Hacker News Reader

twoWhlsGudon Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware

Big claims require and all, but he's an Asst. Prof at CMU, so not the usual suspect for AIP - and presumably there's pudding on the way given the description of this "Open Source Week" thingy. Will be interesting to see what comes out...

twoWhlsGudon Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

Let me introduce you to the power of cynicism to normalize corruption...

twoWhlsGudon Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil

/s Right, cause it's not like there's any Russian propaganda out there competing with it... /s

twoWhlsGudon Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight (2025)

Exactly! I worked with a couple ex Xanadu acolytes at Apple back in the day. What they took away from the experience were the many inspirations rather than the project as a model for organizations. One of them brought him in to speak and he spent the time exhorting us to think beyond WYSIWIG (be careful about how your metaphors limit what your avoidances can be) which at the time I found rather eye-opening.

twoWhlsGudon Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

It can certainly be seen as a simple prisoner's dilemma, but it's not in some very important dimensions. (E.g. given the core tech the most likely outcomes are not AGI but developed carelessly nonetheless capable of causing all sorts of societal damage.) Unfortunately our bitwit overlords love short term self serving frameworks like this one so it's easy to imagine them embracing a "what has the future ever done for me" strategy...

twoWhlsGudon Is This the Fastest Opinion Shift in American Politics?

Seventy-one percent of Americans say they don’t want an A.I. data center built close to where they live. Why?

twoWhlsGudon Too Old for Silicon Valley? Think Again. AI Is Changing the Math

As someone in industry who also teaches early career engineers once every two years, there seems to be a tailing off of enthusiasm in the latest cohort. Does anyone know of an actual data source from which one could draw actual conclusions about this sort of thing, by the way?

It makes sense to me that someone coming up today would be less enthusiastic about the effects of technological innovation given the experiences of the last decade. Growing up in Silicon Valley a generation or two ago it was an article of faith that innovation was going to bring great things to us. Taking that away ought to have an impact on enthusiasm.

twoWhlsGudon As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers

If you are bad enough at building coalitions you can lose almost any election regardless of how evil or corrupt the opposition, is too : )

"FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?

REG: He's over there.

P.F.J.: Splitter!"

twoWhlsGudon Local Reasoning for Global Properties

Interesting. In the Rust world extensions like Verus, I think, are trying to enable exactly what the author is discussing. Perhaps worth a look:

https://github.com/verus-lang/verus

twoWhlsGudon Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries

Indeed - I look forward to the spa version of this that runs around yelling "Exfoliate!, Exfoliate!" : )

twoWhlsGudon Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada

And if you're wearing long sleeves and long pants, you can apply permethrin in a semi permanent way to your clothing to discourage ticks and mosquitoes: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/insect-repellent/is-p...

twoWhlsGudon Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?

"Everything means less than zero" (E. Costello)

Social media seems to basically be a way of running A/B testing on the population until you find enough folks vulnerable to some sort of powerful misconception that serves your purpose.

For the SM network "purpose" means engagement, but it turns out that (to our disadvantage) it also serves the purposes of an army of grifters, opportunists and power mad sociopaths who are taking over the world. Once again (think the 1930s) it turns out mastery of new media technologies in the hands of bad people has consequences.

As techies, building productive rather than destructive media (and AI is the next "media" of consequence) really ought to be top of agenda.

twoWhlsGudon The intracies of modern camera lens repair (2024)

That seems like a small thing that I as a users of lenses would see as a benefit (more folks who could fix my lenses) even if I don't have the inclination to do it myself. Wonder why manufacturers don't do this? (The majors seem pretty hostile to their user base, but smaller companies like Sigma you would think might care more?)

twoWhlsGudon Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra

I got my TS3 after it had been out awhile and it's been great for me, also. Wonder how the current (TB5) versions are. They generally seem to take a few (?) years to really get the firmware working properly.

twoWhlsGudon Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra

They weren't exactly hopping, but having a local store where you could get hardware support was a big deal, for me at least. I stopped buying Surface devices and switched entirely back to Apple for anything mobile when they closed the MS store near me.

