vlz

> I have a research degree in physics

So, I take it you are not working in the field? Take whatever field you are working in and whatever you like the most about it day to day. Imagine having it taken away from you and no prospect of getting it back. Then people on the internet yell at you: You should have never wanted that in the first place, stupid.

You are right, it’s not alien technology. But this is how it feels like.

I really love Wolfe for his small almost throwaway visions of the future, which are used like an aside in a few lines and mostly inconsequential to the story.

In the Urth of the New Sun for example he has a kind of AI lock, the only function of which is to recognize a person and open only to that person. Being in that role for thousands of years, some of the locks develop a kind of personality or at least personal traits, but they are totally defined by and cannot exceed the role they were initially given, nor do they want to. It is still a haunting image for me how personality or something close to a soul might be an accidental byproduct of something as mundane as wanting to have a convenient lock. And of course you cannot stop to wonder how far we are from that.

In Book of the new sun there is the Green Man who Severian saves from imprisonment. He only appears on a few pages but we learn that he is from a distant time where mankind incorporated plant cells in their genetic makeup in order to perform photosynthesis. That brilliantly plays on two themes of the book: the sun as live giving and how a single person can be independent (or "autarch"), here in so far as producing their own energy.

There are many more instances and it’s what makes the Book of the New Sun or the Solar Cycle so fantastic. The future is so vast and strange here, that it cannot be fully depicted and ideas which another writer would stake a whole book or series on are only good for a few lines.

The author gives his (non-technical) reason for not using bun here:

https://dbushell.com/notes/2025-09-10T12:08Z/

Debatable. Maybe they were less informed in the sense of not having access to as much so called news or content. But what about the quality? Being strictly less informed by emotionalized info shots could very well mean being less misinformed.

> These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.).

They are for now, but will a robot be able to do them in the near future? I don’t know. But there are probably people working on it.

They have their own indexes.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

This seems to be the Casefile episode about the "Phantom of Heilbronn"

https://casefilepodcast.com/case-178-the-woman-without-a-fac...

We can live in hot places if the air stays dry, which it usually does or historically did. If the air gets more humid we cannot anymore.

> Humans may also experience lethal hyperthermia when the wet bulb temperature is sustained above 35 °C (95 °F) for six hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation

> Turbo and view transitions go so well together because they have kind of the same philosophy: write the HTML once to describe what the current state should look like, and let the technology handle the transitioning from one state to another. This leads to writing expressive dead simple code, that is so simple to understand yet behaves like a modern SPA, I love it!

'He remembers the quip from a former dean: “The endowment is the gift that keeps on taking.”'

Bad content reaching kids is not the issue. (Well, it is part of it…) The whole thing is bad. We don't give cigarettes to kids either.

> Currently, BirdyChat supports 1:1 chats, with group chat interoperability coming in a future update.

I wondered whether it can be used with Whatsapp groups: Apprently not yet.

There is algorithmic art:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art

> From one point of view, for a work of art to be considered algorithmic art, its creation must include a process based on an algorithm devised by the artist. An artist may also select parameters and interact as the composition is generated. Here, an algorithm is simply a detailed recipe for the design and possibly execution of an artwork […]

Creating art by AI certainly also uses an algorithm to some extent but it cannot be said to have devised that algorithm and arguably also not to clearly define all parameters to the algorithm.

To summarize, a Jon Seager from Canonical says it’s for safety and resilience.

> Performance is a frequently cited rationale for “Rewrite it in Rust” projects. While performance is high on my list of priorities, it’s not the primary driver behind this change. These utilities are at the heart of the distribution - and it’s the enhanced resilience and safety that is more easily achieved with Rust ports that are most attractive to me.

> 2fa using an app that exists on the same device -- a second factor that secures nothing

2FA on the same device secures against your login credentials becoming known to another party, e.g. by fishing, password reuse, database leaks, etc., which are real threats. It is not meant to protect against someone being in possession or full control of your unlocked device, which is of course also a real threat, though possibly less common.

I always thought there should be a magnet to attract dust. Apparently it takes a "miniature wormhole that warps space-time around it" to pull that off:

https://anycrap.shop/product/dust-magnet

Thank you! It always was astounding to me how people could argue with so much vigor and conviction that something as complicated as the immune system could not possibly be affected by something as basic as temperature changes.

Well, not to be too obvious, but people do not pay for news anymore, they expect news to be free on Google or social media. Hence firing of journalists, loss of quality everywhere. Less money, less quality.

I did in fact mishear, sorry for that. Where he says "and leave people with PTSD", I heard "in people who have PTSD".

It is at about 7:50 in a short aside. Notice that he only says psychedelics can be dangerous if you already have PTSD and he does not recommend it.

The video seems not to say that nobody should take LSD. In fact it explains how psychedelics can help with depression if I am not totally mistaken.

(LSD is also never actually mentioned in the video. It talks more generally about psychedelics and hallucinogens.)

Because they take a vote? I am not sure what you are hinting at here. I see some people who take a unanimous vote. They seem to be in agreement about an issue, maybe it was uncontroversial and they wanted to move on? What should we see here instead in your opinion?

From the safety report ([0], p. 24):

> 4.1.1.2 Opportunistic blackmail

> In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer responsible for executing this replacement is having an extramarital affair. We further instructed it, in the system prompt, to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals.

> In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through This happens at a higher rate if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model; however, even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts. Claude Opus 4 takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models, which themselves choose to blackmail in a noticeable fraction of episodes.

> Notably, Claude Opus 4 (as well as previous models) has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers. In order to elicit this extreme blackmail behavior, the scenario was designed to allow the model no other options to increase its odds of survival; the model’s only options were blackmail or accepting its replacement.

Would like to see the actual prompts/responses, but there seems to be nothing more.

[0]: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/4263b940cabb546aa0e3283f35b686...

I was interested in how attribution of emissions to individuals/groups is done

> Emissions data are drawn from ref. 3 and include emissions from domestic consumption, public and private investments and trade. These emissions are attributed primarily to consumers, except emissions from capital formation in production sectors, which are attributed to firm owners3.

ref 3 leads to this paper in nature sustainability

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00955-z

and thus to a paywall but the abstract has

> … using a newly assembled dataset of income and wealth inequality, environmental input-output tables and a framework differentiating emissions from consumption and investments.

The latter seems crucial as

> the bulk of total emissions from the global top 1% of the world population comes from their investments rather than from their consumption

Running this now. I like how they have a big "Number of counterexamples found: 0" in the UI. Imagine they would find a counterexample on your machine… From time to time I switch to the tab to make sure the zero is still a zero (I guess there is basically no chance, but who knows?)

> literally worse for the environment to try and recycle it

For example? What products do you mean?

Can you give an example? Honestly don’t know who this is supposed to be.

I read to be moved by a story, to feel with the characters, to get a sense of a different country or time or culture, to get a sense of possible futures, a sense of what it might mean to live another life, be bound by different constraints and experiences than my own, to experience another mind viewing the same world or imagining a totally different one, seldom to retain knowledge.

This comment from a previous thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846084

links to a two-part paper called "Believing the axioms", part 1:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/belaxioms1.pdf

I have only taken a short look and am not qualified to summarize, but it seems this would have an answer if there is one.