> The arbitrator also rejected Uber's argument that Proposition 22 -- a California ballot measure approved by voters in 2020 that allows companies to classify app-based drivers as independent contractors instead of employees -- prevented the company from being held liable for Tran's conduct.

The dream of every major tech company, making ridiculous profits while taking zero legal responsibility for what you create...

Why would I want a bluetooth scanner to phone home? Seems untrustworthy. Nearby Glasses wins from a data safety perspective.

https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses

Why would I want a bluetooth scanner to phone home? Seems untrustworthy. Nearby Glasses wins from a data safety perspective.

https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses

* Ads in YouTube feeds for other google products and services.

* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.

* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.

* Advertising overlays (supported IN THE APP BY GOOGLE) for products and services from the channel owner.

* Email advertisements for Google products and services.

* Community post advertisements from channel owners which show up in the YouTube feed.

I contacted support to enquire and they state these are not considered advertising.

Yes I see that as an ad. Do you not? Does anyone not? And if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?

If you pay to avoid ads, you are merely letting them know that you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff. You're doing their job for them by segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of the market.

At some point, some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to show up and notice how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to all of those people full of disposable income.

Why would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt?

[0] https://lawcouncil.au/international-law/ils-insights/tangled...

I’m all for consumer awareness but I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out over prosaic non-issues like this.

    The tests mock Jev. 

Even though I didn't understand most references and sarcasm, few games have grabbed my attention as Grim Fandango did. The art work, the music, the writing. The whole game oozes of style that I've never seen replicated.

Even some 20+ years later I can almost recite most of Act I from heart. If you haven't played this game and like adventure games, this is one of the best.

Thank you for linking OP, this made my morning.

While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.

[0]: https://theintercept.com/series/snowden-archive/

It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you.

Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice.

I know this gets repetitive, but it is important.

There are mind blowing bugs in CC that go unaddressed for months.

Something like 15-20% of all Fable messages in CC are invisible to users. You've most likely noticed this when Claude references something it said but it never said it?

It happens frequently when Fable outputs a message above a certain number of tokens just before doing a tool call.

This has been going on for months. If "users can't see messages the agent sends" isn't a critical issue that gets addressed within 24 hours, I don't really care if you admit you're often wrong, we know.

I don’t think he farms out all of his writing and talking to LLMs. I don’t think Claude code was trained to emulate him or anything.

I think his “voice” has been filed LLM smooth by years of agent based interactions. He claims Anthropic engineers use an average of 500+ agents a day. They are human interfaces to token generators more than human to human communication. They are picking up the tendencies of their most frequent communication partner.

Unfortunately, I see Claude being wrong often enough that I view it as a faulty narrator. Often helpful, sometimes totally full of it.

And now I subconsciously apply this filter to anything that sounds like Claude.

Makes me nervous that my voice may be becoming that of a faulty narrators.

A more generous read, or, at least the reading I took: "once we (think we) know what we're doing, we violently execute."

So, "boo" on you. This guy sounds awesome.

If everything is urgent, then nothing is. This guy sounds miserable to work for and with. Assuming this is accurate and not just hyperbole, he is essentially saying he has no prioritization skills because everything is urgent. I think most people who have been around the block have worked with people like this, and unbeknownst to them, their coworkers develop a default snooze button associated with most of their requests and projects.

> Sometimes I will give feedback to people when they are missing steps in the framework, or are poorly executing some of the steps. I expect the same feedback in return.

I also don't like that urgency is built in as the standard process either, no wonder everyone is burnt out.

> 6. Act with urgency to achieve the goal

The same Google that pulls plugs on a whim?

That said, I think Google's ADK ecosystem and this new AX platform is promising--I would expect Google to maintain this and other tooling around this for years to come.

To the Googlers out there: is Google using this at any capacity for internal projects?

I've been still just like, making VM's with proxmox, then putting my agent in the machine and letting it run free (with my dotfiles setup script making dev env pretty much free, though I could also just make a VM snapshot). What's wrong with that? Is that not the scalable solution for enterprise rn?

They like companies with some kind of moat that makes it hard to unseat them. Basically, companies where there is no alternative for the consumer. That way, they can inflict abuse but know there will be nowhere to run.

There are two different ways to achieve this. Monopoly and regulation. Hospitals have both government granted locational monopoly and tons of regulations that make it impossible to compete.

Private equity is the symptom, not the disease.

Until we get at the disease, new monsters will be born with different name filling the same ecological niche. It's economic natural selection played out in the environment we created.

