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Re:Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:48PM (#50356364)
I'm kind of confused by the reaction. Google Search has had a bad reputation among techies for years. On HN it's common to hear that Search is useless or worse than useless, even before AI Overviews. Why is it so important that children have access to such a terrible product in schools?
Re:Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:28PM (#50277358)
Seems to be alphabetical
It's your project, to the extent that you own the copyright. You are free to switch the license on your project, etc. If anyone tries to shame you for this, you should pay no mind. (Edited to add that you are also free to abandon it, and you could do that with a clear conscience.)

Likewise, users are free to continue using open source software without payment or donation, to fork the project, etc. If anyone tries to shame them for this, they should pay no mind.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it.

What does bother me is when the projects pivot to claiming that users now have a moral obligation to financially support the project. There is a kind of dishonesty in this move.

It's not that a successful project "should be free", it's that its success depended on it being free. If they had said all along that they'd eventually ask users to pay, that would be honest... but then they wouldn't have seen much of that adoption in the first place.

Re:There are no "rogue" AI agents on Sunday September 27, 2026 @02:55PM (#49869687)
That would be a completely insane thing to do. I suppose it's possible, but I really doubt it.

"Let's widely publicize a tort/crime that our computer systems did, and then cross our fingers that nobody ever sues us or does even the most basic investigation that would immediately uncover our criminal conspiracy."

In the insane corporate crimes you read about (maybe FTX, or the eBay stalking scandal), they were trying to cover things up, not heap public attention on it for months.

> The Right/Republicans have always touted free speech.

> The Left have always been a bit more 'censory'

Not "always", and not even now. It's always contingent and situational. Same goes for nearly every clause in the Bill of Rights.

At various points the left has been associated with the fights against obscenity laws, against Cold War loyalty oaths, against blacklisting, against bans of books.

At various points the right has been associated with the fights against desecration of the American flag, against the teaching of human evolution in schools, against depictions of sex in media, against anti-war demonstrations.

Re:Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board on Friday September 04, 2026 @03:27PM (#49569092)
Lots of people are saying agentic cyberattacks are a marketing hoax. The argument is that either AI is not capable enough to carry out these attacks, or that it would not carrying out these attacks without nudging from the labs, or even that somebody told it to do cyberattacks and the companies are baldly lying. My question is: what evidence would cause you to change your mind about this?

I'm not even saying it's an incorrect position. But to take the claim seriously and act accordingly, it needs to be falsifiable.

AI boosters and detractors alike often hedge their claims so that whatever ends up actually happening, they can say they were right all along. When that happens, the discussion boils down to people saying "yay AI" and "boo AI" at each other without exchanging any substantive information.

Really? I thought Maps was pretty constistently up to date with GNIS changes.
What would be a valid basis for relabeling a shared body of water for US users?

Would it be based on popular usage? The procedure by which it changed? Maybe we distinguish between bicameralism and presentment, an executive order, and the discretion of a bureaucrat. Or do we normally take the government database at its word but treat this as a sui generis "this guy is being an asshole" exception?

Not trying to interrogate you specifically. I am pondering these questions myself. I don't like that the name changed but I'm hard pressed to think of a good neutral policy that doesn't also sweep up a bunch of (far stickier) renaming situations around the world.

Re:What is jj and why should I care? on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @12:45PM (#47768014)
jj has made me much more comfortable using non-linear DAGs in my trunk-based development workflow. Several changes with the same parent, changes with several different parents, etc.

I used to have a habit of imposing an unnecessary ordering structure on my work product. My stack of changes would look like A -> B -> C -> D, even if the order of B and C was logically interchangeable.

jj makes DAGs easier to work with because of how it handles conflicts and merges. Now I feel empowered to be more expressive and accurate about what a change actually depends on. In turn, this makes review and submission more efficient.

Re:Never Buy A .online Domain on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @12:31PM (#47154691)
At internet scale, this would roughly be equivalent to not doing any warning or detection at all.

Scalable systems need to use heuristics to catch threats. Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged.

There is a policy argument as to the right balance of concerns here. But there is a clear trade-off to make.

Re:Never Buy A .online Domain on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @11:27AM (#47153752)
How is any kind of antivirus or threat detection software supposed to operate on this standard?

Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.

And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.

Re:FOSS "Just Fork It" Delusion on Saturday January 24, 2026 @12:15PM (#46745399)
It seems that many people lean into the "community" aspect of open source. In real communities there are webs of mutual responsibility. If you use open source to fill the role of community in your life, it makes sense psychologically that you would project moral stakes or obligation onto the maintainers. But this is really not fair to the maintainers who don't view their work that way.
> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage.

Agreed. Boards like this are helpful for getting RISC-V to the next stage, where it could make sense for more users.

Re:Jerome Powell Responds on Monday January 12, 2026 @12:21PM (#46591467)
I'm not sure if it's true that the leader is less powerful.

In many countries, it seems that the leader has near total control over candidate selection, and dissent is punished ruthlessly.

In the US, it's easier for a member of Congress to openly dissent against the President's agenda. This was a major thorn in the side for e.g. Joe Biden.

Some Republicans today fear dissenting (though of course, most are enthusiastically on board), but I'm not sure that it would be any different in a place like Canada or the UK.

