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aeturnum

Re:StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month on Thursday October 29, 2026 @02:18PM (#50293563)
As someone who only ever asked or answered a couple of questions, Stack Overflow has been on the way out for close to a decade by now. The website never (from my inattentive perspective) did anything about the key problems of a question site:

- If something was marked as a dupe by mods, that was it. There was no way to suggest that a dupe was marked in error on your question or others.

- The site had no standard mechanisms for separating questions in time or by version. So many answers for "python 3" that answered for, like, 3.8 or whatever. Same for operating system and basically any other contextual category.

- Following answers was incredibly inelegant. Would you like to know if the chosen answer switches? What about if there is a new answer for the next version of the software? Trick question we don't track software versions!

- The community had an extremely high learning curve, I think in part because the site had so few affordances. It was very easy to be rude on accident and it left a bad taste in ones mouth.

- The site decided to entirely ignore meta organization. Do you want a category of questions that are kinda silly? What about separating highly complex questions or debugging particular errors from general questions about how to use the tools? Nope, we're not going to do any of that.

I am shocked it lasted as long as it did.

Re:What's Getting Pwned on Thursday October 22, 2026 @11:56AM (#50197162)
I don't understand the categorization for incidents. This signal vulnerability[1] is listed as "Live" and "ongoing" but was patched over a month ago (just announced today). If an incident with no known exploits is "ongoing" 1.5 months after the patch is released, when would it be over?

[1] https://pwn.watch/i/signal-ringrtc-cve-2026-113380

Re:Most advice is right for the person giving it on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @12:50PM (#50184007)
I mean, these things are multimodal. For most people it's easier to cut enough calories to lose weight than it is to exercise enough to lose weight (though both are physically possible). But, of course, if you are losing weight you should be exercising! It's the best way to retain muscle mass, which is vital for health.

I am sure that when I've lost weight it's more the portion control than the exercise - but the exercise is a critical component. When you go from being sedentary to doing even casual exercise you feel better and get more energy - which you can then use to be more active. Without some kind of virtuous lifestyle-change cycle you are likely not going to shift your body mass, kind of no matter what ultimately puts you over the edge.

I agree the client is pretty scuffed, but I don't understand your problems:

> I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options.

I am not sure exactly what you mean by "top bars" but my two top sets of menus are "Steam View Friends Help" and "STORE LIBRARY COMMUNITY <USERNAME>" which seem quite different.

> The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.

You can go to the store page from the library! Why would you assume you should re-explain the game to a player? I think reminding you of when you did things in the game makes a lot of sense. I wish it listed playtime and not just achievements.

> Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family.

I do think their DLC display is bad, but it's far from impossible. Properties -> DLC shows you all your DLC and which is enabled. Also clicking on the DLC tab does show you which you own (and all the ones you own will be enabled by default).

Like I said, I think steam has a lot of problems, but I don't understand your complaints at all. I would complain about the awful performance of a webview, the annoying behavior of store pages, the foolishness of the "All" tab on communities that mixes different kinds of content in one place but it will never change because people can't find it otherwise, etc.

It's "sort of" a dark forest problem because admitting you're using AI is socially risky. Indeed, this entire thread is built on the idea that Epic's lazy use of AI has been bested by the savvy & righteous programmers at Valve[1].

So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.

[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI

Good and cheap is probably still RTL-SDR and HackRF. Both solid at what they do. If you want a similar thing from a different maker you can check out the sbitx-v3 [1] (official platform of HERMES[2]). For more money there are a bunch of options and I don't have any personal experiece with the platforms, but I see people recommend bladerf or kracken. Reddit's /r/sdr is a great place for info.

[1] https://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/sbitx-v3/

[2] Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49789228

Re:Thinking will become a hobby on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:04PM (#50063697)
Yah - people get fooled by the drop in the relative percentage of the population when the absolute numbers are not actually changing that much. What is real is that the structure of overall society does change - food production becomes less of a concern and people shift their focus to producing other things - but it's wrong to imagine that food production is less important. It just becomes relatively well optimized and less economically productive (i.e. lower ROI for capital). You still need the food just as much.
Re:Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers on Monday October 12, 2026 @01:47PM (#50060067)
The Spring Engine also has a modern re-implementation of TA called Tech Annihilation[1]. This version seems more focused on a faithful reimplementation, which I think the general TA community abandoned long ago because the actual OG TA is not a very well balanced game.

