nelox

The comment was definitely not LLM generated. However, I certainly did use search for help in sourcing information for it. Some of those searches offered AI generated results, which I cross-referenced, before using to write the comment myself. That in no way is the same as “an LLM-generated comment”.

The claim that big US companies “cannot explain the upsides” of AI is misleading. Large firms are cautious in regulatory filings because they must disclose risks, not hype. SEC rules force them to emphasise legal and security issues, so those filings naturally look defensive. Earnings calls, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly positive about AI. The suggestion that companies only adopt AI out of fear of missing out ignores the concrete examples already in place. Huntington Ingalls is using AI in battlefield decision tools, Zoetis in veterinary diagnostics, Caterpillar in energy systems, and Freeport-McMoran in mineral extraction. These are significant operational changes.

It is also wrong to frame limited stock outperformance as proof that AI has no benefit. Stock prices reflect broader market conditions, not just adoption of a single technology. Early deployments rarely transform earnings instantly. The internet looked commercially underwhelming in the mid-1990s too, before business models matured.

The article confuses the immaturity of current generative AI pilots with the broader potential of applied AI. Failures of workplace pilots usually result from integration challenges, not because the technology lacks value. The fact that 374 S&P 500 companies are openly discussing it shows the opposite of “no clear upside” — it shows wide strategic interest.

> The main reason for the push from the top is probably because they believe companies that don't adopt AI strategies now and ensure their programmers are familiar with AI toolsets will be at a competitive disadvantage. Note they may even believe that today's AI systems may not be much of a net benefit, but they probably see the state of the art advancing quickly so that companies who take a wait-and-see approach will be late to the game when AI is a substantial productivity enhancer.

Yes, this is the correct answer.

Maybe they did and informed the authorities accordingly.

An oxymoron if I ever saw one.

Yes, the medical dark ages. Not the metaphorical kind either, but the kind where people die foaming at the mouth because their neighbor decided a rabies shot might cause dog autism. The CDC has apparently chosen the new strategy of “if we ignore it, maybe it will go away,” which worked wonders in the 14th century. Soon, every PTA meeting will double as a plague ward while Etsy sellers crank out crystal collars to protect your doodle from brain inflammation. The irony is perfect: the world’s richest country, armed with billion-dollar labs, yet losing a fight our grandparents solved with a needle and some common sense. When your local ER is triaging between toddlers bitten by strays and adults bitten by TikTok misinformation, maybe then people will realize the dark ages don’t arrive with torches and pitchforks. They arrive with Facebook posts and silence from the institutions that should have known better.

The “40,000-year-old writing” headline is a bit ahead of the evidence. What researchers have actually found is that Ice Age caves are full of recurring abstract marks — dots, lines, Y-shapes, grids — that show up across sites and cultures. That’s fascinating on its own, because it suggests early humans were tracking things and passing on symbolic systems.

A recent paper argued those dots and Ys might form a kind of lunar calendar tied to animal life cycles. That’s where the headlines about “the earliest written language” came from. But specialists in Paleolithic art have already pushed back pretty hard: the associations are often mis-read, the counts don’t fit neatly, and there’s no sign of syntax or actual language encoding. At best it looks like a notation system or proto-writing, not “writing” in the Mesopotamian sense.

So the consensus is: yes, Ice Age people were doing more with symbols than just decorating caves — but no, we haven’t pushed the invention of writing back 35,000 years. The earliest real writing systems still show up in Sumer and Egypt ~5k years ago. These cave signs are another reminder that symbolic thought is very old and very human — but we shouldn’t confuse notation with language.

Yes, dubious indeed.

How about looking at descendants of fair-skinned Britains in sunnier climes?

Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world. This is due to a combination of factors: very high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, outdoor lifestyles, and a largely fair-skinned population that is more vulnerable to sun damage. Rates of both melanoma (the deadliest form of skin cancer) and non-melanoma skin cancers are higher in Australia than anywhere else. New Zealand follows closely behind.

No, the language clearly limits the restriction to those “aliens … currently outside the United States.” “Entry” in this context means seeking admission (or re-entry) to the U.S. from abroad, under a new petition or visa that starts outside. It is tied to new petitions, and specifically those where the beneficiary is abroad.

“(b) The Secretary of Homeland Security shall restrict decisions on petitions not accompanied by a $100,000 payment for H-1B specialty occupation workers … who are currently outside the United States …”

The actual proclamation [1] is very narrow: a $100k surcharge on new H-1B petitions for workers outside the US. It’s a one-time hit tied to the petition. It does not say “annual.” It does not drag in renewals or transfers for people already in status.

Boundless is technically right that a $100k fee exists, but the piece glosses over the narrow scope and leans into speculation. It frames the fee like an ongoing tax on every H-1B, which just isn’t what the proclamation says. The difference matters: a one-time petition fee is brutal enough, but calling it annual misstates the policy and inflates the impact.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...

