Jesse Frederik, a smart Dutch journalist, has arguedthat locals greatly exaggerated the harmfulness of the earthquakes.

I really appreciate the author making their bias this obvious.

This community is literally just an RSS feed of Hacker News?

If I had an employee that fucked up as often and confidently as LLMs do, I would terminate their employment. I don’t have the time or patience to redo all their work because I can’t trust them. If a brand had quality issues at as high a rate as LLM output, I would avoid buying anything related to that brand.

A human being or company can make some amount of mistakes and that’s completely understandable, and I think it’s perfectly fair to hold LLMs to that standard. That said, with a human being I can stress how important some task is and they don’t double or triple check their when it is that important, I can not and will not trust them. If I tell a company “hey this is important to me”, they will usually make extra effort to make sure it’s correct, and if they fail to do so, a decent company will make an extra effort to make things right. An LLM will offer an empty apology and spew more bullshit at me that I still have to verify.

The fact that AI gets things right often enough for you is great. Maybe I have higher standards, maybe I need higher quality output, or maybe I have trust issues. Everyone has a different threshold. Just because yours is much different than the people here doesn’t mean their opinions are invalid, and the way you dismiss everyone’s opinions and insist that it’s good enough makes you seem just as insufferable and ignorant as you accuse others of being.

The fact that LLM output has improved is great, but it is still so far from meeting much less exceeding my threshold that it’s beyond frustrating to keep being told over and over that “no bro, it’s good now”. I’ve been hearing that for over two years and it’s still not close to where I would trust it to answer questions, much less perform actions on my computer with access to my personal data.

You need to learn that some people are different than you and understand where they’re coming from if you want to have an “interesting discussion… about this topic”, rather than getting frustrated that people don’t agree with you and rage quitting.

At the currrent revenue rates for AI, that would put the upper bound well into the 2030s; I’m hoping it pops much more quickly than that.

Insider Trading as a Service?

It’s real.

Don’t forget Paris!

I’m reminded of when the co-founder of Uber announced that he was close to a breakthrough in theoretical physics with the help of an AI.

3.342294e-13 to 5.34767e-13 AU.

Wyden said in a statement that it was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”

Past time.

By leaving they gave up all their special exceptions, and rejoining would mean that they have a worse deal than the one they had when they got fed up and left the EU. It’s like they’ve been looking at Trump’s Iran strategy.

If only she had more than a decade of evidence that Donald Trump was a pathological liar that didn’t just spilt hairs, deflect, or cite misleading statistics like most politicians, but actually told complete fabrications on easily disprovable subjects where there was ample evidence that he was making shit up completely.

Predictable the HN comments are full of people raving about how amazing Tesla FSD is. On one hand, it is genuinely magical that you can get into a car and engage the technology and watch the car drive itself without incident. I took a Waymo in San Francisco a few years back as part of a group and it genuinely felt incredible to be picked up and dropped off without any human intervention.

On the other hand, the same is true for drunk drivers; that someone who can’t even stand up or answer basic questions can somehow pilot a vehicle home without crashing is kind of astounding. There are people who do this regularly without crashing or getting caught.

In neither case would I trust either of them with my expensive car, much less my even more precious life, much less the priceless lives of my family. Human beings are bad drivers and we don’t trust them - we mandate they carry liability insurance for this very reason.

Eventually I may trust the technology enough to support it and use it, when I see cold, hard data that it performs as good or better than a sober, attentive driver. I don’t think we will ever see that from Tesla, who consistently over-promise and under-deliver, to the point many people would consider it fraud.

People are terrible at assessing risk, and the fact that people are willing to trust their lives to a system that can fail in unexpected ways at any point because it once completed a single trip without incident are proof of this. Even bad drivers go many miles and many trips without any issues, and they drive in all weather conditions without any geographical restrictions.

Have you ever seen someone in a relationship with someone (often abusive) who they’ve built up a fantasy of their partner and fully believe that person to be the same one as the ideal they’ve crafted in their head? And they ignore clear red flags, make apologies and excuses for that person, and heartily swallow any and all lies that person tells as a way of holding onto that fantasy? And then when they finally snap, reach a breaking point and that person turns on them and they see them for who they really are and tell themselves that the person changed because they can’t face the idea that they were complicit in that person’s behavior and don’t want to believe they were capable of enabling them? This is the political version of that.

