News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

mindslight

[delayed]
[delayed]
Re:Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:25PM (#50341231)
First, you seem to be confusing me for the commenter who originally raised a concern.

Second, you're not really addressing my comment, rather just responding with a more polished version of your previous comment deny any issue.

My point is where are your own ethical boundaries here? For each aspect of the situation, what would have to be different to run aground of your own ethical concerns? In order to say that something is on a specific side of a line, you must know where the line actually is, right?

Third, and this doesn't apply to you as an uninvolved commenter per se, but it definitely applies to the original "experiment" - the onus is on the person performing it to demonstrate how it is ethical. A xit that reads like a kid buying some fancy equipment and playing around to see what might happen, "18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this", and a "licensed vet" as an accountability crumple zone does not inspire confidence!

Re:Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:09PM (#50339987)
> I fail to see a lapse in ethics.

And you are presumably going to keep failing, because you're not trying.

I've come to see this type of indignant/defiant language as a tell that someone is refusing to consider an issue (ie ignorance).

Re:Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:58AM (#50339785)
Oh don't worry, they made sure to have a human acting as an accountability crumple zone: "A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent."

(/s)

Re:Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:47AM (#50339619)
Tell me you've never needed significant healthcare without telling me.

It's never about "ambulances". The bureaucracy will happily call an ambulance for you, as it ends their involvement and absolves them of liability. And the ambulance company is happy to show up, as it's a large billable event. In fact when seeking/obtaining complex medical care, this is one of the failure modes you have to constantly swat away!

As for interacting with the bureaucracy to obtain real care, it's gotten to the point where it's easier to get something done calling a bank. Navigating the medical bureaucracy is probably on the level of calling Comcast-Warner (although I haven't had the misfortune of having to deal with them for a decade, so I'm sure they've gotten worse as well).

Even before "AI", my standard experience is a multi-level phone tree, multiple mandatory announcements before you can even proceed, then waiting on hold. That merely gets you to an answering service who types a ticket into the computer system. Then you wait a ~day for a nurse to call you back (if you miss answering this call, return to step 1). Then the only urgent appointments are invariably with "nurse practitioners" who throw pre-canned advice at you, as they don't really know what they're doing. That's four layers running interference to keep you away from an actual doctor, who you will finally get to see in a month for a fifteen minute appointment, if you are lucky.

Re:The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:00AM (#50333582)
The dynamic is that corpos are chartered/registered by states, both domestic (operating in the state its chartered in) and foreign (operating in a different state than where its chartered).

Federal regulation would make a mess of the idea due to preemption, eliminating the state regulatory option and leaving us with just the federal options of a Constitutional amendment or impeaching/replacing the Supreme Court and repudiating their openly corrupt precedent (decree).

Re:Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half on Sunday November 01, 2026 @09:50PM (#50332568)
OP doesn't sound very happy about the arrangement to me. If it were consensual due to saving money from running a bunch of steady heavy loads (a bunch of computers etc), I wouldn't expect words like "nauseating" but rather more of a recognition that intermittent heavy loads are incompatible with something they've chosen for another reason.
Re:Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half on Sunday November 01, 2026 @12:37PM (#50327745)
I don't quite understand what you're saying, and this seems like a recipe for talking past one another. In general of course there are many ways to individually mitigate a market failure, but this doesn't make it any less of a failure. And as described, OP's rate structure seems like the product of a market failure.

They themselves said that such charges aren't common from other providers, and that their POCO acts with unrestrained monopoly power to tack on a bunch of arbitrary fees. My only point was that this is part way to not even having electrical service in the first place, and is exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be reigned in if we want more things to be electrified.

This right here. If we're going to oust this anti-American Flock and its less prominent "competitors", then we need the police to realize they're not a friend, but rather a foe. Extra work arresting motorists with frivolous warrants from neighboring towns, civil suits for violating rights where the police are left holding the bag, spending budget that could instead be spent on actual policing, defiant disobedience when they're asked to take the cameras down or make changes, making your city more likely to be a flashpoint for federal action, etc.