Yeah, but apart from that …

ZFS can hit “No space left on device” (ENOSPC) errors if the pool fills up. But unlike btrfs’s infamous ENOSPC woes, ZFS was designed to handle these situations much more gracefully. ZFS actually keeps a bit of “slop space” reserved. So, as you approach full, it stops writes early and gives you a chance to clean things up, instead of running into unpredictable issues or impossible snapshot removals like btrfs sometimes does. You can even tweak how much safety space ZFS reserves, though most users don’t need to touch it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11696657]

When you run out of space in ZFS, you get a clear error for write attempts, but the system doesn’t end up fragmented beyond repair or force you into tricky multi-step recovery processes. Freeing up space (by deleting files or snapshots, or expanding the pool) typically makes things happy again.

[https://bobcares.com/blog/zfs-no-space-left-on-device-how-to...]

That framing is too narrow. A weather model is trained on physics equations but still relies on patterns in past data to make forecasts. A language model is trained on patterns in human text but that text already encodes mathematics, code, and reasoning. When prompted with a math problem, the model is not doing physics but it is reproducing the learned statistical structure of solutions people have written before. The distinction between “predicting language” and “solving math” is smaller than it seems because the training data couples symbols to meaning. Dismissing its outputs as “just predicting words” misses the fact that word distributions encode information-rich representations of knowledge. That is why large models can in practice generate working code, prove theorems, and reason through problems, even if they do so imperfectly. The right comparison is not that people are misusing them, but that they generalize beyond their design intent because language itself is the medium through which so many other domains are expressed.

Self-insured. The government absorbs losses itself instead of purchasing commercial insurance.

With a nod to War Games. Superb.

Right now the app leans heavily on punishment mechanics (loss aversion + alarms), which is super clever and already works better than the usual “one more minute” blockers. But there’s a whole toolbox of behavioral science that could take it further. Things like if–then planning (pre-deciding what you’ll do when the urge hits), shaping (starting with smaller blocks and leveling up), social accountability, or even sprinkling in variable rewards so it’s not only fear-driven. Add a bit of mindfulness at the start of each session, and suddenly you’re not just fighting your phone, you’re actually training focus like a muscle. That’s how you make it stick long-term.

A dozen students

Soft power comes in all manner of forms

Look, employees absolutely have the right to raise concerns, but occupying the office isn’t really about discussion, it’s about forcing the company’s hand. Microsoft already has ways for staff to voice their views. If every group with a political objection shut down operations, no global business could run.

On the “singling out Israel” point, that’s not whataboutism, it’s a real double standard. Yes, there have been protests over ICE or China, but those were smaller and shorter-lived. The fact that Israel alone sparks this kind of sustained disruption says something about selective outrage. That’s worth calling out.

And about the ICJ, it hasn’t ruled that genocide is happening. It’s issued provisional measures, which it does pretty routinely before a case is decided. That’s very different from a verdict, and it doesn’t legally bind companies to cut ties. Suggesting otherwise is misleading.

Finally, pointing to individual settler violence doesn’t change the basic issue. Israel prosecutes those cases, and they don’t justify employees trying to hijack corporate policy. If people want to change foreign policy, the place to do that is through politics and public advocacy, not by staging sit-ins at work.

It is hard to see the point of employees occupying their own company’s headquarters to protest contracts with Israel. Microsoft is not a government and it does not set foreign policy. It is a technology firm with clients that include many countries, including allies of the United States. Israel is one of those allies. Refusing to sell software or cloud services to Israel would not bring peace, it would simply undermine Microsoft’s ability to serve a lawful customer in line with international trade rules.

The workers demanding this kind of boycott ignore that Israel is a democratic state facing real security threats. They also ignore that their salaries and benefits come from contracts just like the ones they want cancelled. If every group of employees claimed veto power over which governments or companies their employer can serve, no global business could function.

There is also a basic issue of consistency. No one is occupying Microsoft offices over contracts with China, Saudi Arabia, or other states with serious human rights problems. Singling out Israel reveals that this is not a principled stand on universal rights, but a political campaign against one country. Employees are free to hold those views privately, but staging a disruptive occupation of their workplace crosses a line. It undermines trust, damages productivity, and forces colleagues into political disputes they did not sign up for.

If workers want to change foreign policy, the proper place is the ballot box, not the office lobby.

It is baffling that anyone in tech branding thought Gemini was a smart name. The NASA Gemini program is remembered as a near-disaster. Gemini 8 went into an uncontrolled spin that almost killed Neil Armstrong and David Scott, and Gemini 9A failed to dock because of a botched shroud. More than once, engineers were seconds away from losing crews outright. Yes, Gemini served as a bridge between Mercury and Apollo, but it also exposed how fragile the whole effort was. If you want your product name to inspire confidence, why pick a project where “not killing astronauts” was the biggest win? It feels like someone skimmed a Wikipedia page and thought “twin astronauts, neat” without recalling that Gemini’s legacy is one of narrowly averted catastrophe. If the goal is to project reliability, safety, or trust, Gemini is an odd hill to plant your brand on.

