News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

polishTar

Re:We have a year to fix security everywhere on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @04:38AM (#49607413)
I heard someone use the analogy of "If Magnus Carlson played me at chess, I wouldn't be able to predict the moves he'd play since if I could I'd be at his level. He'll consider things I didn't and even though I don't know the route he'll take to win, I can be certain he will beat me." (not an exact quote).

We're not going to be smarter than a superintelligent AI. The things we conceive it doing if it were given a malicious task (bioterrorism, killer nano-machines, pure fusion bombs sidesteping the non-proliferation bottleneck of Pu239, etc) are likely not the full set of things it can do to harm us. I don't think it does us any favors to dismiss the risks here.

Even the things we can conceive of are very scary, to me at least.

Re:Pacing the Frontier on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @06:50PM (#49091051)
Influencing change is more complicated than that.

We live in a society that has systems of market competition between companies and economic/military competition between countries. There's not just one country working on frontier AI, and not just a few companies in each country either. The incentives of these systems ensure AI advancement will happen quickly from here on out, no matter what, absent governmental action.

An individual researcher leaving the company does nothing, other than give their seat to someone else who likely doesn't share their same concerns.

Alternatively, using the influence they do have in their position to directly try to advance AI safety research, advocate for govt action, and make public arguments attempting to persuade the public to pressure the govt to act when they otherwise wouldn't be inclined is far more likely to impact things for the better.

The people of hacker news seem to really want this to be some sort of conspiracy. It's quite interesting to see.

"It's deliberate sabotage by Amazon", "It's retribution by Hegseth for embarrassing the DoW", "It's a brilliant marketing scheme by Anthropic", "It's because of the govt is considering investing in OpenAI and so they're crippling any competitors".

It's never just "a very poorly formed regulatory action in response to increasingly capable models".

Re:Policy on the AI Exponential on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @04:47PM (#48482482)
Look - it's WAY more fun to just call Dario a goober than engage with the actual substance of the essay. Duh!

Sure, this may be the most important invention ever with near certainty to reshape society over the next few years, but meh. We should probably just immediately dismiss the concerns of anyone working on it without addressing their arguments at all. It's easy, we can justify ignoring their warnings by saying they're self-interested or too self-important or whatever.

Life is more fun when you live it with your eyes closed! You should try it out too.

Or, slightly more direct: .1kW*h/GB * .125GB/s * 3600s/h = 45kW

Those are some goofy numbers. Obviously incorrect.

Re:Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation on Friday April 10, 2026 @09:59AM (#47718278)
That’s an internet argument. The legal issue being debated in actual courts has never been “does Facebook have the technical capability to remove content”.
Re:Denmark's struggle to break up with Silicon Valley on Thursday January 15, 2026 @03:58PM (#46639207)
But Google is willing to host their content in search, right?

They're just not willing to pay since there's no revenue benefit to search hosting it. It seems like Danish media doesn't like this and has chosen to withhold their content, which is their right of course, but it seems strange to contort that into a claim that Google is doing censorship.

Re:OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race on Wednesday December 03, 2025 @02:57AM (#46131437)
That's a bit revisionist. Network effects were obvious when Google acquired Youtube. Google Video had the edge technically, but it didn't matter because Youtube had the users/content and Google saw that very clearly in their user growth before they made their offer.
Municipalities are generally preempted from regulating matters of statewide concern. In CA, the state decided to have the CA DMV regulate operational safety and the CPUC regulate the commercial service. Individual cities are prevented from enacting local laws that encroach upon state authority.
Re:DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @10:32AM (#42184575)
Oracle Chrome, Ha! I wouldn't even be surprised if that's exactly how it plays out.
Ah, you're right. I was wrong to say "public domain".

It would be more correct to say Quake III Arena was released to the public as free software under the GPLv2 license.

Fast inverse square root is now part of the public domain.

Also, even if this weren’t the case you can’t sue for damages to other people (they’d need to bring their own suit)

For enterprise, Google has something called Vertex AI which has a strict privacy policy but you have to pay just like any other typical cloud service.

Presumably Gemini 1.5 will be available there soon.

Re:Mark Zuckerberg on Apple Vision Pro [video] on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @11:47PM (#39366601)
what do you mean?

If you've ever used a VR headset you'll know the weight is extremely important when it comes to comfort. This isn't just a random marketing metric.