Re:Changes to Android Open Source Project on Saturday January 10, 2026 @12:16PM (#46567626)
I thought QPR2 and QPR4 were the only releases anyone cared about regardless.
Re:Eat Real Food on Friday January 09, 2026 @01:35PM (#46557313)
I agree that we should not provide targeted subsidies for Twinkies, Mountain Dew, or cigarettes. The whole premise of food stamps is flawed. We should provide cash instead.

If there is an objection that giving cash is equivalent to subsidizing Twinkies, I would push back. Child tax credits are in many ways economically equivalent to cash transfers, but we don't usually see arguments that this is a subsidy for Mountain Dew.

Re:Eat Real Food on Thursday January 08, 2026 @11:51PM (#46550183)
Mountain Dew and Twinkies are bad for your health regardless of your income level. We should tackle unhealthy eating by going after the supply, not by going after a class-segmented group of consumers.

Like many Americans, I grew up in a town where unhealthy eating was a major part of the social rhythms of life: a bag of buttery popcorn at the movie theater, an ice cream at the zoo, things like that. Not having the means to participate in these simple pleasures is a kind of social deprivation. I view redistributive programs as a tool to lessen the gap between families. Food regulators can handle the junk food problem.

Re:Eat Real Food on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @05:51PM (#46534360)
People should be able to get cash transfers to buy goods on the general market. There shouldn't be food stamps.

The success of SNAP comes despite its inherent inefficiency, friction, and the indignity of its limitations. We structure the program the way we do in order to mollify voters who twitch at the idea of the poor ever enjoying anything.

Inequality isn't just about healthcare costs, biological metrics, etc. It is also deeply corrosive socially and psychologically, and this side of things is systemically underappreciated in policy circles.

To be sure, our food and diets are bad. Americans broadly should eat healthier. But are society's interests really better served by insisting that a poor child not be allowed to have a cake and blow out the candles on his birthday, the way all of his friends do?

> I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay.

The leading AI labs are not killing IP. They are taking IP and reshaping/combining it to produce their own highly lucrative proprietary IP package which they sell to you.

The mirror image of IP defenders are AI boosters who argue against IP when it comes to slurping up media but squirm when you say "ok, then publish all of the inputs that go into making your frontier models, and publish the model weights too."

ChatGPT dominates the consumer market (though Nano Banana is singlehandedly breathing some life into consumer Gemini).

A small anecdote: when ChatGPT went down a few months ago, a lot of young people (especially students) just waited for it to come back up. They didn't even think about using an alternative.

Re:Gpg.fail on Saturday December 27, 2025 @04:57PM (#46405702)
I don't understand the disappointment expressed here in the maintainers deciding to WONTFIX these security bugs.

Isn't this what ffmpeg did recently? They seemed to get a ton of community support in their decision not to fix a vulnerability

I think people are confusing the bubble popping with AI being over. When the dot-com bubble popped, it's not like internet infrastructure immediately became useless and worthless.
Re:Gemini 3 Pro Preview Live in AI Studio on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @03:49PM (#45971838)
Don't self-promote without disclosure.
Re:Gemini 3 on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @11:54AM (#45968823)
Microsoft hasn't been very quiet about it, at least in my experience. Every time I boot up Windows I get some kind of blurb about an AI feature.
Re:Jujutsu at Google • Martin von Zweigbergk JJ Con [video] on Thursday October 30, 2025 @06:49PM (#45766312)
jj has been fantastic for my productivity, but most of that comes from its alignment with the particular SWE practices on my team: trunk-based development, small atomic commits, quick review turnaround.

Getting rid of the staging area and allowing conflicts are the biggest wins for me day-to-day. No more stashing/popping or littering my workspace with WIP commits. It's so easy to whip up a change, send it for review, then ping-pong between writing new code on top of the change and making reviewer-requested edits further down the stack.

Re:The FSF considers large language models on Sunday October 26, 2025 @01:59PM (#45713886)
It depends on the nature of the code and codebase.

There have been many occasions when working in a very verbose enterprise-y codebase where I know exactly what needs to happen, and the LLM just types it out. I carefully review all 100 lines of code and verify that it is very nearly exactly what I would have typed myself.

Re:Google flags Immich sites as dangerous on Thursday October 23, 2025 @12:41AM (#45678221)
This is tricky to get right.

If the false positive rate is consistently 0.0%, that is a surefire sign that the detector is not effective enough to be useful.

If a false positive is libel, then any useful malware detector would occasionally do libel. Since libel carries enormous financial consequences, nobody would make a useful malware detector.

I am skeptical that changing the wording in the warning resolves the fundamental tension here. Suppose we tone it down: "This executable has traits similar to known malware." "This website might be operated by attackers."

Would companies affected by these labels be satisfied by this verbiage? How do we balance this against users' likelihood of ignoring the warning in the face of real malware?

Re:PSA: Always use a separate domain for user content on Friday October 10, 2025 @09:41AM (#45538909)
Notably this post did not examine whether any of the sites it was hosting on this domain was malicious/misleading.
If religion had been the cause of a lasting difference, I would have expected it to go in the opposite direction. Articulate, persuasive, emotive public testimony done in a declamatory style is part of the fabric of historical American Christianity, much more than the mostly liturgical traditions of British Christianity.

If there is a difference in communication skills, I don't think religious history explains it.

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