the skill to do so lacking. If we limit the "pre-LLM authors" to people with good intent writing about stuff relevant to a HackerNews audience, you're probably right. Many more bad writers are now creating the same ostensibly fancy articles, decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio we were used.

> I see this over and over again on HN: pick the weakest sentence, attack it, proclaim the article is rubbish, and move on. Why?

It's to heuristically filter content on quality to optimize information consumption, i.e. concluding early: "This is probably not going to be worth my time, because this author seems to make fairly trivial easily avoidable mistakes (or something similar)". I appreciate the signal from other people here, even if it is not always accurate.

There is a lot of content to filter through nowadays.

> Yet more confirmation LLM's have no concept of concepts or context, no intelligence, no self awareness.

No, it isn't. Look at the absolutely trivial code used to simulate war: https://github.com/kennethpayne01/project_kahn_public/blob/m...

Having LLMs play nonsense toy simulations like this tells us very, very little about whether they would use nukes in real life war.

> https://github.com/kennethpayne01/project_kahn_public

Look at the code for the war games. It is an absolutely trivial and incredibly unrealistic handwritten set of rules that determine power. See the function `calculate_relative_fighting_power` for instance.

This is about as close to a realistic simulation of war as tic tac toe with nukes thrown into it.

> Git is more robust than Jira.

Much of such issue tracking systems may be better in the repo in the first place. A Jira issue could just be a markdown file committed in the repo. A code review could just be commits of inline remarks/comments.

Maybe there is some value to slapping on a web interface on top of that data for ease of use, but as to where the data lives I'm leaning towards putting everything in repo.

Another vote for Lit here.

JS frameworks were invented to deal with clunkiness of Vanilla Javascript and got bloated to include everything and the kitchen sink. All of a sudden they're 'ecosystems'.

Modern JS + Web components with the light layer of Lit on top solve at least 80% of the issues there were and are with just plain JS. Close to actual web standards and thus play nice with almost everything. By design they fit into a far more modular approach than React or Vue or Svelte.

Agreed. The amount of effectively annotated (possibly very sensitive) data that users are voluntarily shoving across the line seems worth losing some money over. I imagine that data is also not exactly safe from the Chinese government.

> Learning from others at a small scale is not only socially acceptable, but is the foundation of how advancement works.

Exactly, if anything, the logic (a bit bad -> really bad) shows that one person learning from one thing is far inferior to one person learning from every thing (a bit good -> really good).

Seems to bug hard on Firefox.

> It's a nightmare full of wrestling with the LLM when you try to tell it the version of the framework and that it changed a lot from the previous version and yadda yadda

Tip: Add a default instruction to look at the actial downloaded source code of the dependencies used (assuming you're not dealing with closed source dependencies). Have the agent treat it as your own (readonly) source code instead of relying on model training data and possibly mismatching documentation on the web. Then it just greps for the exact function signatures and reads the file based documentation.

> The goal was to raise as much money as possible as fast as possible before the curtain is pulled back to reveal the Wizard's empire of lies.

There may be some lies, but a big part of the backlash against AI is that it is too effective. The backlash is growing precisely because people are finally getting out of the "it's just a tool and there will always be a place for humans!"-denial phase and into the "they took our jobs!"-anger phase. They're seeing the writing on the wall many (although surprisingly not all) in the tech sector saw long ago.

Additionally, I'm quite sure it's not backlash against slop, as some might think. People have disliked spam and ads forever, but all in all they'll happily stomach loads of it just to watch some badly written Hollywood or Netflix human slop.

> You very much do not want your nation’s security entangled with an organisation with such marked and explicit political stances.

Unless you don't really have a choice, like Ukraine. It's like being in an abusive relationship they can't (yet) get out of.

Interesting times with regards to geopolitics.

It's probably not something that can be enforced legally, but the concept of DeArrow (user-provided titles and thumbnails for Youtube) should be the norm.

Perhaps there can be an EU maintained browser extension that allows netizens to provide alternate, honest titles and thumbnails for all kinds of content. Probably still incredibly hard to implement throughout apps etc., but a man can dream.

SpaceEngine is also known for putting quite some effort into this; highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4TjdVAbXks

https://spaceengine.org/

Not a nitpick, but a justified criticism of the post. The technical term is "burying the lede" and it is incompetence at best and malice at worst.

It's absolutely awful. It's not a novel or entertainment. Don't "foreshadow" or "set the scene". Just get to the fucking point.

Even the, it's incredibly vague at best, equivalent to "The USA said that", which only makes sense in a context where the relevant spokespeople are well-defined (such as a UN assembly or something), but who is the general spokesperson for the USA or the EU?

Usually things like these are qualified like "the Department of Defense of the USA stated X".

He must be trolling.

AI is hands down the most researched topic in CS departments. Of the 10 largest companies (by market cap), only 3 aren't balls-deep in AI R&D. The fastest growing (private or public) companies by revenue are also almost all companies focused primarily on AI (Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Scale AI, Nvidia).

And the money isn't even the most important part. It's all about mindshare and collective research time. The architectural concepts can be researched and developed on top of open models, so even individual relatively poor researchers unaffiliated to anything can make breakthroughs.

Even the computing required for the legendary "Attention is all you need" paper could probably be recreated on con-/prosumer hardware in a month's time.

Private investment in the US has grown from 100 billion in 2024 to almost 300 billion USD in 2025 [0]. Add public investments worldwide and private investments in at least China and Europe.

I'm pretty sure money is not going to be the blocker.

[0] https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

> I think the rest of us should rest easy knowing that LLM's can't [...]

What if (when?) (AI-assisted) research moves AI beyond LLMs? Do you think that can't happen?