(In addition to state-level political action from this and other types of surveillance to preserve our freedom uniformly. The point is to make it so the police lobby is neutral or even on our side, rather than having to fight against them)

Re:Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half on Sunday November 01, 2026 @11:16AM (#50326992)
Sure? I understand the fundamental problems here, but it's a residential electrical company's job to solve them as best they can with things statistical modeling and buying capacity ahead of time - not to pass them on and leave customers over a barrel!

I do understand that mine lands on the opposite side of not being the most economically optimal, compared to say variable time of use rates. I was just illustrating how out of wack the explained pricing structure is. At that point, why even bother upgrading from a 60A service?

If this is really a modern competitive cost structure with nearly free incremental electricity (great for running computers etc!) then the obvious answer is to get some batteries rather than contorting your life around the POCO's hyper-discretized schedule. But it reads to me like an electric company just putting customers over a barrel because it can. I would have to know the actual $/kWh incremental rate to think otherwise.

Re:Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half on Sunday November 01, 2026 @10:08AM (#50326375)
It sounds like your electric company is straight up corrupt, which would indeed be a barrier to electrification. For reference, the main demand reduction my municipal electric company does is to send text messages on hot days asking us to use less air conditioning.
Re:Digital Minimalism on Saturday October 31, 2026 @01:10PM (#50317967)
No those are just "moderate" opinions of every day regular people, who were previously being "canceled" by "the far left". (/s)

The times I've had the misfortune of reading replies on xitter, even on what should be technical topics, they have consisted of extremist maximalist takes with others chiming in to call them "based" [0]. Whatever its "algorithm" is, it definitely leans into the outrage farming / Balkanization project, regardless of the bots.

[0] which from context would seem to be shorthand for "freebased", as in smoking crack, despite apparent intent to the contrary

I wholly agree with where you're coming from, but I don't see how it's connected to the original article.

If you think the censorship is the problem, then how does what you're saying address that?

If you think the frustration with the censorship is the problem (ie part of the outrage farming), then I suppose what you're saying is a solution in a roundabout way. But trying to fix a small problem by casting it as one aspect of a much larger problem seems self-defeating.

Do you know how the Enterprise is this huge ship that carries a huge population, but yet very few people are seen working in each department? Yeah, the rest of them just stay in their bunks doomscrolling, subsisting on Doritos and soda ("Diet Coke, cold") from the replicator. Government provided basic housing is mostly on starships, because it gives their working crews a sense of importance. When the ships dock for repairs, transporter technology is used to seamlessly reallocate the population between ships. The residents would notice if they bothered to look out their windows, but they mostly don't.
> I guess the best approach is to look at a string of such events, and see if they add up to a consistent pattern of behaviour.

Sure, except, why? Such behavior is (unfortunately) not currently illegal, so it's not like proving it would mean it could be straightforwardly punished.

Then furthermore, the specific groups that feel aggrieved shift based on who is in power. The only way to get actual reform is to form a coalition with people who don't feel particularly aggrieved right now, but still respect that it could happen to them in the future.

Making it into a personal us-vs-them just makes it so people who don't care about your "us" aren't inclined to see the issue!

> The change I would like to see: feeds must be in date order, most recent first. Posts should only appear in feeds if you have actively chosen to "follow" the originating account in some way.

Sure, but keep in mind this is still a political solution, whether through regulation or through shaming these speech censors. Meaning it requires the political will I am describing above.

Also from a technical perspective I don't see that this would directly address the problem in the article. You still need another point, getting there indirectly - if the only feeds shown were subscribed ("followed"), there should never be a reason to censor an account from speaking to people who have subscribed to it.

The simplest explanation is that it's chaotic damage from whatever overzealous autocensorship systems they have. The extent of the damage is moderated based on who you know - whether it's social media reach to someone employed there who knows the strings to pull, pay to play line to an account rep, or even ahead-of-time "this needs to be protected" due to threats/back scratching from/of the regime.

