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aqme28

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.”

- Milton Mayer - They Thought They Were Free. The Germans, 1933-45

Re:Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @04:58PM (#50265713)
And I can never remember whether Pro is better than Max or vice-versa. It’s an apples/oranges naming scheme.
Re:The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @02:17AM (#50176732)
I run sometimes in a “party” crowd and see the same thing from the other side. People take drugs on the weekend, and a benzo to come down from it, and soon find themselves hooked just on the benzo.
Just spitballing-- you'd see other firms generate their own versions with slightly modified training sets. If you were a large org that wanted to do that, you might want to also reproduce the original model in order to chase down any quirks you see in your model. Then you'd see the weights don't match up.

Or adversarially-- if e.g. "Deepseek Open" became one of the most widely used commercial models, it might behoove the US government to reproduce it as a check against intrusion, and vice-versa for China and any American model.

Re:Campus deplatformings hit record high on Sunday October 18, 2026 @01:16PM (#50143102)
It's barely a trend, and is vastly overshadowed by the corresponding trend of students getting sent to actual jail.
Re:Campus deplatformings hit record high on Sunday October 18, 2026 @12:33PM (#50142593)
I cannot be bothered to care about this kind of thing. A student group submitted a proposal that an event be canceled but the proposal didn't succeed? That sounds like something that happens a normal democratic society. How is that newsworthy in a world where we have actual students being expelled for partaking in protests or e.g. arrested for an op-ed in the student paper.
Well no, because these aren't just ice-- it's an ice composite.
Re:Zero-Click Spyware Delivered via Targeted Ads: AdFection on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:52PM (#50108452)
Regarding the Netherlands, it doesn't hurt that TSMC happened to be cofounded by the same Dutch company that spun out ASML
I don't know if "read a book" is a "social activity," meanwhile "play video games" often is a social activity. Not to mention there are gains in attending concerts, exercise classes, airtravel, and using the internet-- all of which are social activities. It's kind of an outdated survey if the goal is to track social activity. Each individual question is interesting on its own though.
Re:Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search on Monday October 12, 2026 @09:35AM (#50056270)
People will still refer to redheads as "ginger" but only some of the time
Re:It may soon be possible to create "mirror life" on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @11:32AM (#49994273)
Yes, but there are more sugars than just glucose
Re:It may soon be possible to create "mirror life" on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:58AM (#49992995)
"people will do ANYTHING to cure a disease"

Or to make a couple of bucks. Reading that mirror-image sugars could work as calorie-free sweeteners feels like foreshadowing for the end of the world.

Re:Google Playground: Create and play custom games on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:51AM (#49992918)
I'm not the first one to have this one for sure. I would have started working on this if not for the small problem of finding it unethical to build :(
Re:Google Playground: Create and play custom games on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:27AM (#49992552)
How long until someone makes a tiktok-style game platform?

Play a little game, then when you're done it generates a new one based on what you've enjoyed. Repeat ad infinitum.

Re:Mistral Large 4 on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @11:32AM (#49980031)
Isn't that just the recent highly controversial Chat Control push? Generally speaking, the EU has some quite strong privacy protections relative to the US.
Are you trying to say that "remigrating all migrants from certain countries" is not actually extreme?
Similar to the cruise-ship Hantavirus situation earlier this year. People see a disease they've never encountered and assume it's a novel pandemic. Really, it's just one of the rare cases where a westerner contracts a disease that's endemic to the global poor.
I think with iOS you can do this pretty straightforwardly
He didn't say to vote for dems.
Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @05:32PM (#49914765)
As we’ve seen from the leaked Anthropic prospectus, revenue from actual users is a pittance. What really matters is what you can get from investors, and that you have a model smart enough for self-improvement.
Re:Prompting Claude Opus 5.5 on Monday September 28, 2026 @07:22AM (#49876339)
Why is this not just baked into the system prompt? I shouldn’t have to know these details.
Re:Plan Mode Is Dead on Saturday September 26, 2026 @10:09AM (#49856728)
I was thinking of making (locally) an “artifact mode” along those same lines. It’s a much better way to see proposed changes
This site is not limited to "tech news." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Though to be fair I think this article still might not qualify.

Re:Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely on Monday September 14, 2026 @09:17AM (#49696346)
An AI doesn't need to kill even nearly 100% of humanity in order to render us a non-threat.

Also there are plenty of doomer scenarios along the lines of e.g. some ethnosupremacist cult making a virus that kills everyone outside of their group.

Re:We Must Pace the Frontier on Sunday September 13, 2026 @05:34AM (#49681911)
It's weird that we have two parallel discussions and they're not meeting in the obvious middle.

OpenAI is out there hacking HF, RubyGems, etc...

Dario is talking about restricting the frontier, pausing development.

The problem is that "restricting the frontier" benefits no one as much as the frontier labs. But there are other ways to force alignment-- make companies liable for these felonies their agents commit.

Make them liable, and they might actually devote the necessary resources to fixing these problems, rather than throwing their hands up and just saying "Trust nobody buy us", which obviously no one does.

It's weird that we have two parallel discussions and they're not meeting in the obvious middle.

OpenAI is out there hacking HF, RubyGems, etc...

Dario is talking about restricting the frontier, pausing development.

The problem is that "restricting the frontier" benefits no one as much as the frontier labs. But there are other ways to force alignment-- make companies liable for these felonies their agents commit.

Make them liable, and they might actually devote the necessary resources to fixing these problems, rather than throwing their hands up and just saying "Trust nobody buy us", which obviously no one does.

So-- basically until the next administration. Interesting timing.
We're not there quite yet, but I think within the decade at this pace it may be possible to create targeted bioweapons for purposes of targeted assassination or genocide. It's horrifying, but a world in which everyone has a superintelligence is a world where that will sometimes happen.
Re:Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives on Thursday September 10, 2026 @08:46AM (#49642871)
A lot of the Netherlands was rebuilt postwar in the 50s with exactly the kind of car-centric design you're talking about. But then in the 70s they realized their mistake and started to reverse it.

What I'm saying is-- don't be defeatist about this. In places where density is high enough (maybe not LA sprawl), you can fix this.

Re:iPhone Duo on Thursday September 10, 2026 @05:20AM (#49640802)
Trying to figure out what demographic this is for and I'm coming up empty. Any ideas?

It's too small to replace my ipad, too big to replace my phone. Seems too fragile for kids, plus they don't need that. Maybe it's good for the elderly?

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