He’s the same but unfiltered. Which you can argue is a change, but the underlying personality and (complete lack of) values are the same. He’s always turned on sycophants for the slightest reason, he’s always ranted delusionally, he’s always been a narcissist who cares about petty and meaningless awards, he’s always been a corrupt grifter, he’s always full of threats and bravado who chafes at any restrictions on his impulses, he’s always been a shitty deal maker whose only tactic is escalation and starts out so aggressive he doesn’t leave himself any room to negotiate, he’s always been racist and misogynistic, he’s always been stupid, ignorant, and incurious but still believes he’s smarter and more knowledgeable than anyone else.

None of those qualities changed. The only things that have changed are:

• His dementia has gotten worse and his grasp on reality has weakened.
• He’s now completely surrounded by sycophantic yes men who won’t question or push back on his worst impulses.
• He’s faced so few consequences for his craziest impulses and corruption that he no longer feels any constraint, which is exacerbated by the previous two points.

May never recover? 80 years ago, Germany was split in two and the depths of the holocaust were still sinking into the worldwide consciousness. Given enough time, it absolutely can recover. Probably not in my lifetime, but eventually it might. Or maybe it’ll end up like Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, or the nation of Taiwan. Wait, that last one hasn’t happened yet… forget I said anything.

Kaley Chiles has a Master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, and is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Licensed Addiction Counselor in Colorado.

A bunch of places had that information but not the actual college(s) she earned her degrees at. Her LinkedIn has her education, but I don’t want to log in to view it. I did see the logos and they confirm this information that I eventually tracked down:

Denver Seminary, Master of Arts, Clinical Mental Health, 2014

Dallas Baptist University, Bachelor of Arts, Biblical Studied and Psychology, 2012

GitHub VP of developer relations Martin Woodward explained in a post on X later in the day Monday that Copilot inserting ads into PRs isn’t actually new behavior - it’s been doing so in the ones it creates for a while.

That’s… worse?!

“I understand everyone is upset that we’re grinding up little girls to lubricate our machinery, but we’ve been grinding up little boys for years to do that. Still, we’ve heard you and will stop grinding up little girls. For now.”

The last US hijacking was in 1990, when a hijacker claimed to have a bomb but it turned out later it was a fake. Before that, in 1987 a man threatened to start a fire using a cigarette lighter and a packet of chemicals. There was one in 1983, and a couple in 1980, but the majority of them happened prior to 1973 when basic security checkpoints were instituted.

There were no notable hijackings in the US between 1990 and 2001.

The reason 9/11 was so successful is because people expected it to be like historical scenarios where the hijackers make a little threat, get the plane diverted, and no one dies. Back then, a hijacking was seen as something like an unruly flier today - a little scary, but not too much more than an inconvenience.

After 9/11, people realized that planes could be used as guided missiles by dedicated actors. That the goal is no longer to get attention, but to plow a jet loaded with fuel into any structure in the US. Everyone realized that allowing an attacker to take control of the aircraft was a potential death sentence to everyone on board, not to mention any targets on the ground.

To counter this threat, they instituted two positive reforms: bulletproof, locking cockpit doors, and armed air marshals. No longer would pilots respond to a threat in the cabin of the aircraft, allowing the attackers to control the plane directly or indirectly, and an air marshal on board can eliminate any actual threat to passengers.

Hijackings didn’t stop in response to TSA security theater. There was already a drastic reduction after basic and minimal security measures were introduced at the airports in 1973, and by the 1980s they were super uncommon and after 1990 they had already vanished.

TSA security theater also didn’t stop casual hijackings, as many previous hijacking’s used the threat of fake bombs or fires, something that enhanced security will do nothing to prevent. Instead, it was the stakes of hijacking that escalated, meaning any casual threat is treated as the worst case scenario and dealt with as such. Any would-be hijacker knows that they can’t get to the cockpit, and even if no air marshal is on board or thinks that they can subdue them, knows that the passengers will assume they’re all going to die and attack them.

Ironically, TSA security theater doesn’t actually do what it was intended to do - stop another 9/11 style attack. There are so many instances of security failing to do its job; their failure rates should be absolutely terrifying to anyone who believes they’re actually protecting us from hijackings as firearms and knives frequently make their way onto planes. All it does is inconvenience travelers and make simpletons feel safer, while costing us civil liberties and taxpayer dollars.

The actual, effective reforms were cheap and invisible. The TSA screening at the airports is a bullshit waste of time and money. If anyone wanted to do a mass casualty event with a bomb, they’d get to the middle of a crowded TSA security line and detonate rather than try to board a plane.

MAGA: “We hate DEI because it means they’re not hiring the best people for the job.”

Also MAGA: “Only people loyal to MAGA will get employed.”