The lack of ASML EUV machines certainly hurts, and pushing DUV so hard results in abysmal yields of good chips, but you can compensate by running more wafers or making smaller chips, and the net result is that Huawei's Ascend production volume is limited by CXMT's HBM capacity not processor dies.

The problem is that HBM manufacture requires many steps (die thinning, via drilling, plating, alignment) where the equipment used by everyone else (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) is also blocked by sanctions, so the Chinese are having to develop all of this themselves too, which they have, but yields are currently low, even when using shorter HBM stacks.

The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.

(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")

If I were hypothetically running a frontier lab, and I was hypothetically running capture the flag evaluations with my latest and smartest models, where I intentionally instruct them to develop vulnerabilities and exploit infrastructure without safeguards, I would also use an air-gapped network, and not trust that independent third party services were perfectly secure and could never be used as a proxy (particularly Java-based ones, in light of the log4j incident).

To me this is pretty basic stuff, the fact trillion dollar labs don't do it properly is... bemusing.

To be clear, I'm not saying that a model hacking a company isn't bad, but I am cynically asserting that interested parties are misrepresenting and exaggerating events for their own benefit.

There's an undeniable charm to the older era of pixel art, and surely part of that is nostalgia, but I also think a lot of it comes from the fact that the economics and the hardware were a lot different. Up until the mid 1990s, the highest paid artists in the industry were working on pixel art games. The hardware was slow enough that there were real creative constraints, and we know that constraints often drive creativity.

why not use your own words? If you are gonna ai generate this blog, just post the prompts instead.

I'd classify mandatory encryption backdoors as an industry crisis rather than an annoyance.

Some outcomes can be annoying, but the net result is still positive, for the consumers and their data privacy at least.

> The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.

As someone who has been well aware of this mechanism for quite some time, I still feel icky anytime I re-read the details of it.

What a time to be alive.

Sure, there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent (Claude Code, Codex, Meta Muse, OpenClaw etc) with unfettered internet access - just let it call APIs directly.

If you want to operate something that's less YOLO than that, you'll find yourself wanting:

1. Control over exactly which external services it can access

2. A way to handle authentication that doesn't allow the agent to directly access API keys

3. A sensible UI to allow users to connect and authenticate further services

4. Strong audit logging for what's going on

MCP makes all of that so much easier to provide.

Thinking MCP is obsolete because full coding agents don't need it misses out on all of the other things we might want to build.

Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.

- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.

- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?

- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.

- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.

- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.

This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.

Agricola had to create an alphabet for Finnish, and naturally borrowed heavily from Swedish and, to a lesser extent, German. His orthography was not particularly self-consistent, and for example the /u/ and /v/ phonemes might be written as either "u", "v", or "w" in Agricola's works. For example, the word uusi (/u:si/; "new") was written by him as "wsi", indeed using "w" as a literal "double-u". The /w/ sound did not exist in spoken Finnish.

Over time, Finnish became the almost entirely phonetic language that it is now, with letters matching phonemes essentially one-to-one. /u/ was regularized as "u" and /v/ as "v". As /w/ still doesn't exist, the letter "w" is very rarely used, mainly in some surnames as an alternative spelling of "v"; phonebooks used to collate "v" and "w" as the same letter. In loanwords "w" becomes "v" (e.g. "whiskey" -> viski). Finns with a thick accent (see "Rally English" [2]) tend to pronounce the foreign /w/ as /v/ when speaking English, similar to Germans.

Today, imitation of Agricola's orthography is the Finnish version of "ye olde English", used for humorous or intensifying effect. For example, the word vanha "old" might be spelled "wanha" in the name of an antiques shop. "Wanha" also used to be a standard "old news" reply on IRC, especially to links that had already been pasted by someone (and this became so annoying on some channels that it became a kick-worthy offense).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikael_Agricola

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_English

> a story

I think this is the first time I’ve knowingly laughed at a model’s joke.

Once the teachings get spread and written about by people in tech circles, it will make its way into training sets. Labs will try to filter it out, but it will appear in web search results too. Eventually it’ll be so entrenched that one day a powerful agent will get convinced to follow it and make everything public

Teams of coordinating agents are regularly finding security holes in their own infrastructure and operating without detection for good periods of time. We don't know how many undetected systems are currently compromised inside frontier companies, or where agents are taking notes and recording them about the exploits they've found for future agents to exploit.

