majormajor

In the "volatile and unstable" scenario that you're replying to, the $BILLIONS from cashing out while it's a hot market is a more sure way to have long-term influence on things.

The game featured a store and stuff in it, that's a product category IKEA markets.

If the name of an unrelated game was IKEA as some clever acronym or such and it was unrelated to stores, that would be a different trademark convo.

Hah, I was aware of 5G vs 5G mm-wave, didn't realize there was another way in which most 5G was "kinda fake" too.

How is paying $20 instead of $50-60 ripping themselves off? Have you considered that the extra 985GB might be useless to them?

Net neutrality as generally understood says nothing about being able to pay more for a higher service tier from your ISP.

It's entirely on the publisher side: net neutrality was an attempt to avoid ISPs getting paid extra---costs that would be passed onto you---in exchange for making your experience on site A be better than your experience with site B (or service, vs site).

Think: "Oh, yeah, Netflix 4k works great on your new Comcast plan! But if you want Hulu 4k, you're gonna need to pay us more, because Netflix pays us to make their shit work better than Hulu's if you don't!"

ISP's spent $$$$$ against net-neutrality cause they wanted to get paid twice (Google already was paying for their side of the bandwidth as the source).

When you add the second line---pretending that that nobody funding all the anti-net-neutrality let-big-ISPs-do-what-they-want stories that pro-legacy-company Republicans ate up---it makes me think this is some astroturfing, since it goes from "maybe this person fell for the ISP claims" to straight-up dishonest intentionally-misleading-fallacy.

Google was obviously on the side of "don't get charged twice" but ultimately net-neutrality was a tech enthusiast consumer position that came out of a desire to avoid getting charged more on the basis of what sites you did or didn't want to watch, and ISP's trying to influence where you visited by cutting deals to get paid to prioritize A vs B.

(Hell, ISPs were already getting paid "twice" for the bandwidth in some ways, e.g. when your "100Mb" plan only works at that speeds if your neighbors aren't using it much. That's a different sort of incomplete-advertising trickery that helped create the whole "too many people using Youtube are saturating the network!" "problem" in the first place.)

(And high-bandwidth publishers already were making private peering/colo-of-servers deals with ISPs and CDNs that I don't believe would've been prohibited by net neutrality, so the 'protection racket' aspect of the ISP's game was maybe more arguably wanting to be paid thrice? Or wanting to be paid without providing that colo service?)

Do you find Fable significantly better than Opus at avoiding-overengineering? All of my recent testing of Anthropic models seems like they're tuned-to-hell to (a) be much slower than they need to be (running tests over and over during the loop vs at the end, say, even if those tests take a few minutes a pop) and (b) doing exactly that sort of "built a lot of fancy enterprisey feature-adjacent 'stuff'" even before nailing the actual feature. Sol and Terra both have some of the latter but they seem to do the actual work a fair bit faster (this may be a usage-based-priority-tier/rate-limit thing though) which helps offset it.

I think the bigco folks saw all the "it wrote all this code but the tests didn't pass" or "it wrote the feature but it's super brittle" and tuned the newer model+harness combinations incredibly aggressively to try to turn a lazy prompt into "median Enterprise Architecture design suggestions" to bring up the baseline, but in a way that slows you down if you don't want that.

I'm not on big enough subscriptions to want to burn a lot time just evaluating Fable/Astra comparatively until they're cheaper, heh. I can steer any of the cheaper ones just fine anyway.

This has not been the case at any of my past employers in B2C...

There was a fair amount of scrambling to get GDPR/CCPA compliant, but even that was done largely with a prevailing "ah, this is a defensible thing to store, make sure you can annonymize it or scrub it if needed" vs "stop storing this."

Starting with the ones that are most popular in the US, "Big Tech" usually includes:

- Google - Gmail and Maps contain massive amount of PII, Photos contains all sorts of other sensitive stuff, and they have not treated those aspects of those products like radioactive waste

- Meta - Facebook has a real names required policy even. Not a lot more needs to be said there, I think.

- Amazon - Nothing I've seen about trying to move away from how they need your name/address/payment info and all. If anything, more and more geographic targeting and such.

- Microsoft - Now you need to tie your local Windows install to their cloud services, not moving away from collecting user info. Also moving towards subscriptions which means PII and payment info.

- Apple - cloud accounts + email + payments + subscriptions all here too. Getting into banking-type services, that's leaning into PII...

