chromacity

If that book was titled "hey mentally ill person, you should kill yourself", and if I was handing it out in front of a clinic, then yes, I'd probably bear some blame.

Normal, well-adjusted people have genuine difficulty understanding the boundaries of this tech specifically because it's designed to be sycophantic and human-like. They ask AI for life and career advice, use it for therapy, ask it to interpret dreams, develop romantic relationships with AI "girlfriends", etc. I had two friends who believed they are "exploring the frontiers of science" with ChatGPT while spiraling into the depths of quantum multidimensional gobbledygook.

I'll give you that some on this is on us because we just don't know how to deal with a "human-shaped" conversation partner that isn't human and has no trouble praising Hitler if you prompt it the right way. But if you're building a billion- or trillion-dollar empire on top of it, you don't get to wash your hands clean.

Public schools are public schools. They're more or less compulsory and are just meant to try and get you to a point where you can contribute meaningfully to the society.

Princeton is very much optional and is a school for future elites. They're supposed to produce CEOs, politicians, and Nobel prize winners. So the standards should be different.

Of course, expectations are a part of the problem. Many kids go to Princeton or Stanford or MIT because they had wealthy parents who really wanted their kids to go there. And many of these kids are mostly interested in computer games, weed, and the opposite sex. A combination of unmotivated students and high academic standards lead to predictable outcomes.

But that's precisely the evolution we've seen in the past 20+ years. For the sake argument, let's say that Fox News started it by more overtly embracing a specific political alignment for stories and opinion programming. Then, MSNBC noticed and went the other way round. Then, "new age" outlets such as Breitbart News and HuffPo took that to its logical conclusion, not even pretending to describe reality and just focusing on portraying the other side as evil and dumb.

The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.

I continue to be impressed by our collective willingness to engage with obvious AI slop, as long as it also talks about AI. Sincere question for any of the nearly 300 folks who argue with the point presented in the article: why? The author couldn't be bothered to present their case, so they probably don't care about ours. They just want traffic and search ranking.

Is it just that the subject line alone is a springboard for casual discussion? If so, maybe that's fine, but then, it feels like we'd be better off cultivating these discussions as "ask HN" posts instead of boosting this kind of web content.

The usual explanation in these threads are "chargebacks", but come on. Payment processors could deal with chargebacks and disputes just fine. They suck for the seller, not the credit card company.

What US companies are afraid of more is PR and regulatory risk. Zelle has no chargeback process, but still bans the sale of automatic knives, fireworks, ammo, and firearm parts. Venmo bans a nebulous category of "products that present a risk to consumer safety". You better not be buying any vintage lawn darts for your collection.

The chargeback rate on knives or firearm optics is probably not any higher than on anything else. What's higher is the likelihood of a headline along the lines of "kid dead / injured because of Paypal". And so, we end up with digital payment processors as the arbiters of morality.

If humans can find bugs, why can't humans write flawless code?

Whatever the answer to that conundrum might be, LLMs are trained on these patterns and replicate them pretty faithfully.

My reaction to the first demo (recipe) is that it was slower than typing the same thing on your keyboard.

The second demo seems to be a wash: there's no time saved in saying "move this" versus "move crab". And an app-specific contextual menu would probably be faster.

The third demo doesn't seem to warrant the use of a pointer at all, since there is only one way to interpret the prompt.

None of this means that this approach will not be successful, but there's a reason why so many attempts to revolutionize user interfaces ended up going nowhere. Talking to your computer was always supposed to be the future, but in practice, it's slower and more finicky than typing.

In fact, the only new UI paradigm of the past 28+ years appears to have been touchscreens and swipe gestures on phones. But they are a matter of necessity. No one wants to finger-paint on a desktop screen.

The main thrust behind their foray into hardware was that they feared being cut off. Whoever controls the terminal has the power to push users toward their own platforms (Bing, Microsoft 365, etc), and I guess they could see the writing on the wall and wanted to have a platform they control.

As for this project, I think part of it is just the conclusion of internal power plays between Chrome and Android. The other half is probably the same fear as before: if Microsoft puts their own AI closer to the user, Google will have a hard time keeping up. So the best defense is to have your own "AI-first" OS.

Keep in mind that Microsoft doesn't need to win to hurt Google's bottom line. For example, if Bing captures 5% of search through OS- and browser-bundling strategies, that's still a 5% that Google can't have.

I think this is an odd article. It mixes together a variety of technologies that have little in common (gas discharge tubes, CRTs). It doesn't really say anything about the operation of vacuum tubes, their advantages, or disadvantages. And doesn't even really support its own thesis. The reign of vacuum tubes lasted for less than the reign of the transistor and is in no way unusual in the world of electronics.

