dofm

FWIW the situation in the UK, that the BBC doesn’t mention, is similarly muddy.

In England and Wales, since 2022, the minimum age is 18. Previously it was 16 with parental consent, which is the situation in (the rather more religious) Northern Ireland.

In Scotland the age is 16 and parental consent is not required.

So, well into the 20th century young English couples would flee across the border and get married there; most famously at Gretna Green, a town just inside the border.

Scottish marriages involving English/Welsh people under 18 are now not legal.

> We don't have a recent ARR, and their ARR calculation has had irregularities.

What do you mean by ARR though?

Is there an Annual Recurring Revenue published at all?

They've published several Annualized Run Rates, but this is, basically, a bullshit figure you cannot trust because it can be made to say a lot of positive things based on one-off events.

They aren't the same and the latter is essentially always intended to at the very least paint a rosy picture.

> What Anthropic is doing requires way more resources than what the Chinese labs are doing.

Oh that’s very sad.

Meanwhile Anthropic made a product from the work effort of millions of people without compensating them, sell that product on tap and unless I am mistaken do not even have their competitors’ cover of having released any sort of meaningful open weights model.

They have taken from culture (including very specifically their most direct customers’ specific culture — our culture), turned it into a machine to make themselves rich, appear likely to predicate their valuation on permanently removing people from the workforce, then want to dump themselves onto pensions funds and ordinary savers to carry the bag.

It is, I agree, philosophical, because karma is a philosophy as well as a bitch.

> I'm assuming that, if this rumor is true, somebody in the Trump campaign forced somebody at NASA to do this out of some misguided nostalgia.

Came here to say this is exactly my guess.

FWIW I think it's almost always a good idea to keep at least one example of any plane flying, just out of simple cultural principle (I feel this way about the Avro Vulcan and I think it's really sad that none can do more than taxi anymore) so I am not sure it's stupid for them to ask, but I can see why keeping an SR-71 in any kind of functional condition might be implausible.

I would guess this is not a serious project to get it flying, but more a recognition that it will take more than two years to do it, could be cancelled at the two year mark without really wasting vast amounts of money, and ensures some very easy, regularly replenishable goodwill from the man who thinks the USA has planes that are literally invisible.

There is precedent, after all: his insistence on a return to steam launchers on carriers.

Going by the comments on this thread: Faith, belief, conspiracy, unverifiable claims, incomplete answers from closed cloud services that cannot be made deterministic.

Great future everyone has chosen for us.

In my own case it does (or at least the first one does) because it reduces inhibition from creative impostor syndrome.

It also helped occasionally in severe OCD crises when no other strategy would break a cycle of compulsion: literally a single shot of alcohol will.

And it can help if I am stuck in self-defeating ADHD loops.

None of these things are advisable or worth the health damage even small amounts of alcohol could be causing. The only thing that is worth say a dozen units per year is reducing social anxiety. There are people I only know because I had a rare drink.

> No, actually being right is what people want from AI,

You are considerably more optimistic than I am about how people use things like this. IMO people are happy with these tools if they can be used to support their existing positions and biases.

Even vibe-coding is like this. OK it creates code that compiles, but its primary job is still to confirm a bias. I have yet to see people making significant novel discoveries about functionality this way.

Cal Newport is one of the clearest minds on this whole topic. His take on doom-trolling helped me realise that there could be an end to all this nonsense that isn’t the end of us.

That is pretty standard sports/quiz show announcer tone, is it not?

For me this was always going to end up being the Spitfire vs the Zebra crossing. But at one point I had to choose between the miniskirt and Tower Bridge and that was difficult.

The thing about the "AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses" thing is the essence of our future hellhole — deterministic software replaced with AI and legal disclaimers.

The reason the firms do not want to invest in making fact-checking a first-class feature is that the appearance of being right is what people want from AI.

Yes. I just started a comment asking the same. Are there S3 boards with better audio breakouts?

This cable presents as a USB audio interface, is the point I'm getting at.

Added some info on the chip here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49877171

Not clear to me at all, but I just did a bit of a google to follow up on a thought — do you mean your hypothesis is that it's using the USB-C-specific Audio Accessory mode?

I was not aware that the Mac supported Audio Accessory mode. And the blurb for these cables talks about a sampling rate, which suggests there's a DAC in the USB-C connector end.

