News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

SideQuark

You know your claim simply doesn’t follow. Costs and profits can both go up. Why make such a silly straw man, since it makes the rest of anything you want to show much less well received?

It’s perfectly reasonable for gains in productivity to reward those taking risks for the gains.

And your graph also makes clear both corporate profits AND remuneration to employees have gone up significantly. And that profits are far more volatile than remuneration: most people willingly take stability over risk and choose salary over entrepreneurship, which is a reasonable choice.

Corporate profits are what has been growing retirement accounts, which has huge benefits to the majority of people nearing retirement. It’s not the us-vs-them binary option commonly sold.

Also productivity costs more in tooling than ever before per worker, so it's not a surprise that a smaller amount of capital goes to humans when the gains are majority from capital outlays, not labor improvements.

Here's BLS data for total cost to employ for the last 25 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECIALLCIV

Note how much it has increased over simply wages, as it costs more and more to employee a person due to laws, benefits, and tooling.

Well, there are tons of other things newly proven any LLMs, as well as lots of other things once termed creative and the domain of humans only, that LLMs and other models have surpassed the "creative" humans, that all you have to do is find one to realize that humans are not the only creative force on earth.

Something like the forest and trees applies here.

Re:Ofcom Concedes Defeat in the 4chan Case on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @06:17AM (#50178484)
Did CNN or MSNBC lose a billion dollar lawsuit for knowingly promoting false stories while, and I quote from the Fox case, calling their own viewers “stupid, stupid, stupid” for believing their content? Did CNN or MSNBC shareholders sue them due to the damage caused by promoting false stories on purpose?

Maybe there is some demonstrable difference to size and scale of willful dishonestly among outlets.

They don’t.
US share of disposable income spent on food has cut in half since 1960.
Re:Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @07:45PM (#50080526)
Transistors doubled for so long, but pretty much no other technology has come close, so it’s not like going to improve for very long, which is far more common. Transistors only did it due to a quirk in physics, that of electrons being long lasting, super tiny, and fairly controllable. We’re out of such particles to make another set of leaps.

For data bound things, there’s also fundamental laws of information theory, far stronger than physics theories, since they’re theorems about math. And LLMs can only compress knowledge so far, and we’re about at it now.

Re:Lobbying is corruption on Saturday October 10, 2026 @11:34AM (#50033942)
If Google communicates to Schumer, then do you think Schumer would then sit down and write the policy, knowing very little about it?

In reality, many companies would get Schumer attention on crypto, and other regulators, the companies would use their expertise to craft sensible policy, politicians would work with that, run it by lots of other groups and politicians, and if it passed enough tests along the way, it might come up as a bill.

It’s not like Google, or any company, likely can just put in ludicrous things, and use wizard powers to make laws. If a company breaks trust, they will lose the ability to get ears. If politicians, or parties lose trust, they get unelected. So, in order to have sane laws regarding any complex topic requires huge specialist inputs, and those specialists became expert by working in that field.

There’s simply not a pool of such people sitting around unassociated waiting to write laws to specifications of random internet people.

Re:Lobbying is corruption on Saturday October 10, 2026 @11:24AM (#50033861)
Yes, absolutely. Simply check. They’ve spent far over a billion over the past decade directly to politicians, PACs, etc. The teachers union is the largest union in the US, and I think even the world.

Simply google the question, plenty of sources.

I can no data even close to your 50x claim. The most toll intensive states ($ of toll per mile driven) don’t even break even on annual maintenance costs, much less initial outlay for the roads. The gap is covered in other state and federal programs.

So, care to cite the states where the tollways paid for the road costs by 50x?

People don’t randomly sell, so treating all dates as a uniform random variable makes no sense to complain about.

Not understanding how investing works doesn’t make everyone else behave under your misunderstandings.

They invest because they’re smarter than cherry picking outliers to base behavior on, like you are. They have empirically done well as a group over standard timeframes.
If you’re claiming the merger that created Enron is the sole or majority of its fraud 16 years later, then explain the vast majority of other mergers that weren’t fraud.

Or are you claiming anything that was a merger ends like Enron?

Income at all levels of labor has vastly increased over 80 years, more so than likely any country on earth, and certainly for any population this large, so something in your choice of words doesn't match reality.
None of those were the result of mergers.
Fighting for free roads is a sure way to have crap or no roads to a lot of places. If you (or any consumer) gets value from there bring roads, then you should pay some for that value. It’s not subsidizing the super rich - sounds like you want others to subsidize you.
> Consumers shouldn't pay anything at all for roads.

If consumers get value from roads they should pay. Consumer road damage is certainly measurable, since plenty of roads disallow heavy trucks.

It’s silly to claim because one can see a billboard that the billboard would subsidize the value a consumer derives from roads. Putting up a billboard didn’t cause consumer utility of having a road to become zero. And private property owners are generally free to put up plenty of things, billboards included, without this odd request they subsidize others that look onto their property.

Re:The Legend of von Neumann [pdf] on Sunday October 04, 2026 @07:47PM (#49959146)
No one ever thought Ramanujuan a crackpot. Hardy immediately realized his genius and brought him to the UK.
Re:The Legend of von Neumann [pdf] on Friday October 02, 2026 @11:13PM (#49941081)
The problem is the actual crackpots outnumber hidden gems by many orders of magnitude, so wasting time trying to sift through the noise is a losing proposition.

And I don’t know many, if any, examples of people received as crackpots that later were considered genius. At worst genius takes a little time to be recognized, which is a situation far more common.

Making up more items?