twoWhlsGudon Last.fm is now independent

yes, I dropped it because simply favoriting a song seemed to require streamifying my entire personal library, which I didn't want to do.

twoWhlsGudon The Art of Money Getting

Look for companies with big fierce customers. This gives you an ally when you go to your boss to try to get the company to do the right thing. I moved from big tech to big manufacturing a couple decades ago, and it's the best move I've ever made, for exactly that reason.

twoWhlsGudon Intro to TLA+ for the LLM Era: Prompt Your Way to Victory

Yes! Formal specs could be where the understanding of what exactly the system is supposed to do gets laid out - and ideally coupled into the verification process that the code produced actually does what it is supposed to (and nothing else...). That would be a big change!

twoWhlsGudon Apple unveils new accessibility features

I don't think things have improved much on that front since Colin Hughes gave a run down on Voice Control's problems several years ago

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2023/08/16/those-who-rel...

Would be great if they could at least fix two major bugs:

* input simply fails (seemingly) randomly where it is supported and many apps from major vendors don't support dictation input at all (e.g. OneNote) (there should at least be a fallback (a la Dragon Dictate from decades ago) for those cases * capitalization is still random leaving you with many errors to correct

but Apple mostly seems to see accessibility as something to use to enable performative press releases not actual functionality...

twoWhlsGudon Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

Princeton was that way in my lifetime (and I'm not that old : ) - corruption is not inevitable nor should honor be considered some sort of utopian dream.

twoWhlsGudon Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

As someone who went there (albeit many decades ago) I can tell you FWIW when I was there folks took it seriously. I literally knew of no one who ever cheated on an exam. And I'm pretty sure that anyone I knew who observed cheating would have taken it seriously enough to bring it to the process. It was pretty much a fixture of how students thought about things. So it worked (near as I could tell) back then.

But institutions take awhile to adjust to new realities, and it while looks like Princeton may have been a bit behind the curve on this one, I can understand why they were reluctant to abandon this practice. Living in an honest community cuts a lot of extra effort out - crap that you don't even have to think about. Princeton will be a less productive place to learn going forward.

twoWhlsGudon Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

The point of today's megascale corporations is to make it impossible for challengers to arise at all. They aren't always successful, but the direction of travel is pretty clear.

twoWhlsGudon MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be

The surface pro argues otherwise. Using Lightroom classic on the Pro is largely best done from the keyboard, but there are certain workflows where using the touchscreen or a stylus is much better than a touchpad. The fact that it's limited doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.

twoWhlsGudon Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

Is there a write up of this somewhere? Curious to read more...

twoWhlsGudon Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

And birds didn't invent jet engines, so obviously we don't need those either, right?

twoWhlsGudon Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Interesting! Is there a pointer to an issue where this feature is described by chance?

twoWhlsGudon PRC elites voice AI-skepticism

A bit old, but still relevant (from Dan Wang's book Breakneck which I am very much enjoying):

In China, The Communist Party's Latest, Unlikely Target: Young Marxists https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...

twoWhlsGudon There Goes the American Muscle Car

This. If you are completely surrounded by light trucks as you grow up, then you are much less likely to ever think of actual cars (muscle or otherwise) at all. I grew up around 2000 lbs BMW 2002's (and the like) - a kind of vehicle that simply has vanished. So I could imagine lightweight sport sedans as a thing. If all you know are SUV's your concept of vehicle is going to be very different...

twoWhlsGudon 'Rocks as big as cars' are flying down the Dolomites

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150192/tracking-30-...

I don't see what's funny about 4 inches just in the last three decades. 8 inches over the last hundred plus years at seattle

https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station....

seems very much in line then (given the lower rates before 1992). "Further investigation" was perhaps motivated by the search for something besides truth?

twoWhlsGudon Budget Car Buyers Want Automakers to K.I.S.S

Budget car buyers aren't driving the market - especially not the market for new cars. In the US income inequality has gotten to the point where most new cars are bought by upper income customers. And they want fancy SUVs. Budget car buyers purchase their cars in the used market. For them it would in fact make sense to purchase less expensive more efficient vehicles. But they don't get a vote (in theory a lower depreciation for such vehicles should flow up, but I don't think that signal really gets anywhere now.)