There are quite a few interesting stories to tell here. Probably the most interesting one is that transistors still underperform vacuum tubes in many respects that would matter to purists, but that it just doesn't matter because we learned to compensate for it. Well, except for niche audiophile audiences who don't believe in negative feedback or digital signal processing and want a supremely linear amplifying component... that they then connect to op-amps, DACs, and ADCs on both sides because that's the only practical way to do it, but there's a performative tube somewhere in between.

Another cool story: there were some "integrated circuit" vacuum tubes!

> I wonder what gives them that "high confidence", as opposed to this being just a traditional zero-day?

Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft are a trio of companies that get to see most of what's going on the internet. I imagine that if they see you attacking them, they can work back from that and get remarkably far, even against sophisticated actors. If it's their LLM, they presumably keep transcripts. If you searched for the affected API function via a search engine, they almost certainly know. Even if you used a competing search product, you probably went to a site that has Google Analytics. Oh, and one of these companies probably has your DNS lookups. And a good chunk of the world's email traffic. And telemetry from your workstation. And auto-uploaded crash reports... And if it's bad, they can work together behind the scenes to get to the bottom of it.

So, when their threat intel orgs say they have high confidence in something, I'd be inclined to believe it.

> LLMs are really good at translating to different programming languages.

...for which ample training data is available.

> This makes sense, given that they are derived from text translation systems.

...for languages with ample training data available.

Yes, LLMs can combine information in novel ways. They are wonderful in many respects. But they make far more mistakes if they can't lean on copious amounts of training data. Invent a toy language, write a spec, and ask them to use it. They will, but they will have a hard time.

No, come on. Have you really tested all VPNs in 2026 and picked the best one? You're posting 100% AI-slop articles and the internet is already overflowing with this content.

This is an AI-generated article on an obvious spam blog that also features such bangers as "Best VPNs in 2026 for privacy and security", "Best crypto hardware wallets in 2026", etc. I'll still engage because I guess that's what we do on HN right now. If you have a single, stable online identity, it doesn't matter how much noise you inject, simply because you can't avoid linking that identity to yourself - through the social graph, through photos, through interests, etc.

Your best defense is to use stable identities only for the things where keeping a historical record of your interactions is important to you. So sure, your GitHub portfolio (in the pre-LLM era, I guess), your research papers, maybe LinkedIn. But political flame wars on Reddit? Change accounts and delete comments aggressively, the only value of keeping it around is helping the bad guys.

I think some of it is account farming, but some is just people buying wholesale into the idea that if you're not using AI for everything, you're gonna be left behind. On the Kagi Small Web list, there's plenty of hobby blogs that used to be normal pre-2023 and are now obviously LLM-written and AI-illustrated. There's also plenty of people on LinkedIn who post AI slop because they think it helps them build a "professional brand". I even have some distant friends who are using AI for responding to friend & family posts on Facebook just because it makes you seem... smart? engaged? I don't know.

It's actively encouraged by some of the platforms too. In Gmail and Google Docs, you have incessant AI prompts along the lines of "help me write this". I think LinkedIn does the same.

We do precisely the same thing here. Here's a relatively recent post that, to me, seems obviously LLM-written. It just rattles off some management platitudes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913650

It had 639 comments and 866 upvotes. And that's not a one-off.

This is a pedantry for the sake of it. If it's present by default and an attacker can trivially cause it to be loaded, it's the same as "on by default".

You can make precisely the same argument for network services. Who knows, maybe you need telnet and UUCP and NFS and ftpd running on your system?... why should the distro maintainer decide?

Well, because you probably don't, and it's a security risk, so no need to put millions at risk for the benefit of that one person who wants to tinker with packet radio or whatever. Similarly, it would be prudent for distros to not allow autoloading of modules that are extremely niche while giving a simple way to adjust the settings if you want to. God knows they have plenty of GUI configurators and config files already.

If this indeed works on all major distributions, I just continue to be amazed by how irresponsible the maintainers are. We're talking about optional kernel functionality that's presumably useful to something like <0.1% of their userbase, but is enabled by default?... why?

This feels like the practice of Linux distros back in 1999 when they'd ship default installs with dozens of network services exposed to the internet. Except it's not 1999 anymore.

I'm pretty sure that I've seen more LLM mistakes than coworker mistakes at this point and I'm nowhere closer to enlightenment.

