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jefftkon The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

We're talking about JS in browsers: many fewer options there, plus needing to support old devices.

jefftkon US SEC preparing to scrap quarterly reporting requirement

This is not correct. A business this big would definitely be using accrual accounting (not cash) which generally means you count the revenue when the actual ownerships transfers to the buyer. Since the truck was operated by the seller, the transfer of ownership is almost certainly counted as when the buyer receives the goods.

jefftkon Something is afoot in the land of Qwen

This is pretty pedantic, but I think it's usually rounded. 1=90%, 2=99%, 3=99.9%. I'd say 98% is "not even two nines" but not "one nine".

jefftkon MacBook Neo

I used a first-gen eeepc with Linux in college. I didn't have any problems with speed for normal use, though I ssh'd into servers for anything more intensive than running a browser.

jefftkon Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

Pretty often. When I was at a defense contractor it was the standard term for when you didn't want to say soldier/sailor/airman/marine/etc.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=warfighter&date=a... has videogame-related spikes, but doesn't show any recent increase.

jefftkon We Will Not Be Divided

There mostly aren't physical barriers. Unlike nukes, where you need specific materials and equipment that we can try to keep tabs on, bioweapons can be made entirely with materials and equipment that would not be out of place in an academic or commercial lab. The largest limitation is knowledge, and the barriers there are falling quickly.

On your second point, see my response to oceanplexian below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189385

jefftkon We Will Not Be Divided

Symmetry is not guaranteed. If someone creates a deadly pathogen with a long pre-symptomatic period (which we know is possible, since HIV works this way) it could infect essentially everyone before discovery. Yes, powerful AI would likely rapidly speed up the process of responding to the threat after detection, especially in designing countermeasures, but if we don't learn about the threat in time we lose.

There are people today who could create such a pathogen, but not many. Widespread access to powerful AI risks lowering the bar enough that we get overlap between "people who want to kill us all" and "people able to kill us all".

This is not a gotcha argument, this is what I work full time on preventing: https://naobservatory.org The world must be in a position to detect attacks early enough that they won't succeed, and we're not there yet.

jefftkon We Will Not Be Divided

A "world where millions of AGIs run on millions of gaming PCs, where each AI is aligned with an individual human" would be a world in which people could easily create humanity-ending bioweapons. I would love to live in a less vulnerable world, and am working full time to bring about such a world, but in the meantime what you describe would likely be a disaster.

jefftkon Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers

It also strongly favors older projects, since stars don't expire and they've had longer to accumulate them.

jefftkon Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony

Really very sure that wasn't one of the conditions. I didn't remember that from 2012, and looking now it wasn't included in the merger agreement. They did write:

> We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

>That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people. -- https://about.fb.com/news/2012/04/facebook-to-acquire-instag...

That looks to me like what they've done?

jefftkon Claude Sonnet 4.6

I think they're assuming the reader already understands their Opus > Sonnet> Haiku. Which is probably not a great assumption.

jefftkon Advice, not control: the role of Remote Assistance in Waymo's operations

I wish they included how many active cars they have at any one time so we could make a proper comparison.

jefftkon Advice, not control: the role of Remote Assistance in Waymo's operations

That it's 70 remote assistance people for 3,000 cars is pretty good counter-evidence to the "they're not driverless, they're remote controlled" claims.

jefftkon Claude Sonnet 4.6

That's rewriting history. What they said at the time:

> Nearly a year ago we wrote in the OpenAI Charter : “we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research,” and we see this current work as potentially representing the early beginnings of such concerns, which we expect may grow over time. This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas. -- https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/

Then over the next few months they released increasingly large models, with the full model public in November 2019 https://openai.com/index/gpt-2-1-5b-release/ , well before ChatGPT.

jefftkon I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

Like (ad-funded) HN?

jefftkon Claude Opus 4.6

Several of those have incorrect frames:

https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/cyclist_23714264.htm

https://www.freepik.com/premium-vector/bicycle-icon-black-li...