At least to me, this is a good working explanation - the conspiracy angles prove things that don't need to be proven to effect sustainable solutions. The real issue, as it has always been, is that we need to move away from these centralized communications technologies controlled by corpos. Their concentrated power is what makes their censorship inevitable.

So pragmatically as things stand - while it's completely understandable that political campaigns (and everyone else) need to engage with where people are, they should also be making it a point to nudge followers to distributed forums. Use censorship-eager popular forums to recruit new followers, but maintain your base of members with censorship-resistant communication methods.

Or politically, assuming a critical mass of people frustrated at this problem that we can effect change, what we need is anti-trust enforcement that breaks up these companies into smaller entities, chiefly by un-bundling apps (client software) from hosting services and mandating published APIs for the two markets to interact.

Re:French digital tax may kill VideoLan non-profit on Friday October 30, 2026 @05:11PM (#50310194)
Sure, but the problem is that this is outweighed by the downsides to the law.
Is there a similar tag for dismissing the bulk of a comment while narrowly responding to a single part of it? </s>

> The other option would be to embed enough context in a comment that most good faith readers would understand that you

I had described why this does not work in general.

<legacyTags:s xmlns:legacyTags="http://example.org/schemas/interaction-styles/biologic/prima...">

(PS the first paragraph was me introducing my new tag "<s>" which means sardonic)

</legacyTags:s>

After a year of finishing projects with storage bought before the start of the second grump catastrophe (and seeing that everything has basically gone up in price 2.5x), I just had to break down and buy some DDR5 SODIMMS (which I had unfortunately not stocked up on). It hurt, and I am definitely wondering if this is going to look foolish in retrospect - ie buying at the peak.

But then I remembered that it's essentially a hedge. These people and the capital pools behind them give off strong vibes of being all-in on capturing computing technology for their centralized control, and damning the revolutionary distributed computation/communications we have been enjoying for the past three decades (albeit we've been squandering most of its capabilities).

No... I wasn't talking about the context of the reply chain but rather the context of everything else someone does/says/believes.

The comment in question - go read a few pages of the poster's comment history and you will understand it was meant as sarcasm. The difficulty is that sarcasm takes social capital to execute, and the comment-in-isolation model eschews even having that type of reputation.

Now in this case it's relatively easy to avoid sarcasm (although I would say we're worse off for it). But the same difficulty applies to straightforward communication as well - if someone is criticizing the DNC, are they doing it from a place of trying to reform and make it better, or are they trying to drive cynicism and apathy? You don't know unless you know them.

And while you can mitigate the problem by writing comments that appeal to some groupthink (marking you as part of the tribe) before making a nuanced point against some other bit of groupthink, this propagates the first groupthink which is itself often a problem.

Personally I just click on people's usernames and skim a page or two of their comment history. I think the HN/web forum ethos of "a comment should stand on its own" has been a grave mistake, as it strips all the surrounding context from what someone is saying. The whole reason I can discuss contentious issues with my friends is that they know I am not a monster, but this luxury just doesn't exist in web forums.

So especially in these times, I think it's important that we do a little work to see where one another might coming from [assuming it's in good faith to begin with], rather than squandering our focus on destructive infighting from slight misunderstandings.

And as the old joke goes - How do you know if someone is a maggot? Don't worry, they'll tell you!

I'm sure the video goes into more depth, but the "inevitability of hierarchy" explanation has never made sense to me.

If reactionaries place more importance on hierarchy, then shouldn't this mean accepting the hierarchy as it stands and knowing their place in it? Progressive beliefs are often seen as being a product of out of touch affluenza, so [stereotypical] progressives' relative direction in the hierarchy should be clear. Meanwhile the underclass below them with shittier jobs should make them feel content from being above a different group of people - illegal labor especially puts even more people below them!

Rather what they would seem to want is some other hierarchy where they sit higher. And while it's completely understandable to want to improve your position, it's specious to give this credit as some noble abstract belief in hierarchy rather than mere zero-sum scrapping to improve their lot.

