leoc

It's reasonably clear that Star Wars would have been in some trouble if it had come out with anything like the original John Jympson edit, and in that sense it's fairly safe to say that Star Wars truly was saved in the edit. (Though that's also not very surprising, as by all accounts it's not particularly unusual for a good completed film to have had a shaky first edit.) But it seems that all the evidence suggests that George Lucas was always unhappy with Jympson's editing and understood its problems, and that it was he who selected three professional editors including Marcia Lucas to work on a re-edit which achieved his high-level creative intentions and was closely and actively supervised by him, and in which he did some of the hands-on editing to boot. There doesn't seem to be much to support the idea that the (other) editors took Star Wars out of the hands of a hapless George Lucas and bestowed on him a film which had been reworked beyond his own capabilities or vision, which is the usual "saved in the edit" claim, let alone that Marcia Lucas alone was largely responsible for that supposed feat, which is what was claimed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883758 .

Do you mean the prequel trilogy here?

It doesn't affect the specific point in question here, but it's probably best to treat the RocketJump video with caution: https://youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE .

Marcia Lucas along with two other editors won the Film Editing Oscar for Star Wars/ANH/Ep. 4 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dW6bNBzN8&t=52s ): she was no doubt a very good editor. Neither she nor the other two "saved Star Wars in the edit" in the manner often claimed. For example, Marcia Lucas fought to keep the teen-movie version of the opening with Luke meeting Biggs and others at Tosche Station in Tatooine, while George Lucas had always preferred to begin the Tatooine segment with the droids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE&t=1407s .

That version of events has been disputed: https://youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE .

There's also some concern for what life will actually be like for any poor sods actually stuck on Mars. Between the harsh conditions and what we know about the aspiring Emperor Musk of Mars, it's likely to make the Sea Org look like Butlin's.

Relatedly there are questions about why the whole project seems to assume that it's much more important to preserve the human species, like a celebrated breed of dog, than to protect the lifespans (ideally, healthy lifespans) and welfare of individual human beings, questions which unfortunately can also probably be answered with reference to Musk personally: https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18 .

There's also the wrinkle that if it's viable to send settlers and adequate resupply to Mars, then it's probably much easier and more straightforward to send a few nuclear warheads on their own one-way trip, so the whole premise that a Martian colony wouldn't be struck in a full-scale nuclear war on Earth seems shaky. Now a Martian colony dug in deep under the surface might be relatively safe, but that brings up again the question of whether it wouldn't just be better to build a far-flung network of underground settlements on Earth and/or have submarines loitering in the Antarctic Ocean in shifts.

Right. It is weird that this has to be explained, but let's make it clear: in the Before Times, probably anytime up to at least the late '00s, probably approximately no-one in or around free or open source software would have endorsed the idea that the legal disclaimers completely free even the most mainstream, self-publicising, broad-userbase open source projects from any moral or ethical obligation to have even the slightest concern to ensure that their software doesn't hurt or betray its non-paying users, even in the most harmful ways. And if one of the many and often vocal FOSS opponents of the time had started claiming that this is what open-source developers really believe they'd have rightly been seen as having veered off into the lunatic fringe. And that's because it's a, frankly, bonkers idea which is radically detached from normal human understanding of the social and moral role and obligations of volunteers, voluntary organisations, charitable givers or gift-givers. And also because it's a wildly counterproductive idea to put out there if you're hoping to increase FOSS adoption.

That does leave the question of why this idea has started to take off more recently. Part of the answer is certainly that Rich Hickey, disgracefully, set the ball rolling in this direction, and that many others have welcomed it as one weird trick and one pat answer for all the worsening problems of developer burnout. Unfortunately it seems hard to dismiss the idea that it's also social breakdown driven by a broader trend, as over time we move further and further from the pre-'60s "neurotic society" of people obsessed with duty and social conformity (often with oppressive or destructive results, to be sure) into the "psychopathic society" in which even people who don't themselves merit a Cluster B diagnosis have internalised narcissistic and psychopathic attitudes.