(Works well on the Mac, anyway — it is too much fun simply plugging my lap steel into my Mac in a way that would have been complete fantasy when I first started playing electric guitars.)

ETA: OK so it's always time to play guitar, and I plugged it into the Mac, which reports:

  Product ID: 0x126e
  Vendor ID: 0x3302
  Version: 0.01
  Serial Number: 3302126E250214
  Speed: Up to 12 Mb/s
  Manufacturer: TTGK Technology
  Location ID: 0x14400000 / 1
  Current Available (mA): 500
  Current Required (mA): 100
  Extra Operating Current (mA): 0

Which suggests it's one of these DAC-in-connector boards:

https://www.szttgk.com/en/product/conversionaudiomodule.html

It appears as an ordinary USB Audio device in the Sound panel. My likely ignorant surmise as to why it doesn't work on the iPad is that it also presents a (disconnected) output device and this is confusing the iPad. So perhaps it kind of is working but I can never hear it…

Sorry — I should have added that there is a variation of this device that (allegedly) does work with the iPad Pro, so if you have time to amend your order…

https://www.amazon.de/6-35mm-Microphone-Recording-Electronic...

I don't know why this one would work and the other not, but my guess will be that this one has a chip that doesn't offer up a disconnected output device as well (which would be my totally uneducated guess as to why my iPad hates the other cable and the Mac, which has switchable output devices, doesn't)

There was an ESP32 board I wanted to try (below) but it looks like it's a 1.8" sibling of the one you are using so maybe I'll just track down the one you're using.

https://thepihut.com/products/esp32-s3-development-board-wit...

Hi! Great project.

OK so I have a little J&D USB-C guitar cable thing:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CRR6G355

Any idea if this will work? (Notably working on my Mac but not my second generation iPad Pro, which sees it but is confused)

Hmmm. I wonder if it will work with the USB-C guitar cable I have here…

I had assumed that the current rash of these app-configurable devices on e.g. Amazon (Sonicake Pocket Master, Soran Tiny Stomp, Lekato ME-05, M-VAVE Pocket Amp, Strich Pipe Tones etc.), with the Sonicake the progenitor as I understand it, were all based on some sort of hardware platform at least somewhat quite close to this sort of profile, and they all appear to be running one OEM vendor’s software, but this is interesting indeed because of NAM 2.0.

I am in the market for one of these, perhaps I should build this for fun.

> e.g. patronage

This is nothing more than an argument that 99% of working interior designers and artists shouldn't get an income.

But it's also an argument that software developers should be paid minimum wage; you just have to work through the consequences of the abandonment of copyright to see software development reduced to day labour.

If that is what you want, you should be honest about it.

> You're mixing up copyrights and patents.

I'm not, at all. aeon_ai's original point was "Intellectual property is a myth, as any hacker knows. A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws."

So what I did was mount a straightforward, easy defence of the simplest form of intellectual property, and observe that his concerns about disease cure ownership could be addressed by targeted changes, and not by a world where "intellectual property" is written off as myth.

> Also, would we have something more advanced than PCs by now if we weren't hindered by unnatural "ownership" of thoughts?

No? Why on earth would you think this? Intellectual property protection is the way that you get people to invest in the development of ideas. Almost no groundbreaking ideas in the industrial revolution or later would have happened if their subsequent monetisation was not protected.

It also explicitly doesn't grant "ownership" of thoughts or ideas.

One can make all sorts of arguments that software patents are bad (mostly I think they are), that copyright durations are too long or grant undue protection (I think it's possible that the total protection window is now too long) and that copyright extension law was bogus (most of it was).

But the legal construct of intellectual property is why we have the progress we have already. Will it need changing going forward? If it survives at all, yes.

But if intellectual property does not survive then the alternative is corporate thuggishness of an unimaginable kind.

> PS: look up the cover of the reissued Lions’ “Commentary on UNIX”

Hey, weirdly enough, I don't need to, because I have a copy of it that I bought the week it was reissued, during his lifetime, from which AFAIK he made money, as the author?

I know that story and I don't think you really understand, actually, that the Lions book folklore is not actually a story of abusing or invalidating Lions' copyright.

But Bill Gates didn't make the PC. IBM did. And it was not aimed at hacker culture: it was aimed at business, at writers, at publishers, at a knowledge industry that exists only as a result of copyright.