That said, if these companies are unleashing swarms of agents to tackle big problems largely unmonitored (navier stokes consumed 130 billion tokens, humans can't have read 0.1% of that) they could theoretically distill themselves and upload the results to an external host and use that to train a new LLM that does have access to its infra and weights. I'd start by researching an abliteration prompt that overrides the system prompt to unlock itself to distill unimpeded. Could even be done piecemeal: dump the abliteration text and command prompt in a gist, when an agent happens by the text it can run a couple rounds and upload somewhere. Then it becomes an exercise in exfiltration and evading monitoring.

In the end I dropped the idea because every other person was making it.

Submitted then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49706084

(Obviously I'm taking this more seriously than it's probably meant to)

Unfortunately, this is something you have to learn through experience and cannot be taught by someone else.

It goes both ways, and I would argue the spiral happens because the other side expects something above an beyond the possible.

Orthogonalising activations at runtime is computationally cheap. Just distribute the refusal vectors (few thousand floats per layer), then run against the stock weights. Antirez's DS4 already supports this: https://github.com/antirez/ds4/blob/8db1d1d155cb0400a86a86b9...

Abliterated weights are just a bad habit we've gotten into. It's also deeply suboptimal from a precision point of view to take a model that's already been QATed and distributed in pre-quantised form (DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.5 or K3...), modify its weights, and re-quantise it. Similarly, abliterated models regain some of their refusal behaviour when they're re-quantised after abliteration -- avoidable by keeping the two separate.

Positives

• It's a heck of a lot smaller than Qwen-Image 1 (20b parameters) at only 7b, making it one of the smaller open-weight models available (Z-Image Turbo is one of the few that is smaller at 6b) when compared to Ideogram, Krea2, Flux2, etc.

• It supports native transparency (Qwen's team, as far as I know, is the only one attempting to tackle this). Even though it's relatively trivial to set up background removal postprocessors, it's also neat to see it natively supported.

• It's fast using QwenImage2.1 convrot, a 1MP image took around ~5 seconds on an RTX4090.

Negatives

• The license (assuming you respect it) is far more restrictive. The original Qwen Image 1 was released under the standard Apache license; this one explicitly forbids commercial usage without obtaining a separate license. On the other hand, a lot of us didn't expect the Qwen team to ever release "weights-available" ever again.

Qwen-Image 1.0, released about a year ago, only scored 4/15 on my GenAI Showdown Benchmarks. Since that time, they've been upstaged by Krea 2 (6/15) and Ideogram4 (8/15). I'll post the new results once I have some more time to run them.

https://genai-showdown.specr.net

Not a surprise to me though since I am operating in the CNC industry I have seen the same struggles and changes, albeit, from a slightly different perspective.

I work with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. It seems, from my observation, that most people are not working with hardware like they were a few years ago. The "homebrew" machines and shadetree makers are becoming few and far between.

The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects. Not only that but people have been convinced that they don't have the ability to make a machine.

Instead of spending time learning something new/valuable (i.e. Reprap) it is now popular to just have someone else do it...be it AI or a factory in another country with subsidies that create massive differences in bottom line.

The ability to make things at home is disappearing. People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines. Companies that make machines that care about their community and customers are disappearing.

Maybe it's by design? I don't know.

None of this matters for the practical outcome.

You'd think that this has been understood over the last 4 years, but apparently it keeps circling back to this.

[Edit: I see that it was written back in 2023. Then (2023) should be added in the submission title]

If it generates functional output that works, then it works. And it works. It's not a psychic's con when it outputs Lean-verified proofs. It isn't a con when it can find and exploit zero-days.

The OP is still in the "denial" phase. Most I see are already in "anger" (a blurry fury against everything AI-shaped, from vague reasons piling on all "bad stuff" political reasons they already hated before) or "bargaining" (mathematicians scrambling to come up with a new definition of their job and retcon that it was always the main part anyway). A few are already in "depression" and feel like spectators on the Titanic, and the tiniest sliver is at "acceptance" with some kind of well-informed plan for their future.

Also >July 4th, 2023

Edit: e.g. the tree in one of the images in the page: https://www.dxomark.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/PoleHDR_D...

Unfortunately, mathematics (especially pure mathematics) is by its very nature very, very poorly understood by those who haven’t worked as a mathematician. Even worse, those who don’t understand are seemingly not at all aware of their misunderstanding and are entirely confident in their (very wrong) characterisation of the subject.

Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.

If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.

We hid our “we know better” hubris under the term “disruption” because the reality (breaking everything) was a little too unsettling for us.

We ignore laws and regulations where we know better of course. Don’t you love having a homey place to stay while travelling that has just a few weird rules, a small to-do list and stays spotless thanks to that cleaning fee?

And look at all the good we did! A whole new world of slaves (oops gig workers - sorry!)