So at least to me, reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of an [unfair] hierarchy doesn't seem like anything particularly different than reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of $whatever else to get them riled up and turn off their ability to reason or communicate. It's never actually about the lofty value, but rather emotional appeals to how you've been wronged so let's get revenge.

Arson when the fire department is already on the way. Great idea! Firefighters hate this one simple trick.
As an atheist, "religious claptrap" tends to contain more wisdom than average. Not inherently, but rather simply because reverence allows it to endure while more direct wisdom is readily thrown away for the sake of expedience. I think this is like one of the main themes of the piece itself.

All of the simplistic rejections in this thread, people looking to quickly assuage their cognitive dissonance rather than doing ten minutes of work holding conflicting thoughts in their head, make me think we are truly damned.

It's always fearmongering when it comes to "vulnerabilities" that affect the model of locking down computing devices.

This shit used to confuse me so hard when I was learning security. It seemed that articles were talking about something really important, but I just couldn't connect it to anything I knew. Then I realized they weren't talking about security for users, but rather security from users - and for entities ultimately looking to restrict users (the same inversion-of-authority as TSA propaganda). Hence the syndrome of acronym hell, as that amount of overabstraction is required to motivate a system for its own purposes.

Now given that this is a network exploit, you've got to adapt my model a bit from above - my framing is most clear when talking about local "exploits" in locked down bootloaders etc. But from an individual security perspective here? If you've disabled the network stack in your BIOS (because why the hell is it there in the first place), OR put any management interfaces on their own network unreachable from anything that isn't trusted to be managing, this is an utter nothingburger.

> You pretend to be righteous. I just am right.

As if asserting "I just am right" isn't being righteous...

It seems like you're trying to hang some moral authority on what is, even after having spent most of your time on what ought. But what ought - an abstract model of ideals - is exactly what defines us as thinking beings above the level of animals. Twisting your estimation of what ought based on what [presently] is drags us down to that lower level.

As for what is? That is easy! Would I have started moving my car after I was being assaulted by ICE agents? Probably not. Would I have engaged in the type of protest she did now that I have a kid? Fuck no. There are plenty of things Renee Good could have done differently to avoid being murdered that day! And I'm sure if she could have gone back and changed her actions after seeing the consequences they ended up having, she would have.

But still, none of this has any bearing on what ought to be in a society based around individual liberty and a government subservient to the People! And what ought to be, what we should be aiming for if we want to have a just society, is that murderers end up behind bars regardless if they happen to be employed by the government.

It's a progression of logical inference based on the facts of the case.

What is "a narrative" is your repeated implication that it's somehow within the scope of law enforcement officers - in a civil society governed by the rule of law - to summarily execute people for disobeying them.

> huge failure of ICE

This is the wrong framing. This was a premeditated (first degree) murder. The killer, Jonathan Ross, had previously tried cowboy heroics with a moving vehicle and had ended up being dragged a few hundred feet - surely a traumatic experience. In the run-up to the murder of Renee Good, he went out of his way to approach her vehicle using the positioning of his own body to box it in - in direct violation of written ICE policies of how to interact with motor vehicles (for obvious reasons).

The reasonable inference is that this was setting up a pretext to use his gun if the vehicle started to move, while leaving enough room to jump out of the way - so as to be able to attack a driver who might disobey him, while not ending up getting dragged again. And when Good started to reverse the vehicle, he acted according to that plan.

The involvement of ICE itself is that they protected this violent criminal from seeing justice. Not merely as an immediate reaction of waiting until the dust settles, but as long term policy. This indicates the organization itself is a criminal conspiracy, rather than an institution of civil society governed by the rule of law. Of course this is merely one among many other such indications.

I know nothing about pronouncing Greek beyond what I just searched, but I don't see how that helps get one to the proper pronunciation of shitter. Isn't it based on the Chinese "xi" ?

Older »