[1] https://github.com/techannihilation/TA

Re:Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers on Monday October 12, 2026 @01:44PM (#50060001)
I am pretty sure their first axiom is "this is only interesting to people who know TA already" and, as you suggest, that's probably correct. There's no reason to annoy your primary audience in trying to make your hobby project accessible to people who are not interested in it.
Re:The Mathocalypse on Thursday October 08, 2026 @03:30PM (#50010832)
> Some can be simplified too if this can be done without loss of fidelity.

If you don't understand why the paper is in its current form, how do you know what changes would damage the fidelity for the AI? I think your example of alien knowledge is misleading because it suggests the aliens don't need to understand the info - but in this case we intend to keep using AIs to expand this work. So if you transform it into something that humans think makes more sense without understanding why it's in a form that we hate now - you risk losing something in the form that you don't understand.

Re:Anthropic bans 'abusive or cruel behavior' towards Claude on Thursday October 08, 2026 @03:25PM (#50010777)
I think what I am saying is quite different from that, but you're free to do whatever you like.
Re:Anthropic bans 'abusive or cruel behavior' towards Claude on Thursday October 08, 2026 @02:35PM (#50010010)
I am not representing Anthropic's position I am representing mine. I couldn't care less about their policy. As I said be mean to LLMs if you want, I just don't think it's good for you.
Re:Anthropic bans 'abusive or cruel behavior' towards Claude on Thursday October 08, 2026 @02:33PM (#50009989)
I think you might be interested to look into studies on implicit bias and how being exposed to representations and behavior patterns will get into your subconscious. No matter your intent. Also - it's not like you're going to be hypnotized - I just think it's preferrable to build your ability to write directly and politely.
Re:Anthropic bans 'abusive or cruel behavior' towards Claude on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:33PM (#50008982)
No, but you are building neural pathways. It's not that it's immoral to be mean to matrix multiplication. It's that getting into the habit of communicating rudely and without considering how your words may impact someone will get you in the habit of communicating that way in general. Ofc it's not "wrong" to talk that way to a machine, but why build the habit?
I can't provide any code samples, but this only strikes me as medium-cursed as far as python code goes. That stuff can get nasty! Once a team realizes they can modify anything at runtime things can go bad quite quickly.

Nice hack for maintaining old behavior tho!

Re:The Mathocalypse on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @04:54PM (#49998675)
You can certainly do that - but it's quite the break from tradition to release a paper in the state described. Why they did is a really interesting question! It may be that AI math requires approaches that humans don't find intuitive and what you are describing is actually counter productive (because, in summarizing the work in a way humans understand, you're removing the context an AI would use to further the work an AI did). It also might be that OpenAI could have done that and chose not to - or maybe they tried and this was the best they could do. No matter what I don't think anything about how to react to a paper being released in this state is obvious.
I also do not use them - but there are lots of bits of the OS that I don't use and AI does not feel different to me. Given its many uses and that there are people who are enthusiastically adopting it I think adding it makes sense and you can't totally remove most other OS features so it feels odd to expect it here.
I am not sure what point you think you are taking. I have no idea if what I said based on the text of this law applies to the text of a different law. I am having trouble following your argument (especially the "legalese notwithstanding" as my point is based on the legal text and I don't understand the purpose of a conversation around 'is this legal' outside of legal text) - could you say more?
A sibling comment includes an important rider to the provision: "...in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person." If you wrote this in a google doc, it almost certainly would not qualify as a threat under this statute. Even though google docs, like LLM chats, have administrative override and you could look at their contents - you would not expect either to be "viewed by another person."

IMO I do not think this is a grey area and it's legal to tell a LLM you want to kill someone. It's certainly not a "threat" like you might send to another person, though it may end up being evidence of conspiracy or premeditation. I suspect we would be well served to, after a few years of experience, put together some laws governing when LLM chats must be made available to authorities.

It is very interesting that the LLM responses to these lines - the context around what she is saying - is not in the article. I suspect, as is the case in many instances where LLMs are involved in violent planning, that the LLM was urging this behavior on. Basically entrapment - you are encouraged by a robot to become more violent and vindictive and then when you do you are handed over to police.

Crazy! I can't imagine what WoW would be like with bots! Another new frontier broken open for AI lol.