Re:Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial on Monday February 12, 2024 @03:34PM (#39350098)
A lot of patent trolls are very small companies though
I got something totally different when I asked: https://g.co/bard/share/d5830c43d539
Gatik has yet to remove safety drivers as I understand it.
Eh, it depends.

I don't know if this is the case, but if these images were released to press & public as part of a media resource pack with a permissive license used to market the movie (which I believe is commonly done in this industry), I'd have a hard time empathizing with the viewpoint that Midjourney is doing something wicked by including it in their training data.

Other ridehail products like uber or lyft have 100% human intervention all the time. I think that's what the parent comment is referring to.
I was referring to the graphic they showed during the announcement that verbatim said the CPU was "up to 20% faster than M1 Pro".

https://images.macrumors.com/t/wMtonfH5PZT9yjQhYNv0uHbpIlM=/...

You're not considering the difference in performance between the p and e cores. The math should be something more like:

  M2 pro = 8*3 + 4 =28 (the *3 representing that the performance cores contribute ~3x more to total system performance than the efficiency cores)

  M3 pro = 6*3*1.15 + 6*1.3 =28 (apple claims 15% more performance for the p cores not 20%)
> They do say the system overall is up to 65% faster, and has lower power consumption at the same performance level.

They don't claim either of those things. They claim the performance is 20% faster than the M1 pro. Interestingly, they made that exact same claim when they announced the M2 pro.

Energy efficiency might be better, but I'm skeptical till I see tests. I suspect at least some of the performance gains on the p+e cores are driven by running at higher clock rates and less efficiently. That may end up being more significant to total energy consumption than the change in the mix of p/e cores. To put it another way, they have more e cores, but their new e cores may be less efficient due to higher clock speeds. Total energy efficiency could go down. We'll just have to wait and see but given that apple isn't claiming an increase in battery life for the M3 pro products compared to their M2 pro counterparts, I don't think we should expect an improvement.

I guess we'll have to wait for benchmarks but I did find this interesting:

Apple's PR release for M2 pro: "up to 20 percent greater performance over M1 Pro"

Apple's announcement for M3 pro: "up to 20 percent faster than M1 Pro" (they didn't bother to compare it to M2 pro)

I love Apple's E cores. It just sucks that the M3 pro gains so few given the reduction in P cores.

Apple's E cores take up ~1/4 the die space of their P core. If the M3 pro lost 2 performance cores but gained 4-8 efficiency cores it'd be a much more reasonable trade.

In addition to the reduced memory bandwidth, the M3 pro also loses 2 performance cores for only 2 more efficiency cores.

M2 pro: 8 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores.

M3 pro: 6 performance cores + 6 efficiency cores.

Not a great trade... I'm not sure the M3 pro can be considered an upgrade

Precisely. If you chose your product/company name to be a common word in the english language you should expect it to be more difficult to exclude others from using it too. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, it's just the consequence of a non-distinctive trademark.

This should apply for both threads software and meta.

I'm a bit surprised how many people here have sympathy for companies trying to enforce exclusivity over common names. Let anybody use "threads" if they want.

I'm not convinced it's a bad thing for hiring or compensation committees to consider relevant experience/education.

Agreed on gender/race/age. That should be made as blind as feasibly possible.

Interesting read.

I wonder what went into the decision on the ratio of P to E cores. Naively it seems like more of the die space should be dedicated to E cores since they're so killer for workloads where efficiency or throughput matter. Obviously some jobs can't spread the load across multiple threads and are sensitive to single-threaded latency, but those workloads won't benefit from so many P cores anyways.

Re:AMD ymm registers are rolling back on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @10:19PM (#34978353)
Strongly agree. It's not moving the goalposts when the metric is useless. TDP means nothing nowadays because CPUs can significantly exceed them when turboing if they've got thermal headroom.

IMO, real power consumption in joules over the course of a benchmark needs to be the standard when it comes to comparing efficiency.

This seems a bit revisionist. Nobody got upset at people getting excited, everyone was excited about its potential initially. The annoyance came specifically about certain politicians endorsing its use, without any disclaimers, without evidential support, and even after the evidence showed it didn't work.
Speaking as a complete non-expert, I don't find that a satisfactory/comforting answer.

Just a quick google search shows prosecutors in the US also selectively choose which cases to prosecute (it appears there are around 4x as many cases get dismissed than go all the way to a jury trial), but nonetheless there are many meritless cases that do somehow make it to trial anyways.

I could accept that Japanese prosecutors are a bit better at filtering, but a 99.3% conviction rate does not seem right.

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