When I was 11, on 17th Nov 1989, in Czechoslovakia, my father was watching the evening news on our (black and white) TV, as usual.
There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"
This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical difficulties..
AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level.
I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'T let the machines write the code. Yes, they can write the code: you are a student, the code isn't hard yet. But you HAVE to write the code.
Correct. In the US, the TSA is just a government jobs program for the lowly skilled or unskilled. It's all security theater.
TSA Chief Out After Agents Fail 95 Percent of Airport Breach Tests
"In one case, an alarm sounded, but even during a pat-down, the screening officer failed to detect a fake plastic explosive taped to an undercover agent's back. In all, so-called "Red Teams" of Homeland Security agents posing as passengers were able get weapons past TSA agents in 67 out of 70 tests — a 95 percent failure rate, according to agency officials."
Airtag is the reason of why I stil have my favourite hand luggage.
I had just sat down on the train from Zurich to Basel. Suddenly, someone sat down in front of me. He looked suspicious, but I didn't pay much attention. Just before the train departed, he picked up what I thought were his belongings and left.
Twenty minutes later, already on the way to Basel, I looked toward where I had left my suitcase. It was gone. That was when I realized that the person who had sat in front of me was a thief.
However, he hadn't counted on the fact that I have an AirTag in every backpack and suitcase.
So I was able to see where the thief was and where he was moving. I considered going to retrieve my suitcase myself, but while traveling back to Zurich, I called the Zurich Police and, as the thief kept moving, I told them where he was.
Twenty minutes later I received a call from the police informing me that they had found my suitcase with my belongings, matching the description I had given.
This just adds confusion as to the purpose of all this.
The motivation behind the liquid limits is that there are extremely powerful explosives that are stable water-like liquids. Average people have never heard of them because they aren’t in popular lore. There has never been an industrial or military use, solids are simpler. Nonetheless, these explosives are easily accessible to a knowledgeable chemist like me.
These explosives can be detected via infrared spectroscopy but that isn’t going to be happening to liquids in your bag. This reminds me of the chemical swipes done on your bags to detect explosives. Those swipes can only detect a narrow set of explosive chemistries and everyone knows it. Some explosives notoriously popular with terror organizations can’t be detected. Everyone, including the bad guys, knows all of this.
It would be great if governments were more explicit about precisely what all of this theater is intended to prevent.
So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.
I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department[0][1] as a cost savings measure and claiming developers will do their own QA (long before LLMs were on the scene). It started in 2014 and the trickle never stopped.
Microsoft has a cultural problem; it went from an "engineers" company to an MBA directed one, trying to maximize short-term shareholder value at the cost of long-term company reputation/growth. It is very common and typical of US Corporate culture today, and catastrophic in the long-run.
Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
The company can brag that their formulation has a special blend of herbs and spices, but someone who wants to can obviously make their own special formulation and say that theirs is secret too.
More importantly, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And there is nothing particularly special about WD-40's formulation anymore. WD-40 consistently performs worse than nearly any other available penetrating oil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUEob2oAKVs It's a terrible long term lubricant (because it's designed to evaporate, it actually concentrates gunk and grime).
WD-40 themselves have come out with improved "Specialist" formulations that mostly just copy other, superior products.
It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there.
This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result.
Of course this becomes a different thing outside of learning, where delivering results is more important in a workplace context. But even then you still need someone who does the high level thinking.
Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time.
Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable. We’ve got phytolith [1] and microwear [2] studies showing unambiguous evidence of woodworking going back at least 1.5 million years. Wood tools just don’t survive very long, so this find is most notable for its preservation.
My experience with using AI tools for code review is that they do find critical bugs (from my retrospective analysis, maybe 80% of the time), but the signal to noise ratio is poor. It's really hard to get it not to tell you 20 highly speculative reasons why the code is problematic along with the one critical error. And in almost all cases, sufficient human attention would also have identified the critical bug - so human attention is the primary bottleneck here. Thus poor signal to noise ratio isn't a side issue, it's one of the core issues.
As a result, I'm mostly using this selectively so far, and I wouldn't want it turned on by default for every PR.
I need to applaud the efficiency and moxie of the Zurich / Swiss police service.
In America, the UK, Canada, etc they'd tell you to fill out a report that nobody would ever read, and also advise you it's probably unsafe to go pick it up yourself.
And importantly the DoJ attorneys who would be responsible for investigating g the murders resigned because they were prevented from performing the standard procedure investigation that happens after every single shooting. They were instead directed to investigate the family of the person who was shot:
We are through the looking glass, folks. This will be dropped and ignored like so many other outrages unless we demand answers from Congress, and hold SCOTUS responsible for partisan abdication of their constitutional duties.
Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality.
A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated one. It might have had actual facts, but overall, my trust in Gemini's response to my query went DOWN after I noticed the AI generated video attached as the source.
Countering debasement of shared reality and NOT using AI generated videos as sources should be a HUGE priority for Google.
