shirro

The US is a bit of an outlier in "the west". They have extreme protectionist trade barriers to protect the local auto industry and fossil fuel producers. Most other "western" countries have a more Laissez-faire approach. Ironically the biggest driver for EV sales at the moment is high oil prices caused by US military action.

The US is simultaneously driving global EV adoption and the crazy growth of Chinese automotive technology and manufacturing and stranding their own automotive sector in the past. A lot of people who thought Trump was going to be a disaster are seeing him as an unwitting ally now.

BYD went from unheard of to number 2 in Australia in about 4 years. Chinese made Tesla are still holding onto 10th spot here but they have MG and Geely coming up behind them. BYD and GWM are now supported by local dealerships that have been in my town for decades and I see the cars in the local community unlike Tesla. I don't know where the Tesla sales are but they aren't around here.

I am still driving an ancient Nissan and although Electric is looking very compelling at the moment I distrust all the brands and products currently on the market regardless of nation of origin. I guess if they are all privacy nightmares then you might as well go for the cheapest.

BYD is currently the second biggest selling vehicle manufacturer (not just EV) in Australia after Toyota and ahead of Ford. It is also the only one increasing sales in the top three. All the vehicles sold here meet our strict design rules. There are some notable US vehicles that even with substantial engineering modifications probably couldn't be made compliant with our safety regulations.

This is how you do it.

Australian public toilets: https://toiletmap.gov.au/

Creative commons dataset: https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/national-public-toilet-map

I heard my 12yo uses "AI" as a synonym for crap in a context which had nothing to do with machine learning. There is a pronounced and growing disconnect between the fervently pro-AI messaging on platforms like HN and regular people. Anti-AI sentiment goes deep and has momentum. A few billion dollars of marketing and influencer spend isn't going to turn it around. When the bubble deflates as most people feel it must I think it will only reinforce the negativity.

Our political and business elites need age verification added to their penis.

There is a medical recommendation for ages 9-25 in my country though the public funded mass vaccination program is for 12-13 as the most effective age.

The thought that a 9yo would need protection from STDs is very upsetting which I would guess makes it a talking point. It is better to mass vaccinate at whatever age is publicly acceptable than not at all so I would concede that to them.

Anyone exposed to sexual activity at such an age is clearly a victim of abuse. Penalising victims of abuse, whether it be forcing them to attempt to carry a baby to term, against medical advice, or forcing them to deal with the consequences of STDs is a very peculiar and nasty attitude. When societies start justifying denial of care and treatment along lines of class, politics, age, race, religion, gender or perceptions of "morality" there's a bigger problem.

It doesn't matter so much if the LLMs are better or worse for learning things. I tend to think much worse in the long term. The problem is the reduction in choice. Soon we won't have web search. No user generated content. No genuine personal interaction. No blogs. No personal computer industry. No tech book publishers. Its all going to be LLM generated content owned by a small group of people. It sucks. I am in the opt out group wondering what exactly will be left to opt out into.

My understanding is that auditory hallucinations are more common in schizophrenia which makes this more of a WTF.

Aphantasiac here so this raises an obvious question. Cursory search suggests visual hallucinations due to drugs or schizophrenia are reported. Conscious and involuntary visualisation seem to be somewhat independent.

With all respect to Christoffer and Bjarne and many others who are much smarter and more experience than me who have said similar things I am far from convinced. Their languages are not memory safe and they either are not doing bounds checking or proving it unnecessary. If iteration is causing underflow or overflow then perhaps the problem isn't signed or unsigned indexes.

Look around at the state of our C++ and C software and all the CVEs I think we probably shouldn't care about unsigned or signed loop indexes and move on before regulatory pressure forces us. Please language designers, give us some interesting alternatives to Rust.

People shouldn't have to justify not putting up with bullshit. It is a sensible default.

I haven't seen a stove top kettle since the 1970s. And they were an old design then. I have never seen one in a shop either. A typical electric kettle has the handle at the back and spout at the front. There isn't really anyway to come into contact with steam in normal use. They are cheap, safe and fast.

I think it is very clear from the way all US allies have reacted to various provocations that we are taking a long term view. That is the reason we are still spying on our domestic populations for the US despite our reservations about the current executive and their actions.

The problem for all 5 eyes (or 9 or 14) is that our co-operation dates back to the cold war and the institutions and thinking have not caught up to current geo-political and technical changes. If anything we are accelerating our co-operation at a time when many voters are seriously questioning the future of the US alliance.

I wish some of our leaders would be more forthcoming about the amount of foreign pressure their governments are under. We talk about the negative influence on social media and politics of countries we are not allied with often but there is an astonishing silence when it comes to the biggest player. There is a very real threat to local values and democracy.

It is getting more difficult to research now. Increasingly I just grab the source code locally and don't bother with the browser. Every search returns pages of wordy AI generated docs. At best they restate the code. At worse they read like badly written brochures. I am avoiding any project that doesn't have a long history. Large, feature packed projects that appeared out of nowhere on github with a single commit with no history or users are essentially stolen code that has been machine translated to obscure the original authors works.

I hate becoming the old person shaking their fist at the sky but the AI bros have just gone too far. I don't know why there isn't a bigger political and social movement against them. I would sign up in an instant to see their companies and practices regulated out of existence.

We are a playful species. People enjoy play. If we didn't have to work for a living but still enjoyed food security that is all most of us would do. But we are also a very exploitative species, some more than others. Companies have made billions of dollars on top of Fabrice Bellard's works, qemu, ffmpeg etc.