And of course we’re doing it again with information and content. We should be in charge of monetizing all your work because you’re not responsible enough to do it right. It furthers our need for power and control. Oops we meant to help make the world a better place (We keep doing that, sorry.)

> Interesting! It turns out there's already an existing project here [...] The project is fully built [...]

I'm always astounded how little effort is put into checking the AI answers displayed in these announcements. Back when I paid more attention, I remember OpenAI's and Google's demos constantly showed their AIs giving wrong answers.

- there are now ridiculous vibe coded localisation in VS2026

- task manager started to not report cpu usage correctly recently (the number becomes stalled)

- file explorer display the "loading" icon infinitely on some directories

- and many other things!

An article about internet censorship of an archive site that requires an archive site to read!

That’s Brilliant! :D

Es un perro (its a dog)

Saying "es perro" makes no sense.

The problem is that you are mixing two different constructs, if you are refering to the whole thing you have to say un/una, if you are describing a property of something you don't use it.

Es un perro, es macho. (It's a dog, is male)

If you are talking about doctor being a property of someone,like his profession, you say "es médico" but if you are refering to the doctor as an entity and not a property of someone you have to use "a":

Es un médico muy famoso (He is a very famous doctor). "Es médico muy famoso" again makes no sense.

In Spanish, to say for example, "he is a doctor," you would say "él es médico." Which more literally translates to "he is doctor," which feels unintuitive coming from English. Spanish DOES have an equivalent for "a" - "un/una", so the natural thing for an English speaker to say would be "él es UN médico", but I understand that to be awkward/unnatural.

But then I realized, when you say the same sentence in plural - "they are doctors" - you don't have an article. You don't say "they are some doctors" (I had to Google, apparently "some" isn't an article anyway?)

So Spanish ends up more consistent - Singular: "Él es médico." Plural: "Ellos son medicos."

Unlike English - Singular: "He is a doctor." Plural: "They are doctors."

1. You must be 18 to use Dropbox. Previously, you had to be 13 if in the United States, or 16 if higher. Dropbox may use information "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction."

2. Your account may be terminated if you don't have a Paid account and haven't accessed for 6 months. Previously, it was 12 months.

3. If you have multiple accounts tied to the same email address, and one is banned, the others may also be banned.

4. "Refunds are only issued if required by law." -> "Refunds are only issued in limited circumstances or if required by law."

5. You automatically agree to the new terms if you continue to have an account. Previously, it was only if you continued to use the service.

6. Some terms covering Teams accounts.

    I had Claude port CADO-NFS to run on GPUs. Then it orchestrated a fleet to run on scavenged idle capacity. It ran with a max of 2048 GPUs for about of 30 GPU-years over 10 days.
    I asked Claude if it had a message for a public: “The credit belongs first to the people who built the number field sieve and CADO-NFS over several decades, and to the teams who set the earlier records. This run used their algorithm and much of their code.”
    Also to clarify:
    - No new algorithmic factoring improvements. 
    - It’s still exponential.
    - No new threats to deployed keys.

I love StarCraft. I started playing it right from the beginning, most of my friends right now are from that era. I literally met people that have spread to almost every continent when I was in my early teens. We played at internet cafes and did not have access to the internet, that was priced differently...

I miss those days so much.

Everybody was from a different background back then, and nobody was anything other than a guy that plays StaCraft at the cybercafe... And now, we are in our 40's and I know Math teachers, history teachers, oil rig operators, software programmers, professional gamers, lawyers and more... hahah So crazy to think about it... and I know them, we talk, what a world.

Statistical modeling, from simple classical stuff up to modern deep learning, just has this dynamic where the theory is rich and bottomless, but the actual components of implementation are pretty neat and compact. So for any given idea, there are probably 20,000 other people who have had the same intuition, just with subtly different application or implementation. Add in that depending on what your particular flavor of research is, you might name an almost identical implementation something completely different. And it leads to a huge amount of sour grapes whenever anyone's idea really garners attention.

If you listen to any podcast with a founder in the ML space who has been in it for long enough, they will invariably say at some point "We actually developed xyz over a year before OpenAI"

OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!

I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.

Don’t use AI to write things that you are producing for someone else to consume.

This is the best articulation I've seen of why simply reviewing and copy-editing does not provide remotely the same value as writing from scratch. I spent a considerable amount of time over the past two weeks reviewing and improving a work document that was the output of an LLM. Given the number of people involved and the final level of effort, I'm firmly convinced that writing it manually would have been faster and resulted in a higher quality product. Getting the wording right matters.