It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
The amount of roadblocks Google is putting up for GrapheneOS is just ridiculous. None of their decisions make any sense, from the delayed source patches upstream, to the embargos, attestation issues, etc. Google simply regrets android being open source.
Passkeys do marginally improve security against MITM and phishing attacks, but they are primarily for protecting the lowest common denominator from themselves: people who re-use passwords and/or don't use a password manager.
If you use multiple devices throughout the day, registering passkeys in all of these systems becomes a big headache with O(m*n) complexity, so putting the passkeys in a password manager is the only realistic solution. But this still breaks the login flow for a very common use case: how do I log in on a device that I don't own? With a password in a password manager I at least have the option of manually typing the password.
The biggest problem, though, is how users are pushed into it without any warning or knowledge of what they're signing up for. I've accidentally set up passkeys just by clicking an okay button a few times in the past and had to go back and figure out how to undo it after being blocked from login on another computer (which computer was I on again?).
HN staff: someone posted before me. Could we change the title to
"Bend - a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs"?
Everyone: feel free to ask any question, but I'd be highly appreciative if you could be a bit civilized and respectful this time. I've worked on this for 1 year, nearly 16h/day, 7 days a week, and I'm giving it for free. You need not to use it. So, I'd be thankful if you could point occasional failures politely rather than throwing me in a lava pit.
These one shot vibecoded sites are always a complete visual headache. Endless clutter, pointless filler text all over the place, and zero regard for actual usability.
I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
> Google simply regrets android being open source.
Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source. With all the work from outside Google. The same is true chrome.
But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand
I know someone who works in law and deals particularly with an area of US benefits and healthcare law. One of their workflows for lower-level employees at their firm involves taking in documents from healthcare plans and organizations, analyzing them for certain kinds of data, and then importing that data into an internal system they use to analyze and provide guidance on plans. The internal system can contain hundreds of documents for an individual client. All of the documents have the same information (roughly) but in totally diverse formats and styles. Once it's in the system, it's easy to compare and analyze across documents and the research process is much faster.
They recently bought a Claude subscription and began using Claude to do the initial read of the documents and output JSON they can import into their internal systems. The work still must be reviewed by an attorney - Claude is nowhere near making the kinds of judgments a lawyer would make about this content - but it has increased their throughput from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour by killing the busy work.
LLMs have great advantages for this kind of work - but not for decision-making. I just don't see OpenAI ever admitting that.
(I've left some details intentionally vague because this is a very specific area of law and I don't want my friends to be identified without their consent.)
"LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output"
The best advice for writing for other humans is: don't use LLMs.
If you're writing for machines, liking coding, then fine go for it. If you're writing for processes with formal highly structured content like manuals, specifications, form content, procedures, information, that sort of thing, then also ok to use LLMS. But if you're writing for a human mind to ingest and extract meaning from, then LLMs are poison.
You are missing the biggest benefit of a self storage business - the appreciation of the underlying real estate. When you dig into the financials of the major self storage businesses you'll see they are essentially REITs that have better cashflow. They can pick an up-and-coming area, do a minimal build-out with low annual overhead, and then down the road when the facility would be needing overhauls and maintenance the underlying property has typically appreciated so much that it dwarfs all other associated revenue streams and makes sense to sell and raze the existing structure. Great business model if you have a long enough timeline.
This is also why some startups trying to revolutionize the self storage model had extreme headwinds - if you are renting the underlying properties and trying to make the storage business profitable you are at an extreme disadvantage to the larger players who can subsidize operating costs with portfolio appreciation.
You use a bunch of technical-sounding words here to make it sound like you understand. But to be clear, nobody understands why the evolved weights of a NN make the decisions that they do.
Almost nothing is understood about the actual representations used for nontrivial concepts, decision algorithms, etc.
If you look at the field of mechanistic interpretability, compared to “GOFAI” like learned decision trees, an LLM is completely opaque.
>why mathematicians should widely receive funding for merely understanding things
imagine yourself living in the 1700s. how would you justify Newton and Leibniz's work on calculus?
all maritime engineering and trade was done with geometry and arithmetic at the time. there were no practical applications, not for likely at least a century until hydrodynamics were incorporated into shipbuilding
now look at today. how many of our modern technologies rely on the field having been birthed? that could only exist because of even further decades-worth of antecedent refinements, extrapolations, applications that had, at their time, no direct utilitarian cause?
there's no KPI to be derived from any academic field of study at the bleeding edge of theory. theoretical underpinnings lead to practical applications much further down the line after many paradigm shifts
semiotics and cultural capital as theoretical concepts is another example - at the time they were purely seen as navel-gazey literary theory work. these days, half a century later, they're in wide use (for better or worse) in marketing and advertising - they birthed the whole concept of 'branding'
not everything needs immediate, quantifiable justification. to believe it does indicates a need for a period of self-reflection, to figure out how and when you became so heavily influenced by the MBA-brained propaganda that the world should revolve around the quarter-by-quarter creation of capital
AI output right now is like a final exam essay response from an anxious student. Instead of being edited for focus and clarity, it's anti-edited to cram in as many details as possible. Instead of worrying that the reader might get bored or confused, it assumes that the reader has no choice but to read the whole thing, even if they get a headache. It doesn't care about picking the most useful perspective on a problem; it cares about covering every possible angle that a grader might use to dock points from it.
It's basically the work you get from a smart, diligent person who is oblivious to any shared goal and approaches every assignment with a CYA attitude.
> It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up.
Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.
Whether the end result threatens the form in which culture is created, at least beyond just threatening the business models of the gatekeepers, is a separate discussion, but you can't draw the heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" arguments there so easily.
And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.
There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".
I feel this post. I am tired of "directing" agents when in reality it feels more like trying to herd a group of toddlers.
Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
The framing of how we think about AI has really been cultivated by a quite homogeneous group of people. These people, like all people that belong to a sub-culture, are almost certainly prone to groupthink.
It's extremely important to see that group as such. That it is not thousands of individual perspectives but a chorus of connected/aligned people who have all read the same things and talked to the same people and are rewarded implicitly for thinking a similar way.
Many of them read HN and are offended I put them this way. But it's inescapable that we as humans have this flaw when we're surrounded by a culture.
There's another universe where we do not constantly compare AI to nukes. I bet that world has a lower P(doom).
I just don't understand people saying "but a human learning from a book isn't illegal".
How do people not understand that some laws only make sense at a certain scale? One human learning from resources and being added to the labour pool is not the same as an infinitely copyable entity doing the same thing. One has negligible impact on the demand for the original, and the other replaces 99% of the demand."
And creating a rule that says you cannot train on any material unless the rights holder authorises it via license is not complicated. That will creat a amrketplace where creators can decide the price for their content. It's just inconvenient.
This article takes the view of the consumer, "Why do so many people pay to store items they almost never use?". But in actuality, the interesting part of this is why is there so much supply of self-storage businesses?
The answer is: cash flow. Self-storage businesses are the almost perfect solution for someone with a good size (but not enormous) bucket of money that they want to put to work generating cashflow:
1. Cheap build out (cheap land, cheap facilities)
2. Almost entirely hands-off (no employees, automated entry)
3. Low liability (low risk of customers suing you)
4. Low overhead (just pay for taxes, electricity, minimal maintenance)
5. Reliable monthly cash flow
The abundant supply of these businesses, I suspect, tends to generate demand: it's easier to pay $80/month to store your junk than spend the time and emotional labor of picking through what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. That ends up being captive long-term revenue.
Ohi, author here! Thanks for posting Hister. Feel free to A.M.A.
My first free software search project was Searx, a privacy respecting metasearch engine, but because of the limitations of the metasearch concept, I've decided to take a different approach.
Hister builds a personal search index from pages you visit, bookmarks, browser history, local files, and crawled websites. It stores extracted content with offline result previews, so information remains searchable even when the original page changes or disappears. It supports full text and semantic search, can run entirely on your own machine, and includes a web interface, command line tools, and an MCP endpoint for assistant integrations.
Ps.: It looks like our name conflicts with a registered trademark in the US. The owner of the other project has asked us to change it, so we’ll probably need to comply sooner or later.
Name suggestions are welcome! Ideally, the new name should be relatively short, sound good, and have an available .org domain.
It is insane to me that judges consistently rule that the constitution doesn't apply because there's a "border" within 100 miles.
The 4th Amendment says, exactly:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I do not know how that could be unclear. My cellphone is my effect, and arguably, also a "paper". Which SHALL NOT BE VIOLATED. But apparently, I'm too dumb to understand the sentence[1].
> The biggest problem, though, is how users are pushed into it without any warning or knowledge of what they're signing up for.
My irritation is that I know what it is, and I've said no thanks many times, but I'm still asked regularly by the likes of Amazon, and they usually pick a time when I'm trying to order something quick¹. It is one of the growing number of things in life that simply have no “no” option, it is always “yes or later” - I wouldn't mind so much if “later” meant “I know the option exists, I'll ask for it if I change my mind, don't bother me again otherwise”. Call me cynical, but if companies are trying to nag me into something I very much doubt the main benefit is mine. I'm sure there are many people out there who go along with it simply because they are sick of being asked repeatedly.
I also don't see the real benefit with the way things are often implemented anyway. When the credential recovery process is sending a magic email or text, making SMTP or SMS the weak link of the chain just as it often is for passwords so I'd be giving up my preferred workflows for no better security.
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[1] A short while ago I actually ordered from somewhere else because of this, bitter twit that I am. “I wonder if I can get this almost certainly drop-shipped item on next day delivery via Prime?”, [goes to Amazon to check], [get passkey prompt], “sod it, I'll go back to the original place”.
Back in 2008 Fujitsu has one of the best performing 10Gbps Switches. We were building 40 Gbps packet sniffers at Google (4x 10 Gbps NICs) and needed switches that could do things like mirror traffic across ports at line rate. Fujitsu was way ahead of the pack. I always wondered what held them back from building a meaningful networking business in the US.
For some reason, this approach makes me think of the difference between “wizardry” and “sorcery” in some fantasy magic systems. The magic of “wizards” is fundamentally based on a deep study and understanding of arcane things, perhaps assisted by some (necessary or helpful) tools of great power. “Sorcerers” summon supernatural beings and are able to control them, cajole them, and protect themselves and others against them (with more or less success)... but the actual desired magical effect is performed by those beings.
Computing has historically been a field of wizardry. It's... interesting (?) to see so many people pushing so hard in the direction of sorcery, and in fact applying that sorcery to other fields, in which they themselves aren't quite able to validate whether the spell worked or not.
The point about poor support for 3rd party managers is so frustrating. Because this is correct, that is the obvious solution for the normal user, but passkey implementations somehow do not know how to deal with it.
Amazon prompts me to create a passkey everytime I log in, even when I logged in with a passkey, because my passkeys live in Bitwarden rather than my OS or browser.
And the confusing mechanism hurts there too: I'm always a little bit afraid that i'm somehow more in danger because I keep them in a vault that's shared on all my devices rather than a TPM, because whenever the protocol is explained the "it can't leave your device" part is highlighted as the main source of the security, except.... mine obviously do leave my device, with the vault, so.....
As a Canadian, I find this unbelievably good news. Canada, the EU, and other middle powers need to unite. Stronger together, while preserving what makes each country unique.
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.