dewarrn1

One hopes fireproof homes and idle firefighters are not the genesis for Ray Bradbury’s dark prophecy.

A shame. I encountered his work in a couple of places (with the caveat that I don't know which Cringely was which):

PBS website: He wrote a column that their site no longer hosts, but the Wayback Machine has it snapshotted frequently, including just after his final submission for the outlet in 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20081223220604/http://www.pbs.or...

NerdTV: In an era of nascent web video, he produced long-form video interviews with tech types, and clipped what might now be called "Shorts/Tiktoks" from the conversations, pulling out the of "the juicy bit" and "the nerdy bit". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NerdTV (h/t to u/Keyframe)

And obliquely, Cringely's columns or videos were the first place I recall hearing about foveated approaches to video compression for streaming. I thought it sounded like a terrible idea, but I guess Valve delivered, 20 years on, using the technique to good effect with the Steam Frame. Chalk one up for Cringely; RIP.

It would be quite an encore if he pulled this off one last time.

A sad irony in the title of one of his last blog posts, "Not dead yet! What Bob Cringely has been up to…". https://www.cringely.com/2020/01/23/not-dead-yet-what-bob-cr...

"The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

This is a stunning attempt to rewrite history.

> It was Levandowski who...had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars.

> Some of the biggest fights involved risks that Levandowski was taking in self-driving experiments. ... “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. “If it is, you’ll never do anything. It’s always safer to leave the car in the driveway. You’ll never learn from a real mistake.” [0]

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...

In light of recent news, it is hard not to think about the 4.5-day hack on Hugging Face's systems happening ~10 times faster and be slightly concerned.

It's not quite the same, but your prose clock solution reminded me of this: https://www.authorandco.com/products/author-clock.

If AI writes your code, why fuss about the language it writes in?

I'm hopeful that new efficiencies in training (Deepseek et al.), the impressive performance of smaller models enhanced through distillation, and a glut of past-their-prime-but-functioning GPUs all converge make good-enough open/libre models cheap, ubiquitous, and less resource-intensive to train and run.

The premise for this research question is related in part to work from Dr. Eleanor Maguire (who I just learned died last year at only 55) and her team on hippocampal anatomy and careers involving spatial navigation, including taxi drivers. A connection that may be of interest to HN readers: Demis Hassabis was one of Maguire's doctoral students, although he does not appear to have worked on the project most relevant to this study.

Hail u/cperciva.

If you're not interested in the new sets, the core product is readily available. Moreover, enjoy the fact that you can get that bucket of bricks for cheap partly because the expensive shiny high-margin SKUs provide a subsidy.

$499 through Apple Edu: https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-neo.

The real question: did he have Claude write this for him?

Had the same thought. NASA already cracked this nut with Apollo; if you’re gonna crack it again and differently, be real sure your solution is better.

Tangential, but Darknet Diaries has been running a "hacker history" series to kick off 2026, starting with this one: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/168/. The "Hackers" movie gets a few call-outs.

Ah, the other AI: Actual Italian. (w/apologies to Davie504)

Presumably with apologies to Steinbeck: “Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”

Not your question, but 4xxx-series work seamlessly.

This is a fun example, but now you've got me wondering: has anyone checked on folks who might have been in an Amazon Go store during the outage?

Slightly hyperbolic, gpt-image-1 is better on at least a couple of the text metrics.

Claude Code is^W^W^WEvery LLM is a slot machine.

Yes, it's the Firefox version of Python's GIL.

A “dead airspace”, perhaps?

It's not my area of expertise, but I have seen other estimates that American adults, especially men, are likely to have and report numbers of friends such that the median is in the single digits.

So, in reference to the "reasoning" models that the article references, is it possible that the increased error rate of those models vs. non-reasoning models is simply a function of the reasoning process introducing more tokens into context, and that because each such token may itself introduce wrong information, the risk of error is compounded? Or rather, generating more tokens with a fixed error rate must, on average, necessarily produce more errors?

It sounds like a compelling film. Seeing now that it's produced by Penn & Teller's team, it makes me wonder about this fits into their "juggler vs. magician" dichotomy. The implication of that duo producing the film suggests that they might believe that Vermeer's reputation as an extraordinarily skilled artist ("juggler") might in fact be the result of Vermeer's use of a sophisticated apparatus that tricked patrons and viewers into thinking that he had extraordinary abilities, thus making Vermeer a master faker ("magician"). Or maybe they simply wanted to spur debate.

It's an appealing hypothesis, but there's some compelling evidence to the contrary [0]. I'm not an expert, but this could potentially fall under the heading of pop history or pseudohistory.

[0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4707