I was expecting Elon

It makes sense that the way dating apps classify people ends up shaping how we think about ourselves. Categories are never neutral. Even something as simple as “serious relationship” versus “casual dating” nudges people into making identity choices rather than just expressing fluid preferences.

A useful way to see this is to think of dating apps less like marketplaces and more like personality trainers. By giving you drop-downs, filters, and tags, they are constantly asking you to rehearse a particular version of yourself. Over time, those rehearsals stick. You start saying “I am this kind of dater” instead of “right now, I feel like this.”

What is novel here is not that technology influences identity, advertising and TV have done that for decades, but that dating apps are interactive feedback systems. Every swipe reinforces not only who you think you want but who you think you are. In that sense, the categories are doing double duty: they constrain your choices and they slowly calibrate your sense of self.

So the interesting question is not whether the categories are “accurate” or “inclusive” but whether we want platforms to keep that much influence over how identities are formed. They are not just matching people. They are training us in how to describe, filter, and rank ourselves in intimate contexts. And that carries a much heavier weight than we usually acknowledge.

I think you are spot on. What makes Chiang remarkable is that he never just builds a clever world and then leaves it at that. The counterfactuals are always put under pressure until their human consequences show through. That is why the religious stories work so well. He does not mock belief from the outside, he imagines a world where belief is literally true and then forces us to face the consequences. The horror comes from taking doctrines at face value and discovering that they are not comforting at all.

Exhalation is a good example of the same method applied to physics. The narrator dissects himself and his world with patient clarity, and in the process he reveals the same fragility that we face. The beauty of the story is that it does not rage against entropy or wrap it up in metaphors. It accepts the facts of decline and finds meaning in understanding them. That is why it feels sealed and perfect, as you say. The restraint is what gives it emotional weight.

Halos and glare at night are usually a sign that something in the eye is scattering light. Sometimes it’s just uncorrected prescription, but it can also come from things like dry eye, early cataracts, or the way the cornea focuses light. Glasses can’t always fix that because they only correct the main focusing errors, not the little imperfections that cause glare.

Contacts (especially the rigid or scleral kind) can sometimes smooth out those imperfections, but if you’re not interested in them, the next step is usually an eye exam to look for things like lens changes or surface dryness. Cataracts, even very early ones, are a common culprit for glare driving at night in the U.S.

Laser surgery can sometimes make halos worse, especially if someone already has them, so you’re right to be cautious. But it’s not the only option. Treating dry eye, using anti-reflective coatings on your glasses, or addressing cataracts (if present) can all help a lot.

In short: it’s not hopeless, but the “fix” depends on what’s causing the scatter in the first place. A detailed eye exam is the best way to pin that down.

A rule to harm people systematically cannot be moral because it contradicts the very point of morality

The distinction between love and attachment is valid, but it does not solve the problem. Even if one defines love as universal, impartial goodwill, it remains aspirational and fragile. To say morality originates only in love is to assume a capacity that human beings rarely sustain in practice. That is precisely why societies construct rules and duties: to create reliable standards even when love fails.

The justice system is far from perfect, but dismissing it as a “brittle imitation” overlooks what it prevents. Most people are not saints. Universal love may be possible in theory, but history shows that in practice societies without enforceable norms often descend into cycles of revenge, corruption, or rule by the strongest. Systems of law are crude, but they are better than trusting every individual to embody unconditional love.

Rehabilitation and restorative justice models do exist, and they align with the spirit of love by seeking repair rather than punishment. But they are still structured by rules. Without those, there is no guarantee of fairness or safety. Love can inspire moral action, but rules are what make morality workable in communities of imperfect humans.

NASA’s Earth science is core national infrastructure. Weather, climate and disaster data from its satellites protect lives and support the economy. No other body can provide the same long-term, global monitoring. Cutting it would damage US security, leadership and safety.

I can sell you some AdWords to solve it.

The idea that morality is grounded in love rather than rules sounds appealing but it collapses once applied outside personal relationships. Love is subjective and unevenly distributed. People love their family more than strangers, their country more than foreigners. If morality is only love, then preference and bias become virtue. That is no foundation for fairness in law, politics, or daily life.

Rules and duties exist to correct for partiality. The point of justice is that it applies equally, even when love does not. A judge cannot acquit someone because she loves him, a doctor cannot favour a patient because he is charming. Love without principle too easily becomes nepotism or tribalism. The most brutal conflicts in history were driven by deep love for one’s own group, not lack of it.

Love matters for motivation. It can inspire people to act with kindness. But moral frameworks require more than sentiment. They need universality and consistency, which only rules and duties can provide. Murdoch’s vision mistakes a source of energy for the standard itself. Without shared norms, love does not scale beyond the private sphere.