I think some of it is an unintended consequence of the backlash against bad or puzzling error dialog boxes in '80s and '90s software. A lot of people seem to have concluded that the easy solution to the challenges of error reporting was just to fail silently instead roll_safe.jpg .

Suppose that you build a childrens' slide in your front garden. You put up a big sign saying "Consider using my slide! https://neovim.io/ Here are several wonderful things about it. It's free for everyone!" in your yard. Underneath in smaller letters you add "[No liability]". You also put up noticeboard ads for your free kids' slide in neighbourhood shopping malls https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/neovim https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Neovim . Unfortunately, when you built the slide, you left sharp metal edges and corners sticking far up on the inside, reaching into the path of the user. No reasonably competent and diligent metalworker or slide-maker would have failed to notice these major flaws or failed to understand the serious danger they represented. Several neighbourhood children use the slide and receive serious gashes to the legs, arms or face, and have to go to the hospital. Even assuming that your no-liability small print somehow had you free and clear legally, do you believe that your behaviour would have been ethically and morally above all criticism? Do you think that "should have read the small print!" or "can't I build what I like in my own front yard?!" would have you covered? Do you think that your family and friends would agree?

That's not how liability works, not either morally or (IANAL) legally.

Intel has committed to bringing "Intel 3" to Leixlip https://www.idaireland.com/latest-news/press-release/intel-a... , so below 12nm or 7nm but still above 20A/2nm IIUC. It does also seem that Intel has already ordered ASML EUV machines for Leixlip, which arrived by 2023 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate/eu-chipmak... .

Mark Zuckerberg famously studied Latin in high school and remains a Classics enthusiast.

Right, but photoengraving is hardware at its easiest—which is not to say that it's easy at the level the industry has now taken it to.

I wouldn’t say so. Once local solutions pass a threshold of affordability consumers tend not to mind too much about their inefficient resource utilisation: see the many thousands of MacBooks which sit largely idle for most of the day. And efficient utilisation is actively against the interests of hardware manufacturers, at least while they’re not supply-constrained and looking to sell their limited supply to whomever can pay top dollar.

It's true that LLMs "want" to be be local, but they won't shift broadly to being local until there's a sufficiently large supply of VRAM or (at least) "unified" memory from the manufacturers. (I'm also assuming here that radical regulatory changes like government bans of local models aren't going to happen.) So (AFAICS—I am no expert) the future of LLMs over the next few years comes down primarily to the nitty-gritty of how much memory fab capacity will be added and when, and to a lesser extent of what happens to future demand from LLM SaaS services (& maybe their existing stock of hardware if they get in trouble). (I'm also assuming no roughly-AGI-sized leap forward which makes the frontier models of the near future vastly more valuable than the near-fontier models of today.) For the incumbent manufacturers the high-margin business is selling to LLM SaaS providers who use VRAM efficiently, but the high-volume business is getting chips into millions of laptops which will use VRAM very inefficiently. I assume that they will want to move from high margins to high volumes as they build they physical capacity to ship higher volumes, but they seem to prefer to do it at a stately pace. Hopefully some jostling from Chinese competitors, and maybe a dropoff in demand from data centres, will speed things along.

Go To Market/Project Management?

But high demand for LLM time isn't sufficient to keep customers at the frontier LLM SaaS providers. That demand can be satisfied locally or at non-frontier outlets, absent hardware shortages at least. The Tier 1 providers (and the would-be Tier 1s) presumably need to open up a much bigger lead in model quality, one that doesn't simply get distilled away this time, and/or continue to be protected by ongoing (or worsening!) hardware shortages. (And that's overlooking the revenue shortfalls which OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be facing already.)

Seemingly the AI bulls are either not sufficiently optimistic, or not sufficiently wealthy(?!), to build new fabs as joint ventures with the manufacturers in which they agree to assume most of the downside risk?

That greater efficiency only benefits the LLM SaaS providers as long as the hardware manufacturers, probably especially the VRAM manufacturers, remain supply constrained, since the high-efficiency users are the ones who can pay top dollar. But the hardware guys' dream is presumably to get parts into millions of laptops which remain on standby for 19 hours a day, not to bargain with SaaS providers who obsessively optimise their memory consumption.