These companies don't have any imagination. Their management has no vision. They could not create anything new and wonderful if they tried. People like Fabrice do and we are all richer for it. If your asking about the practical use you are likely in the exploitative mindset which is understandable on HN. The hacker/geek mindset enjoys this for what it is.

There are so many advantages to turning off and disconnecting these days. Avoiding TOS is just a small part.

There are too many demands on our attention and our wallets and most of us aren't getting more money or time. I cancelled all the family's streaming services in 2025. Everyone adapted. It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. A lot of the novelty of mobile, streaming, social media and weird tech nobody needs has worn off and the value has been eroded. There are so many better things to do and experience and you don't need to hand over your privacy or sign your soul away.

In 30 years the only sort of novel idea anyone has come up with for making money out of tech that has got any real traction is harvesting people's data. Web search - data harvesting. Social media - data harvesting. LLM as a service - data harvesting. Is that because the same money people keep betting on the same sorts of ideas from the same sort of graduates from the same cultural background?

There was crypto coins but pyramid schemes have been around forever.

Why would anyone with a shred of awareness want to subscribe to any LLM service. Particularly a foreign one where that data could potentially end up in the hands of business competitors, political enemies, extortionists or others. That goes for all of the cloud really. Like WTF people. Why do you do this?

The only thing that will save OpenAI is a miracle. The deals only prolong the pain. Just end it already. Nobody wants their products. We want affordable RAM and SSD.

Over investment in AI data centers is having a huge negative impact all over the economy. Other sectors are missing out on investment limiting their growth and stalling the economy.

Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality.

Many hardware launches are going to be delayed or not meet expectations which really is the tip of the iceberg.

The US/SK memory cartel understandably sold out for a massive short term windfall but they their long term decisions to limit supply have created a huge opportunity for China. I wouldn't be surprised if this will go down in the history books as the start of the exit for US/SK from the industry and the start of Chinese dominance.

The smart phone industry is likely to respond with an increasingly hostile anti-consumer approach as they try and lock customers into the cabins of the sinking ship. I expect cheap and cheerful Chinese budget phones aren't going anywhere.

I am happy for ram, cpu and storage to stall. I want a more robust and open phone which can take a fall and be updated long after the vendor loses interest. I expect to uninstall most of my apps rather than install new ones as I increasingly disconnect from an ever more distracting and worthless medium. I have cancelled nearly every subscription service in the last 12 months. And I have been deleting a lot of free accounts and apps. Its like doing a big cleanup. Surprisingly rewarding.

HN has felt like more than 50% AI industry promoting blog spam of little interest to me as a reader for some time. I am setting a budget of ten, no make it five, more posts here. Then I am out for good. Account deletion and no looking back.

The algorithm has been given a job todo. First priority on any platform is engagement and a well functioning, complete human being is not going to be engaged by rage bait and hate. They are rare, precious jewels. The shit gets dumped on people who are lonely, have a grudge, feel left out. It is relentless and escalates until their brains cook. Algorithmic social media is a massive social harm. The people who are in deep likely need years of deprogramming and therapy to recover which they will never get.

These platforms need to be shut down and people with a conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects and their impact on the vulnerable.

Yeah, we are into professional wrestling territory I think. People willingly suspend their disbelief to enjoy the spectacle.

Using a fake identity and hiding behind a language model to avoid responsibility doesn't cut it. We are responsible for our actions including those committed by our tools.

If people want to hide behind a language model or a fantasy animated avatar online for trivial purposes that is their free expression - though arguably using words and images created by others isn't really self expression at all. It is very reasonable for projects to require human authorship (perhaps tool assisted), human accountability and human civility

When they are full I wonder what the final solution will be?

I won't be chasing an increasingly shitty online experience. I imported chromecasts before they were ever released here and had them connected via vpn to a US vps before services like Netflix went global. The pricing and content were really good value back then. Increasingly the relationship with big companies feels abusive. We are moving more towards self hosting, using physical media and changing lifestyle. Disconnecting isn't so bad.

Fully agree. I have no issues with the social media laws as they don't impact my family at all except for YouTube. Accounts under Family Link control should have been allowed as they are overseen by an 18+ parent.

Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator. When I wrote to the minister they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media which I do agree with.

We had curated kids logins with age restrictions, subscriptions, and ad free under premium and also youtube music with individual playlists they used for instrument practice etc. We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this with special apps and browser extensions but this was a single cross platform solution that was working for responsible parents. To be fair it is partly YouTube's fault for prioritizing Shorts and watch time over quality.

Australia does not have a bill of rights. Our freedoms are guaranteed by our participation in the electoral process which is very high. This government governs with a large majority and the social media legislation is broadly popular with parents and older people.

The law of unintended consequences will apply. The legislation has been written in such a way that there is some flexibility in the application and there are some safeguards but its not directly addressing some of the biggest social harms. It's primary purpose (despite the conspiracies) seems to be populism and being seen to do do something for the kiddies.

The much bigger social problem is gambling which is out of control here. The second, related problem, is the use of techniques and studies by the gambling industry in games and social media to increase engagement which is what is messing with peoples heads. The government does not dare to touch the gambling industry or stop algorithmic placement of content. This would cause immense damage to company profits and create lobbying pressure.

So far from my experience this has been kind of low impact for adult users with existing accounts. Social media companies obviously have extremely good demographic data on their existing users as targeted marketing and influence is their core business.

Unfortunately this legislation hasn't addressed any of my real concerns with social media (it's the algorithms and engagement farming) and it is creating new problems.

Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I expect the people running these companies are more interested in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.

Insane decision. This whole bubble is irrational.