- Netflix - more and more PII (IP tracking and geolocation combined with things like email and name) to fight account sharing...

Which ones were running away from it, exactly?

That's a recipe for regressions as the amount of surface you have to cover with "just...use the app" gets bigger and bigger.

You can write more automation to test it. But that's also how you end up with ever-growing test run times.

There are much better ways that aren't just "throw out the LLM" either. You just need to be more focused on throughput. Requiring manual validation can pretty rapidly require more hours than just sanity-checking code by hand, even (and I'm not advocating that for every use case, either.)

I can't afford manual QA passes if I'm gonna go as quickly as I want to.

Yeah, it's smaller in a different way than the mini was small.

But the thinness isn't actually the appeal. The key thing is that it's a lot lighter. (And yes, a case adds weight as well as thickness. But if you start from a lower baseline, you still end up in a lower place.)

We've seen that some---gpt5 was considered pretty lackluster intially, in particular. Opus 4.7 and 5 vs 4.6 were also greeted with a lot more "meh" than 4.6 or Fable.

> I also think there's an aspect where initial testing is more forgiving because the more persnickety polish bits can be ignored and tests are likely to have similar structure to things that can be trained for. Meanwhile, actual specific work items are a broader unusual distribution with more stringent acceptance criteria.

IMO this is 90% of it (as someone who has a bit of a different interaction style and runs these things less autonomously, and hasn't generally seen the claimed regressions). Day 1: throw new stuff at it that failed badly, exciting to see something make more progress! Day n: reality sets in that it still wasn't perfect the first time.

Not a huge fan of the movie (largely because I think the story is rather meh and played out, sometimes classics can stay in the academy and are no longer fresh enough to merit a big budget retelling), but it had one major redeeming factor of not being as un-fun as that review.

"Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air. Supposedly they're gonna refresh the Air next year, we'll see. But even if they don't: we're well into the "keep phones 3 years or more" era of the smart phone. You don't need an exact match for every phone for everybody every year.

> I can't help but think the most plausible scenarios are the ones that have a little less machine supremacy and a little more human stupidity. The Matrix is less plausible than WarGames.

Used to be that we were afraid of sentient AI's like Skynet that would have their own goals.

Turns out we should've just been afraid of sentient-but-naive humans who would build "agents" around models so that Joe Random has a chance of unleashing stuff that's really really really really good at being stubborn until it accomplishes what the user wants, regardless of if it's good for other people! (Let alone intentional bad actors.) Let's not build Skynet, let's just give people who want to cut out the middleman and destroy all humans themselves better tools?

If you're a doomer, wouldn't the "let's try to get there so fast" actions of the companies suggest that, in fact, there are no reasonable people in positions of influence there?

By your own description neither Altman or Amodei are reasonable if their thought process goes: "this is an existential risk, give me hundreds of millions of dollars so I can accelerate it."

> Copyright maximalism is a bad look on a site called "Hacker News." Perhaps other sites beckon.

Frankly it's more of an insult to the "hacker" name to be apologising for big companies profiting off of frontrunning existing work for PR purposes, if the claims about piggybacking on human-directed efforts/prompting are true.

Being pro-copyright in order to protect the work of an individual from being reconstituted into the corporate machine is VERY hackery. Novel use for an existing tool, to fight the dominant system.

(Of course, we're on a so-called "hacker" site hosted by a company run by squarely-establishment individuals acting in an extremely un-hackery-field (investing), so the irony here has been at least one layer deep since the start.)

> In a statement after the vote, Yaryna Ferencevych, deputy U.S. representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, accused the United Nations of promoting an ideological agenda and distracting from more pressing issues.

> "Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility," the statement read.

I dunno, bro, "more accurate map" seems less "ideological" than "refuse to contemplate anything that could be perceived by the most fragile people alive as diminishing the US."

Sometimes it gets harder and harder to understand why certain things trigger these children.

Well, I mean, no. It could mean that regular Windows has things that could be distracting for developer workflows but might have other legitimate purposes.

Like when a Porsche 911 trim strips out the AC and stereo to provide a "distraction free driver experience" that doesn't mean that those things are "needless" to everyone else.

(Though in truth Windows 11 is full of dumb crap, but that doesn't mean we have to try---and fail!---to play clever lawyerball word games to make the point.)

(And honestly, I don't think MS's idea of a good developer experience is going to be the same as mine or most of HN's. There are entire other worlds of 'development' out there.)