> The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse.

Sure (this is demonstrated in the linked video, for instance) but the ZXCV group is pretty similar in that respect. Even for operations which involve the mouse it's preferable to drag only one hand far away from its home position, rather than both of them. (Especially since the video evidence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q seems to suggest that Star users tended to move their left hand only after making the mouse selection, instead of prepositioning it.) And the Star's Undo key, which presumably doesn't require help from mouse input and is likely to be needed after a non-mouse action, isn't placed any more conveniently near the home row: it's simply in the right side-cluster rather than the left one.

I don't see a clear advantage over the the ZXCV shortcut placement which the Macintosh team chose. (The original Finder had no specific Redo shortcut because it was single-undo and ⌘-Z performed both undo and redo.) Even well-placed dedicated keys on a Xerox-style (or later Sun-style) "fun cluster" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk to the left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row. Of course ZXCV is much less well-adapted to the left-handed, but that would probably be true of any dedicated keys as well, unless they were mirrored on both sides of the keyboard.

It also seems pretty reasonable to worry that Oracle isn't banning LLM code contributions to OpenJDK https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/as-larry-el... ( HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49213754 ) purely on quality grounds. If things carry on as at present, and it turns out that indeed it really was legally safe to copy and paste almost any code that came out of an LLM, then that's one thing; but if instead there's a rash of code copyright (and indeed patent) lawsuits a few years from now then the big and middling companies will simply pay each other settlements, while FOSS projects and their small-fry users will likely be in a much worse situation.

Thanks. And the publisher's companion page with supplementary materials is https://shop.elsevier.com/books/book-companion/9781558607354 .

Also, "Readings" is hidden behind a "Menu" menu button on the mobile-device version of that page.

IIRC there's a common cultural tendency to put a lot of stock in the magical powers of exotic foreign wizards, so divination might not be such a bad explanation at all.

The EU is asserting its strategic independence and will no longer rely on the US for supplies of whip-tailed herbivorous dinosaur fossils.

Old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774245 repaste:

> People seem to have forgotten that when Perl evolved from being a better AWK to the paradigm example of the modern "scripting language", Larry Wall explicitly described this as a rejection of the Unix small-tools philosophy. https://web.archive.org/web/20070204053516/http://www.linux-... ("But Perl was actually much more countercultural than you might think. It was intended to subvert the Unix philosophy. More specifically, it was intended to subvert that part of Unix philosophy that said that every tool should do only one thing and do that one thing well.") https://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html The fact that getting things done with a Perlesque scripting language is now seen as the height of purist Unix propriety only shows how far gone the original Unix ideal now is. But moving to the scripting-glue model doesn't really get rid of small tools that endeavour to do one thing well, it just reimplements them inside the scripting-language universe as functions/objects, though with a more expressive and less burdensome common language that makes it easier for them to stay small while being correct and effective. The more expressive their shared language, the smaller [the individual tools in] a set of tools can be.

>> Text just isn't a great medium for IPC.

> Yes, in retrospect Unix's determination to know about nothing but binary or plaintext blobs and streams looks like an adolescent rebellion against the (apparently - I haven't used them) clunky record structures of '60s operating systems.

[Extra text] added for clarification (in 2022 actually https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31259795 ) and links fixed. Basically, if you want smaller tools you must have a more expressive language—which means (in part) a more structured language—for communication between tools. Though that's not Unix's only design shortcoming: for instance it's also a big problem that even in Plan 9 mount "outputs" only files, not processes.

So it seems, but what of it? That wasn't his first career setback, and I'm sure he's still trying to get interesting work done at Isomorphic and maybe elsewhere in addition to working the PR pump for Alphabet.

I don't know, Hassabis always seems to have been willing and able to do PR and put himself out there, in addition to having the technical muscle.

> Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed.

I don't think that a change in the composition of HN users is sufficient to explain it. To start with, a lot of the original user base which came over from main Reddit and /r/programming still seems to be active here. And if I had to hazard a guess I'd say that our attitude to pg has indeed shifted.