andyjohnson0

Seems likely that its either a capability demonstration for a future extortion campaign, or some kind of state-level hybrid warfare. In the latter case the obvious culprit is Russia, to create fear and social disruption.

Or another ai has broken containment and has a fixation about freezers...

There's a thread on pprune about this incident. The usual mix of informed and less-informed speculation.

https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/674728-lear-60-...

You'll only get that option on the Premium tier.

I appreciate that the OP is asking hn, but I'm curious sbout selection bias here.

I'm writing slightly less code thsn I used to - but only slightly. The difference is mostly tests and refactors and semi-boilerplate stuff. I still live in an IDE.

So am I just a dinosaur at this point, and the entire sw industry has just relocated to agent harnesses and software factories? Because I see comments on hn quite regularly where people claim not to have written code for six months or whatever, and give the impression that traditional coding is anachronistic.

Or are there, in fact, plenty of (very many) people outside the hn bubble who are "still writing code" for various reasons - and who probably will be for quite some time?

I disagree. I'm not a Trekkie, but the character was imbued with sufficient depth, by the writers as well as Stewart's performance, that I think the article works.

This is why engineers (including devs) need mentors at all stages in their careers, not just when they're junior. And managers, who assign tasks and determine compensation, mostly can't be mentors.

> but now nuclear power is too expensive compared with renewables plus solar

Brit here: we need renewables and storage and nuclear.

> compulsory wind farms on golf courses owned by foreign billionaires

We need this x100.

quango = Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation.

My own gp's practice has been seriously affected by this business failure.

It doesn't make any difference to the agent. I still drop in a "please" occasionally, and less frequently a "nice work". Partly out of habit, but mostly because I don't want the way I communicate with agents to affect the way I communicate with humans on Teams or in emails. Or on HN.

So it burns a few more tokens. Don't really care.

This isn't a place for hosting your blog posts. Instead why not put this on an external site, expand on it a bit, and submit a link? Thats how HN works.

How does this system of private competing water companies actually work? Do they each have their own exclusive reservoirs and mains transmission system and water pipes right to their customer's houses/premises? And their own exclusive sewerage systems and treatment plants?

Or are they just reselling access to some ahared legacy infrastructure? In which case any "competition" is very likely an illusion.

There's "pull to refresh", and a refresh button on the "three dots" menu. Hardly seems like a reason to abandon Firefox.

> Why so negative? History has shown that a very potent tool can improved and changed industry entirely for the better.

AI isn't like any other historical tool or technology. Its qualitatively different. Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do. While also mimicking innate human characteristics like complex language.

Its the rate of change.

the purpose is: look at me everyone look at me

On the face if it, the big leap here was Claude autonomously envisioning, and deciding to pursue, the "ancient prng + date" angle - - rather than working backwards from the premise of deliberately weakened seeds or some other popular theory. To me that shows creativity, and modelling of the situation and method of the people at the NSA.

So two questions:

1. TFA mentions the "humourous phrase hash" theory, but Claude's trajectory seems to be a long way from that. To what extent was Claude prompted in the ultimately successful direction?

2. Whats with all the "hmm..." in the internal reasoning process log? Do models really do that? And if so, why? Some weird emergent language thing, or just mimicry?

Nobody needs that kind of acceleration on a car designed for use on public roads, and anyone who uses that capability in the vicinity of other people or vehicles deserves to be arrested. Its just criminally dangerous.

Like the Cybertruck, this is just the Musk "fuck you, get out of my way" worldview realised as metal and plastic.

Thats certainly true, and I enjoy spending time in such places when I can. I was backpacking in Knoydart and on Skye this past summer -- and in many places there was no phone reception, and I was several hours walk from the nearest habitation or road, with nobody knowing quite where I was.

As for "small island" - I was trying to make a point about the size of the uk on a global scale, and compared to vast places like the Argentinian campo. But perhaps "island group" or "archipelago" would have been a better choice.

The distances and remoteness mentioned in the article are impressive. And is the human need and ingenuity for communication. It reminded me of William Gibson's description of 1950s farmers in the US using metal wire fences as radio antennas.

In the 70s and 80s (and probably before) in the UK, the BBC used to broadcast occasional "sos messages" [1] prior to the main daily news summaries on FM radio - for people who were away from home and, for whatever reason, uncontactable. They usually related to a relative being dangerously ill. I remember hearing them on my parent's car radio on summer camping trips.

Obviously the uk is a small and quite densely populated island but, without two way personal communications, some needs were similar to those described in the article. It changed a lot of things.

[1] https://swling.com/blog/2012/09/radio-4-and-now-an-urgent-so...

On reflection I think you're correct

> Almost a third of our source code was comments. I deleted all of them and asked an AI agent to build the same features on both versions of the codebase, three times each. The code it wrote was just as good with or without comments.

Seems like this might be another example of The Bitter Lesson [1]:

"The bitter lesson is the observation in artificial intelligence that, in the long run, general approaches that scale with available computational power tend to outperform ones based on domain-specific understanding because they are better at taking advantage of the falling cost of computation over time."

AIs don't need comments that are designed to work around human cognitive limitations. They're quite happy to just crunch the code and extract the meaning.

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

In 1970 the UK domestic electricity grid and generating plants had been state owned since 1948, and was basically run by civil servants. This lasted until 1990-91 when it was all privatised by the Thatcher and Major governments (both Conservative).

Now in 2026 the main generators are EDF (French state owned), RWE (German), and Scottish Power (Spanish owned). These companies tend not to publish executive pay, but back in 2012 the CEO of EDF in the UK was being paid £1.2 million a year.

I would submit that all this has some bearing on why the prices have gone up.

I don't see any evidence for that. Just people saying it.

> Did the link say they were? That seems like a red herring.

By "here" I meant posts on this thread, not in the content of the article.

There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage being posted here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to welcome improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and (neutral?) increased importing of electricity. Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies.

I also wonder what the contribution of domestic solar and on-site industrial generation is? I'm a dev in a large manufacturing business and two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells which power a lot of our operations. Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too. Is that counted as generation in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand?

(Edit: added "being posted", "welcome" and "(neutral?)" for clarity)

Agreed. The business is dissolved, assets confiscated, and the board goes to jail.

And to preempt the inevitable comments about what happens to the employees: anyone who works for an oil or gas (or tobacco or social media or junk food, etc) company who's culture is so broken that it produces such planet- or society-wrecking egregious behaviour, is part of the problem and they know it. Find a new job doing something constructive.

Freelance careers/unemployment counsellor for devs.

Handyman? One of my neighbours used to be a senior sales director. Now he paints fences and assembles flatpack furniture. He seems happy enough.

Or get out of town, buy a shack with some land, try live cheapy off grid, wreck my body hacking turnips from the frozen waterlogged ground.

Retire, try to live off an inadequate pension, hang out in the local public library where its usually warm.