You claimed "No I'm not conflating them, I see the NYPD tags on the map flying directly over Brooklyn to their helicopter base 5+ times a day. [0]", as if this proved your point.

I posted a demonstrable source for those 5+ tags, which can be double checked by looking at NYPD flight logs. You realize there are public flight logs, right?

Now you'll tell us the secret magic helicopters are not logged and these tags are not from the drones, or yet another round of disprovable angry claims.

Those tags are far more likely the NYPD drone-as-first-responder flights they do launch quite often. The FAA gave NYPD beyond line of sight drone operations with NYPD ADS-B tags. [1]

Instead of misunderstanding things, assuming it supports your preconceived beliefs, then making further unwarranted assumptions about others to reinforce your misguided world view, simply google to see if those tags are helicopters.

Don’t project your incorrect beliefs onto others.

[1] https://www.skydio.com/blog/faa-issues-revolutionary-approva...

Re:We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians on Saturday September 26, 2026 @10:35PM (#49862781)
> nobody who has ever achieved notoriety in any intellectual field ever did it to "meet demand."

John von Neumann generated a prodigious amount of math specifically to meet demand, on demand, under govt contracts, world changing things. Some of it was fundamental in getting computers into use.

Newton (and Leibniz) invented calculus to address current astronomical problems, a contemporary demand.

Fourier invented Fourier series to meet the demand of engineering heat flow.

Heisenberg, Dirac, Born, etc. invented the formalisms of quantum mechanics specifically to meet the demand of experimental methods.

Many of these were paid by contemporaneous need to solve significant commercial value problems.

Theres tons of counter examples to your claim. So much so it’s hard to believe you’d make such a claim.

Re:AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0? on Friday September 25, 2026 @11:00AM (#49845635)
> Exactly!

Read my post above. It’s trivial to ask Google if these are the same, and they’re not.

Re:AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0? on Friday September 25, 2026 @10:58AM (#49845602)
> A hash is as secure as its _strongest_ entropy source provided that none of the inputs can snoop on the others

A hash is as secure as the entropy used to make it. That entropy is the sum of the entropy sources, if they do not share information. If they do, and you can accurately model the partials, then you can compute how much entropy is in the result. Using the entropy from a pool reduces it, and over time the input sources are analyzed to know if there’s enough in the pool to perform a requested operation.

Has no one in this tread actually learned basic information theory at the level of Cover?

> This is superstitious nonsense….

You are confusing entropy with complexity. Simply google “ what is the difference between entropy and complexity in cryptography” and it clearly shows you’re confused.

Entropy is the unpredictability in a source of information. How hard it is to exhaust a space by attack is complexity. These are fundamentally different concepts in both information theory and cryptography.

Lots of microcontrollers have MMUs, such as some Esp32, some microchip flavors, some stms, nxp, ti siara, renesas and Infineon flavors.

So I wouldn’t claim this is a hard and fast rule. Lots of mcu lines have added mmus on some variants.

Re:AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0? on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @07:18PM (#49809617)
> The nice thing about a secure XOF is that it doesn’t matter if the entropy given to the XOF is less than perfect. If an XOF is given 10 different sources of entropy, and only one of them is secure, the XOF will remain secure

Secure is not a binary state; not understanding basic information theory and how entropy evolves is fatal.

This right here shows 100% why no one should trust you or your code. You have a seriously fundamental misunderstanding of entropy or what the Bernstein blog post (and it is a blog post, even if it’s Bernstein) states.

His post states, correctly, that a hash is as secure as its weakest entropy source. Adding more bad ones does not strengthen it. He doesn’t say you can ignore the entropy per source, and simply hope one “is secure,” whatever the heck that even means.

Entropy of a source is a number, often in units of bits/sec (or nats or Harley’s or some rate for differential entropy). It’s most definitely doesn’t even make sense to say “one is secure”. That’s a nonsensical phrase.

If you do not correctly know the entropy bit rate of all your inputs, and very importantly cross correlations, you cannot know if you have enough entropy accumulated for an operation, which is then used up; you cannot make downstream claims about security. That you’re so incredibly lax and naive and state the opposite of reality shows the lack of crypto skill. This type of misunderstanding is why there’s still groups hiring people like me to break systems: tons are implemented very poorly, leave holes from poor entropy, timing attacks, power attacks, glitch attacks, etc. depending on the system.

The very least anyone designing such things should know about information theory is a solid understanding of the book by Cover, then stack on top significant knowledge about the physical systems used under the software and have detailed models for them.

This is why people should be skeptical about this stack.

Re:AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0? on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @08:52AM (#49800443)
XOF correctly implemented doesn’t ensure you haven’t made other mistakes, such as using entropy sources correctly, doing needed math correctly to avoid any entropy bias, etc. etc….

You’re correct about black and white thinking. Then you invoke multiple straw men in this thread to defend that you’ll roll your own.

Disclaimer: I’ve been hired for multiple DoD projects to break hardware and software security systems, and I nearly always succeed, because so many people (and companies) roll their own.

And you apparently only read the title and ignored the content.

It’s also poor reasoning to you only pick one thing you think supports your view, and ignore vastly more things not supporting it, all from the same useful criteria.

Now if only you’d carefully read the report you chose, and spend equal time looking at ample presented evidence, you’d develop a more accurate understanding.

And on that page govts have tried and failed at it also. Thinking the current prices are the result of fixing and not insane demand is surely going to lose in court. It’s trivial to show massive demand, and thus production line changes, as the driving forces here.

If you look over all such lawsuits, they extremely rarely succeed.

Google scholar has a flood of papers showing LLM diminishing returns on pretty much every facet

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C23&q=llm...

Older »