Joking aside it is interesting to see that a general model can adapt to a world like this, but I think the contrast between the model being "naive" and then needing to build special-purpose code to allow it to interact somewhat begs the question of the experiment. Customization will always be needed so how interesting is it that an un-customized model can play with a highly customized harness?

You could! But this generates power and has the same benefit. Also you do not have to just do one. Plant trees in areas with denser populations and use solar panels when there are fewer people around and beautification is less of a concern.
Re:Aging may be a program, not a breakdown on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @02:04PM (#49805571)
Naked mole rats are social animals that live in colonies. There are differences of course, but I do not think the evidence suggests that aging is a 'requirement' for complexity. The simplest explanation is that aging is an evolutionary adaption that gives species that age an advantage. Human cells obviously possess the potential to persist past their programmed deaths - that's what cancer is. So I think it's obvious there are no biological limits to us stopping our physical age at whatever stage we want - but I'm equally sure that would involve changes to the experience of being human we may not like (perhaps being in the body of a 20 year old means being in the mind of a 20 year old, for instance).
Re:Aging may be a program, not a breakdown on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @01:06PM (#49804565)
There are animals that don't "age"[1] so of course it's programmed. There's a balance between how often you want to recombine genetics and how long you want to be able to remember. It seems like a better system would have humans decline differently (i.e. no dementia) but having people grow old is almost certainly beneficial to the species.

[1] Their risk of death does not increase after reaching adulthood. I.e. every year after adulthood has the same risk of unexpected death. Humans and other animals that age have their risks of death climb in "old" age.

In practice very little. The FCC tends to focus on long-lived stationary stations ("pirate" radio) with their few enforcement actions. That said it's important to remember that radio transmissions can easily be tracked to their source (doubly so with drones) and you should plan for that eventuality.

My sense is that at most you will be yelled at by HAMs - unless you are actually disrupting emergency communications. Ensuring radios can be used in emergencies is why licensing exists at all and people take ensuring it can be used for that pretty seriously (for good reason).

Re:Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees on Monday September 21, 2026 @02:22PM (#49791217)
I think you should check out the kinds of fees they call out as no longer allowed[1]. They include things like: a fee to "perform landlord duties" and a fee to "access your mailbox." I absolutely think it should be illegal for your landlord to hold your mail hostage.

That said, this generally allows optional fees - they just need to be disclosed, have clear opt-in and out, and cannot be profit centers for the landlord.

[1] https://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=15702946&GUID=...

Re:Attention is all you have on Monday September 21, 2026 @12:43PM (#49789678)
On the social science side, The Ecology of Attention[1] talks about attention as an ecosystem and the final economic frontier for capitalism. It envisions a world where every moment of our attention is fought over by commercial entities, which feels pretty prescient at the moment.

[1] https://www.perlego.com/book/1536286/the-ecology-of-attentio...

Re:Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously on Monday September 14, 2026 @02:33PM (#49701703)
It is pretty funny launch when your longest-term example is losing about $3 for every $1 of revenue. Though I guess the industry standard is to lose money on AI so they're in good company.
Ultimately I don't think you will ever be able to rely on technology to validate authenticity . Even if you had a live human expert checking you off, you could still feel you didn't really give your all even though they were satisfied. There is no such thing as being able to objectively verify that you fully engaged in the spirit of a thing.

I also think your thinking on tick marks is backwards. If you're struggling to "fully do" a goal, you should absolutely be giving yourself tick marks. That way the desire to to maintain the streak helps keep you in the rhythm. Habit trackers aren't trying to "perfectly record your activities" - they use psychology to push you into building a habit. Once you get into the stage where the habit is established but you want to push yourself - then you get into detailed food and workout journaling that will let you track intensity over time. But if you aren't making it to the gym the intensity doesn't matter yet.

Re:Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @05:38PM (#49528603)
I have a Dyson SV22 v15. It was expensive and it doesn't have enough suction for carpets (we have a plug-in for that) but it's much easier to use and everyone in the house prefers it. It doesn't feel particularly high quality and it's possible I could have gotten a shark or similar for much less, but my roommate who moved in with a shark used my vacuum instead so make of that what you will. But after four years of constant use it's never needed a repair and seems to work about as well as when we got it (as long as you clear it out like any other vacuum).
Re:1Password Supports the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @03:31PM (#49526885)
I think you should familiarize yourself with the wikipedia definition of the phrase[1]. It may be helpful to read some examples[2], many of which involve exclusively forced removal.

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

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

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