One answer, as another person pointed out, is that LLM mistakes are just different. They are less explicable, less predictable, and therefore harder to spot. I can easily anticipate how an inexperienced engineer is going to mess up their first pull request for my project. I have no idea what an LLM might do. Worse, I know it might ace the first fifty pull requests and then make an absolutely mind-boggling mistake in the 51st one.

But another answer is that human autonomy is coupled to responsibility. For most line employees, if they mess up badly enough, it's first and foremost their problem. They're getting a bad performance review, getting fired, end up in court or even in prison. Because you bear responsibility for your actions, your boss doesn't have to watch what you're up to 24x7. Their career is typically not on the line unless they're deeply complicit in your misbehavior.

LLMs have no meaningful responsibility, so whoever is operating them is ultimately on the hook for what they do. It's a different dynamic. It's probably why most software engineers are not gonna get replaced by robots - your director or VP doesn't want to be liable for an agent that goes haywire - but it's also why the "oh, I have an army of 50 YOLO agents do the work while I'm browsing Reddit" is probably not a wise strategy for line employees.

HN sends tens of thousands of views to AI-farmed articles about why AI is good or why AI is bad. These articles get upvoted to the front page literally every day. They don't say anything interesting, but many of us just like having our existing beliefs recited back to us.

So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down.

There is a huge market for content that makes you feel smart without requiring thinking and makes you busy without requiring work. I'm not not saying it's inherently bad. I'm listening to music on my daily commute and it's the same thing: just enjoyable filler so that you can do something other than getting angry at other drivers. The internet just weaponized the formula, and now AI is the equivalent of nuclear weapons I guess.

Another reason why I often skip them is that for "tech" products, the tours almost never cover how I want to use the product. Instead, they tell me how the vendor wants me to use the product.

Browsers are especially notorious for this. When I get a tour for a new feature, it's almost always just some new, tacked-on junk to disable. "Check out our bundled VPN", "Use Copilot to shop for socks", "You now have more privacy choices" (meaning we opted you into some invasive data-collection feature). I just want to browse the internet.

Every EEPROM is basically that, and they're designed for data retention of around 100 years. I imagine it wouldn't be hard - embed two metal plates in glass?

Why? If you have the money, the equipment, and the climate, what's stopping you from shifting agricultural production from one good to another on any scale you like? It's often as simple as the government saying "you know what, from now on, we're subsidizing beans instead of corn".

Barring some planetary-scale cataclysm, most of Europe and the US are at no real risk of starving. There are other countries that are at a real risk, but the map doesn't make a clear distinction between "red as a matter of convenience" and "red because they physically can't do it".

> This seems like an impossible requirement to meet for landlocked countries.

Why? There's plenty of freshwater fish that are farmed around the world. Trout, tilapia, etc.

> It's not enough just to label a country as producer/not producer for a category but rather whether that production is fully stable and internalized in case of disasters/war.

Conversely, many industrialized and wealthy countries can probably shift their production pretty easily. For example, looks like Hungary is doing well on fruit but not on vegetables. This is probably not because it's hard for them to grow vegetables, just that there's no economic incentive to.

Similarly, the two-way legumes / veggies difference between the US and Mexico probably boils down to free-market economics or government subsidies more than to any real agricultural bottlenecks on either side.

Independent of that, the article is just a summary of a HN thread...

All the other points raised in this thread aside, it seems like an odd thing to benchmark because a significant proportion of ER practice is dealing with emergencies, often accidental injuries. There's not a whole of diagnosing going on if you show up to ER with a gash on your forehead or a missing finger.

I've heard this a number of times, but how do you imagine this working?

For every legitimate case of a "diverse set of viewpoints" on some hot-button political issue, you have hundreds of crackpots and trolls who want to talk about free energy, telekinesis, chemtrails, and so on. Do you really want to have 50 versions of the article on gravity to choose from, most of them abject nonsense? Who gets to choose which one is given more prominence? If they're given equal weight, then the crackpots win the numbers game because there might be only 1-2 articles representing mainstream scientific thought versus dozens of "here's what I came up with in the shower".

I don't disagree that Wikipedia has some regrettable biases, but the solution probably isn't "allow all viewpoints". Look at the thread you're commenting on and the amount of whataboutism from single-issue accounts who seem to argue that the US is no different from murderous dictatorships.

> there's a good chance a nuclear apocalypse is imminent.

Or that an excavator took out some fiber.

For me, before I canceled, about 20% of the weekly "Release radar" list was obvious AI slop, with zero indication that it was happening and no way to opt out.

It probably depends on which discovery channel you're using and whether the recommendation algorithm has you pegged as someone willing to try new / less popular bands. But it's definitely an issue on the platform. I never sought AI content and always diligently downvoted it, and it would still keep showing up.