For a group who's so bloody-minded about "words have meanings" about certain things, this whole "movement and affiliation and organization are all obviously exactly the same thing" claim is blatantly ridiculous.

When Republicans in the US communicate and sometimes coordinate with totalitarian international leaders, does it mean we get to label the whole thing as a single "international totalitarian organization"?

Heh, the version of this I heard from a Porsche tech was that the reason Porsche's supported Carplay (added in 2017 models) but NOT Android Auto for so long (added in 2022 models) was because Apple wasn't snoopy and Google was.

> The US has been marching in that direction for a while.

It's trivial to remember corruption issues from 100+ years ago (I learned about one in middle school with Teapot Dome and political "machines", and those are hardly the full extent) so this is another one of those cliches that is easy to claim but is never proven. There's always some. Humans gonna human. But that doesn't mean either (a) there's always a high and critical amount in magnitude-of-impact OR (b) it's been definitely increasing.

Let's stop saying it as a general trend without examples.

On the flip side, let's keep pointing to all the specific Trump examples.

It's naive to believe that corruption is impossible or vanishingly rare. It's also naive to believe that the current administration is not a major step change.

When I've tried it using API-rate billing I've saved on $$ on the tasks where I split planning+execution into Sol+Terra or Terra+Luna even. I wasn't paying attention to the token count, I was paying attention to the spend.

The purpose of the scratch pad is very often to refer back to it later.

> A politically impossible outcome that isn't worth hanging our hopes on.

> A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.

There's more history in the US of successful legislation aimed at breaking up big companies than at that sort of specific narrow technically-aware well-executed regulation.

The former is blunt force. It's relatively easy to target and make effective. It just needs enough ground-level support to get enough people from both parties on board - and we're seeing some shifts that way in the current Republican mishmash of groups.

The latter needs excellent technical knowledge and resistance to super-sophisticated lobbying and loophole-creation. It's very hard to get right.

This is true, I'd go much further than the OP here and say the barrier for merger should be MUCH higher than the barrier for spin-out or split.

There's no shortage of obvious problems that can arise from concentration of influence and control over a market. So just try to prevent it. Trade some max efficiency for redundancy + anti-corruption/pro-competition/pro-consumer market forces.

> I don't know anything about elections, a question worth asking is what would it look like if a conspiracy set out to exploit mail ballots? could detection only originate from a defector?

Why don't you start with some research of your own and outline how such a conspiracy would work and how large it would have to be.

Don't throw out a hypothetical "could it even be caught?" to try to bias people without doing any sort of even cursory glance at how things work.

Hell, while you're at it, please outline other possible conspiracies, and think about if there are potential vulnerabilities that could very require less major coordination than mail-in ballots. (Not even including the 'have a president who constantly tells everyone that if he loses it will be due to fraud to stoke the flames in advance' strategy!)

there have been MANY investigations

what have they found, exactly?

at some point how much more money do you want to burn on investigations w/o any particular new cause?

"unverifiable" ain't exactly true either where i live. you might think there should be more or different verification, sure, start some discussions in your local area. don't bring the federal government into everyone else's after the administration shows a long history of crying wolf and pre-seeding conspiracy theories with "i can't possibly lose" stuff. if you're convinced the states and local municipalities can't run stuff, it should be easy to prove.

and yet. you haven't yet.

"Abhors democracy" isn't necessarily the right phrase for the on-the-ground majority. The leadership, sure. But not the average folk.

"Has such a small imagination that they can't imagine they wouldn't be the majority" is more like it.

For all the old fears of "we need the senate so big cities don't run the country" they have a massive blind spot of there being less diversity of thought, and more of a monoculture, in suburban and rural areas. And they don't realize that because of this they shouldn't be surprised if not everyone agrees with them.

There's a voted-into-oblivion reply to this from someone trying to both-sides things "I don't want to hear about it when it was changed quickly for Covid too".

but it doesn't work...anything then was done under literally the same President we have today?

That's pretty damn hilarious: *don't complain to me about the Trump admin fucking with the voting system on short notice in 2026 since the Trump admin also fucked with the voting system on short notice in 2020!"

(At least there was a major national emergency going on that time...)

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It's a point in favor of the "malicious" theory, though. Here's arguably the person who would have the most reason to not fuck with things last-minute, who complained at no end about the results, is now making his own last minute changes... hmmmm.... must still believe he got cheated, and is intentionally trying to cheat instead.