YouTube channels with AI generated videos have exploded in sheer quantity, and I think majority of the new channels and videos uploaded to YouTube might actually be AI; "Dead internet theory," et al.
I would just like to point out that Michael Reeves (the poster, no relation to youtuber) is a high schooler who has also found numerous high impact vulnerabilities in Apple software. Immensely talented.
> It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later.
Somewhere, there are GPUs/NPUs running hot. You send all the necessary data, including information that you would never otherwise share. And you most likely do not pay the actual costs. It might become cheaper or it might not, because reasoning is a sticking plaster on the accuracy problem. You and your business become dependent on this major gatekeeper. It may seem like a good trade-off today. However, the personal, professional, political and societal issues will become increasingly difficult to overlook.
Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs.
Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
I've been moderately happy this morning to find out I can open hackernews. Also Gmail is working. After attempting to get bridges using email and configuring an dozen of them I got 100% connection but then it disconnected without me being able to connect to anything.
I would assume some sort of tunneling must be possible cause the services available are varied and not limited to a few websites (We only had access to Google Search for about a week and nothing before that) now even Nintendo Store opened to my complete surprise.
The fundamental issue preventing keyring aperture integration stems from the AirTag’s reliance on inverse-phase magnetic reluctance in the structural substrate.
You see, the enclosure maintains a precisely calibrated coefficient offramular expansion. Introducing a penetrative void would destabilize the sinusoidal depleneration required for proper UWB phase conjugation. The resulting spurving bearing misalignment could induce up to 40 millidarkness of signal attenuation.
Apple’s engineers attempted to compensate using prefabulated amulite in the magneto-reluctance housing, but this only exacerbated the side-fumbling in the hyperboloid waveform generators. Early prototypes with keyring holes exhibited catastrophic unilateral dingle-arm failure within mere minutes of deployment.
Until we develop lotus-o-delta-type bearings capable of withstanding the differential girdle spring modulation, I’m afraid keyring integration remains firmly in the realm of theoretical engineering—right up there with perpetual motion machines and TypeScript projects that compile without any // @ts-ignore comments.
The technology simply isn’t there yet.
People want a simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except the user. Windows 11 is a very, very long way from this.
Honestly Windows 95 is closer to ideal than Windows 11.
> A good manager is more like a transparent umbrella. They protect the team from unnecessary stress and pressure, but don’t hide reality from them.
I'm absolutely going to steal this metaphor going forward.
Being a "transparent umbrella" does require knowing the personalities of your reports, some people do get distracted when they think higher-up decisions or unhappiness are going to affect their team. Most people, however, really appreciate the transparency. It helps them feel more in control when they know what is happening around them, and when things do change they can tie it back to something that was said previously.
From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their undergraduate affiliation (in accounting) to submit a paper on cosmology, entirely vibe-coded and vibe-written. This just wastes our (already stretched) time. A significant fraction of submissions are now vibe-written and come from folks who are looking to 'boost' their CV (even having a 'submitted' publication is seen as a benefit), which is really not the point of these journals at all.
I'm not sure I'm convinced of the benefit of lowering the barrier to entry to scientific publishing. The hard part always has been, and always will be, understanding the research context (what's been published before) and producing novel and interesting work (the underlying research). Connecting this together in a paper is indeed a challenge, and a skill that must be developed, but is really a minimal part of the process.
Doesn’t surprise me. I frequently shop at Amazon Fresh in store and it’s a mediocre experience. It’s a poorly run store with no visible manager making sure things are in order. You constantly have to work around employees fulfilling online orders and they aren’t helpful. I always find expired groceries/produce on the shelf so I have to spend a lot of extra time inspecting each item. The only reason I put up with their nonsense is that some of their prices are insane and they have easy returns, for example $0.85 for a box of Barilla pasta. They actually don’t accept returns in store and just refund you automatically in the app (Returnless returns). It’s pretty silly and rife for abuse.
I also found a loophole with the Amazon.com return grocery credit. The systems are separate for the $10 off $40 coupon and you just scan a QR code in the store to get it. It turns out you can just take a photo of their QR code and reuse it over and over again.
there is actually a science change that happened, and it's not (entirely) just politicians changing their mind.
The big thing going from X-ray (2d) to CT (spin an X-ray machine around and take a ton of pictures to recreate a 3d image) did a lot to let security people see inside of a bag, but the hitch is that if you see a blob of gray is that water, shampoo or something else?
The recent advance that is letting this happen is machines who will send multiple wavelengths of X-ray through the material: since different materials absorb light differently, your machine can distinguish between materials, which lets you be more sure that that 2litre is (mostly) water, and then they can discriminate
There was a protest and the state media was reporting on it. When the reporter said, "our camera broke down and we can only show black and white pictures", my father IMMEDIATELY jumped up and angrily said, "that's bs, you don't want to show how they [the protesting students] got beaten up [by the police]!"
This was an interesting life lesson. So yeah, sure, technical difficulties..