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

Past time.

I’m sure it will go as well as the countries that used crypto for their currency.

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.

The study found that young people were growing less hopeful and more angry about the technology, even though around half of the demographic was using AI either daily or weekly.

“Even though”? I would argue “because of”. They’ve used AI enough to know that it’s inconsistent and unable to actually do their jobs, but it’s either being used to justify layoffs or as a cudgel to push you for unrealistic increases in productivity. Maybe the AI will one-shot a prompt and save you a bunch of time or maybe you’ll spend three times as long rewriting prompts in the hopes that the next time will do the trick.

Moreover, people like me explicitly avoided management as a career path. I wanted to do the work that got me into the field to begin with, not manage a bunch of people to do it for me. Now everyone is a middle manager, just of the world’s most frustratingly inconsistent employee who never learns and doesn’t respond to anything other than you asking again but in a slightly different way.

For everyone except C-suite executives and shareholders, this is a fucking nightmare. The Jetson’s envisioned a future where productivity gains increased so much that an employee worked two, one-hour days a week, doing nothing more than pushing a button. Instead we have people working ridiculously longer hours to clean up AI slop, and burning out in the process, leading to being laid off or outright fired, meaning your income drops to zero.

From the article:

Because she works in the medical field, she decided to create a condition related to health and hit on the name bixonimania because it “sounded ridiculous”, she says. “I wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania — that’s a psychiatric term.”

If that wasn’t sufficient to raise suspicions, Osmanovic Thunström planted many clues in the preprints to alert readers that the work was fake. Izgubljenovic works at a non-existent university called Asteria Horizon University in the equally fake Nova City, California. One paper’s acknowledgements thank “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise”. Both papers say they were funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”.

aEven if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”.

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.

Large tech companies have a history of providing an API, and then copying or cloning any integrations that are successful. I’m shocked people still continue to provide free product/market research for these massive companies. If you have a valuable idea, the company you built it on top of will steal it.

At least the creator of OpenClaw got hired by Anthropic; Cursor is still struggling to justify its existence after Anthropic jacked up its rates and provided a direct competitor.

Third party services are not optimized in this way, so it’s really hard for us to do sustainably.

If these companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars by providing a service to third parties can’t make money providing that service to third parties… how is that not flashing red lights and screaming sirens on Wall Street? If you’re making a ton of money using their service, they’ll steal your idea to try and stay alive. If you’re not making money, they will cut you loose before you burn more of theirs. It really is that simple.

He’s too busy shrugging off Russian intelligence sharing with Iran to help Iran target and kill American soldiers. Not nearly as disrespectful to our troops as that time Obama saluted a Marine with a coffee cup in his hand.

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

Spoiler alert: This country had roughly the same amount of integrity and ethics prior to 2016. The only difference is that Trump gave everyone who gave lip service to integrity and ethics permission to unmask and expose their hypocrisy. To those people, ethics was just a weapon to tie the hands of the few people who actually had strong values.

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.”

Presumably you had some point that you were trying to convey with your comment, which is going to get lost by the people who will see it as simply victim blaming. The tone of this reply and your other comments suggest that you’re fine having an abrasive personality and care more about some sense of being right than constructive criticism, so I’ll just leave it there and wish you a good day!

Didn’t think I had to spell this out, but in all three cases it’s victim blaming. Men blaming women for being raped, white people blaming black people for being shot by the police, and the previous poster blaming people for getting caught in shitty contracts by predatory companies. On a scale of severity they’re in completely different universes, but that’s kind of the point of an analogy: to use a more extreme example to illustrate why something is wrong.

Edit: And to be clear, this comment was not addressed at your comment, but the poster who replied to you.

I get where you’re coming from so I won’t downvote, but I thought you might want to know that this has some real “men shouldn’t rape women, but women shouldn’t dress slutty or get drunk” or “police shouldn’t shoot black men, but black men should just comply” vibes.

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.

They’re heavily subsidizing the costs to gain users who otherwise probably won’t be interested in the service at a sustainable cost. Every company is hiding their inference costs, but it’s clear that every user is currently burning far more than they’re generating in revenue. The hope is that inference costs will go down, and while that’s a fairly safe bet, there’s two problems:

1. Frontier model companies are burning cash so fast, they’ll run out long before economies of scale will make the costs affordable.
2. Even if the per-token inference costs have gone down, almost every technique (thinking, large context windows, etc) to improve AI performance has involved increasing the number of tokens used. Total query cost is easily outpacing any decrease in per-token inference cost.

Even worse, models themselves are becoming commodities. Although users seem to have preferences for one model over others, there’s still not really a good way to benchmark them. Without a clear ability to differentiate models on performance or ability they’re completely interchangeable, which lowers margins. Why pay more to run company X’s latest and greatest, when company Y’s last generation performs almost identically?

The reason the web was able to cover costs with advertising is because the cost to serve a web page was minimal. A bit of networking gear and a couple servers was all you needed to serve a large website. For many sites, you didn’t even need premium hardware, just a cheap, basic PC with an Internet connection. Lots of people ran free hobby websites with minimal cost. Hell, you can run a website on a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi.

By contrast, AI needs huge GPU clusters to respond to a prompt. A four year old H100 GPU will cost around $30,000; typically 8 of those are clustered together in systems that cost more than $300,000. I can’t even find costs for current generation B100 GPUs or B200 clusters, only cloud rentals. Serving an AI model is orders of magnitude more expensive than serving a website.

providing an essential academic counter-narrative to the rampant demonization of one of fascism’s most ardent enemies.

That seems awfully generous for a man that signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and only became an ardent enemy of the Nazi’s after they backstabbed him. I don’t have the time to energy to dive deeper before saying this sounds like one hell of an apologist for one of history’s most evil authoritarians and I have no desire to engage with it further. This man did not care for his comrades and anyone that equates him with any form of socialism is just poisoning socialism in the general public.

You’re not wrong, but I think you’re really missing something important - that we’ve seen some truly ugly and disturbing shit that we can’t ever unsee. Yes, we’re surrounded by negativity on the Internet, and Mr Rogers advice holds: look for the helpers. That restores some of my faith in mankind, but I can’t ever unhear that kindergarten teacher who was willing to turn in her student’s parents because she suspected they might be here illegally. Could I make small talk with her and feel a little more normal? Sure. Do I think the majority of people are like her? No. But… that knowledge is there, the banality of evil is still alive and lurking.

Steve Shives explains it much more eloquently than I ever could, but I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to devote 15 minutes to a random YouTube video from an internet stranger. I do highly recommend it, as it really encapsulated exactly the kind of sentiment I’m struggling with.

They went from human-derived slop to AI slop years ago. The fact that they looked at that “success” and doubled down is what’s so amazing.

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.”