Or missing/broken pedals:

https://www.freepik.com/premium-vector/bicycle-silhouette-ic...

https://www.freepik.com/premium-vector/bicycle-silhouette-ve...

http://freepik.com/premium-vector/bicycle-silhouette-vector-...

jefftkon They lied to you. Building software is hard

> Think of the Game hits from the 90's. A room full of people made games which shaped a generation. Maybe it was orders of magnitude harder then, but today, it's multiple orders of magnitude more people required to make them.

I think this is more about rising consumer expectations than rising implementation difficulty.

jefftkon Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

> Most US states cap speed limits around schools at 15mph when children are present.

Are you sure? The ones I've seen have usually been 20 or 25mph.

Looking on Image Search (https://www.google.com/search?q=school+zone+speed+limit+sign) and limiting just to the ones that are photos of real signs by the side of the road, the first 10 are: 25, 30, 25, 20, 35, 15, 20, 55, 20, 20. So only one of these was 15.

jefftkon Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

How is "immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge" worded weaselly?

jefftkon Tesla ending Models S and X production

> people tend to drive their electric cars/trucks more gently too

Really? I tend to see much more aggressive acceleration from people in electric cars (including myself when I'm driving, though I try not to). I've been putting it down to people being used to how gas cars seem to be working harder when you ask them to accelerate heavily, while electric just goes with no complaints.

jefftkon The browser is the sandbox

I agree we're talking past each other somewhat, but it really feels to me like you're missing the point. Here's the convo:

mg: This is a great example of how useful the File System Access API is ...

auggierose: the API is not supported (yet?) either by Safari or Firefox

you: describes the current situation with cross-browser file input support, says it's a "developer education problem"

me: this specific use case really does need the full API

It read to me, and still does read to me, like you were saying that Kinlan's use of FSA was hubris.

jefftkon The browser is the sandbox

We're talking about Simon's boosting of https://aifoc.us/the-browser-is-the-sandbox/ which is a prototype of Claude Cowork in the browser. That's what I'm saying needs read-write access.

jefftkon The browser is the sandbox

Not writing the feature makes sense, but pushing Firefox and Safari to add support would be pro-social if you're up for it. The most common reason for browsers not to add support is something like "this can be done in other ways, and it has maintainability/security/bloat downsides". Running into a feature you can't build is evidence on the "this can be done in other ways" question (but of course the other downsides could still be big enough that it's not worth doing).

jefftkon The browser is the sandbox

Providing a web app with edit access to a local directory is really needed for this to be usable. Without that you're constantly managing downloaded files and manually replacing things. I do think this is a case where the File System Access API shines.

jefftkon First, make me care

There are definitely less readable blogs, even restricting to ones that aren't intentionally hard to read. For example: https://www.lilywise.com/amusement (Disclosure: written by my kid, who was just shy of 7yo then)

Personally, I like Gwern's style and aesthetic a lot, and don't have trouble reading his stuff.

jefftkon The Dilbert Afterlife

It's pretty unfortunate that the Yudkowsky-and-LessWrong crowd picked a term that traditionally meant something so different. This has been confusing people since at least 2011.

jefftkon You Can Just Buy Far-UVC

(author)

I'm really glad that you're making and selling far-UVC products. Nukit is the other manufacturer (aside from Aerolamp) that I feature on https://www.faruvc.org

I really hope that your thesis is correct, and we end up with widespread low cost high quality unencumbered far-UVC. In my looking, though, it seems like bulb life is an issue? Is that right, or have I been snookered by Ushio's marketing?

jefftkon You Can Just Buy Far-UVC

That's really interesting; I had thought it was just the high CO2 was a proxy for greater occupancy, but it does look like there is a physical effect.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47777-5

jefftkon You Can Just Buy Far-UVC

And skin damage

jefftkon You Can Just Buy Far-UVC

(author)

The non-profit OSLUV evaluates lamps and measures their emissions. Here's their evaluation for the Aerolamp, which is the one I've purchased: https://reports.osluv.org/static/assay/aerolamp%20devkit--27...