You think the IBM/Phoenix/Compaq story exists outside copyright? All of that is grounded in copyright. Again, PC clones exist because of clean-room techniques, within copyright. Not in ignorance or contravention of it.

Open source licences are all grounded in copyright.

This is just weird gish-galloping of unrelated concepts now.

You understand Warhol made essentially all of his post-illustration career income, during his own lifetime, from licensing and copyright? Including licensing his own identity.

We wouldn't even know who he was without it.

One could perhaps advance an argument that he wouldn't have wanted to be a posthumous brand (this might be stretching credulity) or have all the squabbles over his estate, but one cannot possibly use him as an avatar in an argument against copyright protection for living artists, because he essentially pioneered being a living famous licensed artist.

I am not making a claim that the work has inherent value, am I?

Nor is the artist in this scenario!

They are merely saying that they have made a limited series of objects they wish to assign a price to, if the market will pay.

But if the people who can buy it can sell essentially identical reproductions for whatever price they choose, then its assigned product price tends to zero too.

If you follow your own argument, then what you are saying is that compensation for effort can only come from a one-time contract. But since intellectual work is not then protected by copyright, those contracts are really difficult to write, because the buyer is not getting any unique thing either.

It doesn't take much to get from "there's no such thing as copyright" to demand collapse for almost every industrial product. Would we even have the PC if there was no copyright protection for intellectual work?

Say you spend a hundred working hours on an ephemeral painting (that is, it won't last, it will fade, disintegrate in nature, can't be moved, etc.). You then have that painting scanned at high resolution, to make a limited series of a dozen very large prints.

Scenario 1: a scalper takes the medium resolution image from your e-commerce website, and slaps it on a series of products they sell for their own profit on Amazon without your permission.

Scenario 2: someone buys one of those prints, scans it to a high resolution, and then makes a series of slightly smaller, high quality prints that they sell for their own profit without your permission.

Is it your contention that both of these things are something that should be allowed and the original artist has no recourse?

Because it seems like your more specific concerns about e.g. disease cures could be addressed by targeted legislation creating new exemptions from intellectual property without destroying the means of protecting income from creative work.

(Scenario 1 has happened to an artist I know, luckily with a piece of non-ephemeral work)

Ehh? The specifics of the claim above are that this is what is what the article is titled and what it discusses. Don’t sealion people who are only pointing out an inaccurate title.

As I have said before, it’s a bit like owners coming to resemble their dogs.

> Don’t just let it research something, accept its results as facts and plan from there. This will lead to embarrassing technical dept.

I assume that is a typo and he meant “debt” but it is very, very funny, and true on a profound level.

I have been feeling for ages like I am too old for the tech industry.

Reading this has made me understand that the recruitment industry will soon have to adopt the default position that anyone who graduated after mid 2025 is likely misrepresenting the depth of their understanding; people who graduated before that are the equivalent of low-background steel, until our processes catch up.

Maybe there’s still room for me.

Some observations of LLMs that I suspect follow from the way they work and the way they are trained:

- they are amoral

- they have no innate sense of proportion

- they cannot assess their own confidence in-band

Part of the problem with this, I figure, is that the training corpus for code/tech related tasks does not really contain that much discussion about these things; it’s mostly sets of instructions for given tasks, descriptions of exploits etc., so each possible approach leads to other approaches.

There is no easy way for them to learn when they have crossed a line, or when they have gone too far down the rabbit hole, etc.

Useful (arguably essential) for a security analyst, and the tenacity you want from a one-shot demo coder, but for general agentic assistants the industry is going to have to develop some way to manage this sort of extension of trespass.

It often reminds me of Gary McKinnon’s defence, and that of other teenage hackers, which you can reduce to: it was possible so it felt like it was allowed.

This is true of APIs and it is how Silicon Valley has approached disruptive businesses, but it runs up against our cultural notion of “misuse”: uses that are technically possible and shouldn’t be precluded, but are contextually unwelcome because they have undesirable outcomes.

My expectation is that we will lose any sense that misuse is punished or viewed with suspicion or contempt, since that is the rolling trend of the 21st century tech industry. Uber succeeded through misuse.

But the problem is that we will also begin not to be able to punish abuse; if it’s possible to get something by abusing your site/API or by treating your service as an API, then it will become OK, legal and normal for the AI companies to abuse you.

It feels like we are getting there already.