ilamont

In a rural area I visit frequently there is a couple in their 70s who run their own greenhouse selling flowers. One goes by Gene/Jean/Jeanne, and the other is Fran and I always get them mixed up because the names can be used interchangeably for either sex.

A question: how come the North Koreans aren't draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash using equally sophisticated exploits against known technical and human vulnerabilities?

Boosting impressions to maintain "passive income" is one possibility.

I’ve seen niche forums in the past insert affiliate links, so when somebody clicks on that HP graphing calculator they go straight to Amazon and the site operator gets a 2% commission. This was the approach of a website that plagiarized Obscure Sorrows and was discussed here on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611823).

And then there’s tinfoil hat territory: massive influence operations that span multiple forums and Wikipedia and random blogs to support specific points of view about scientific claims, preferred technology approaches tied to commercial platforms, and even historical claims such as who or what developed a scientific concept.

For anyone unfamiliar with Anthem (including me, before I read the second Onion article) and curious about what happened, Wikipedia covers some of the executive decisions and leadership changes that hurt the effort:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(video_game)#Developmen...

The "Frostbite" engine sounds like a disaster.

> Everyone is different and AI is hitting everyone just a little bit differently, and that’s just in areas that directly impact their specific craft.

That's a great point. I don't have experience with woodworking, but when I see a piece of good antique furniture with precise dove-tail joints that someone made hundreds of years ago, that brings me joy.

As a writer, and as a reader, I really value human-crafted insights, like many of the comments I see every day on HN. As many people have stated elsewhere, writing forces you to organize your thoughts.

But I also recognize that there is a place for machine-generated content, whether it's the weather report on my phone or the factory-produced chair I'm sitting on now.

I don't think the story of artificial intelligence is "humans will stop creating." AIs are powerful tools, but they shouldn't be regarded as mutually exclusive with people who like to create things. Some will create in old ways. Some will create in new ways. Others will move onto new ways of creating.

I can't speak to Ruby or other programming languages, but as a creator and occasional hacker with a media background, I have found AI to be incredibly liberating.

Now I can build things that would never have been possible without huge investments of time and/or money. The latest project: a hybrid human/AI tech newsroom that leverages LLM-driven advances in translation (https://asia-tech-news.ghost.io).

For my personal passions, LLMs have completely opened up areas that were extremely painful to deal with 5 or 10 years ago. Take genealogy: I used to manually transcribe old letters, and documents in foreign languages (often archaic terms) were impossible for me to work with without seeking out experts. The other night I had an AI go through a book of 200-year-old religious records and pick out references to potential ancestors. A few weeks earlier I worked on an old diary transcription (https://youtu.be/P6r1I-4T9is?si=qhaf3Wd5zZNjieEw) which I later shared with relatives to proof and enjoy. Such tasks are no longer a chore. It's fun again.

The closest comparison I can make was stumbling upon an old HTML tutorial on an MIT website 30+ years ago. All of a sudden, as a writer and creator, I was no longer tied to my employer's business model to get my words and images out to the world.

When I started working at Network World magazine in the late 1990s Token Ring was still a technology in our coverage area.

It didn't last. Gigabit Ethernet began popping up around the time of the dot-com bubble bursting. That was it for Token Ring.

I note the Toronto announcement cites job creation in the very first sentence. I live near another snowy city where Waymo has been teased, but has yet to have any significant presence:

https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/back-to-boston/

There apparently is a concerted effort to deny Waymo the legislative changes it needs, driven by a concern about job loss:

https://autonomousboston.com/massachusetts/waymo-opposition

Depends on the thief, the object, how well the tracking device is hidden, and how much time the thief has to investigate.

Many dumb thieves out there, like the airport workers who steal luggage and take it home.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=airport...

I question whether the numbers they are looking at capture everything that's going on.

$100/mo on Claude Max for me (probably headed to $200/mo by years end). The time saved on tedium, the analytic insights I can generate for clients, and the progress I can make on R&D is difficult to assess and measure within my small business P&L.

I get the concern over tokenmaxxing and dead-end projects, but they are going to lose talented people over such petty limits, and hold back the work they do for clients.

The multitrack reel-to-reel tapes and two-track masters are likely sitting in boxes in someone's basement or storage unit, along with scores or hundreds of other recordings from the same studio (or record label, if they took possession).

Music studios are (or were) terrible businesses. Typically they were started by a certain type of musician who liked the process and maybe invested in the gear to record his or her own music, and then decided to turn it into a business. They required constant, expensive technology upgrades. They also require a steady stream of clients which is so hard to maintain as music evolves and new up-and-comers choose or are steered toward other studios.

I worked, briefly, in a London recording studio. It had a good run because its co-owner had a steady stream of Hollywood work and could afford the upgrades to the latest technology, which in turn attracted the latest pop artists. But even it struggled with the analog to digital conversion wave. A problem with the property that required extensive construction work derailed operations for months and it never recovered after that.

The arrival of PC recording software is often cited as the death knell for professional studios, but I think the model died decades earlier and was only sustained by constant supply of briefly successful and competent musician/producers who thought they could make a business out of their talents and gear.

If you're interested in this type of thing, check out "Sound City" (2013) which tracks the journey of a Neve console through LA recording history and eventually to Dave Grohl's private studio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwskv2G0X8A

Maybe double or triple glazed windows?

In the 80s one of my high school teachers said her husband was an engineer who worked on surveillance technology and described how windows could be used as recording devices. People's voices inside caused the window to have minute vibrations, which could be measured by a laser pointing at the window's exterior and reflected back and then turned into audio output. Essentially, turning a window into a microphone diaphragm. It blew my mind.

I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.

https://people.ece.uw.edu/nikitin_pavel/papers/RFID-vox_2013...