Among the first page and 2nd page (top 60) there is always atleast 1 post about how we're gonnna "take back the web" or make it back into some form of our 90s millenial nostalgia memories, self hosting, federated this or that, etc etc.
Meanwhile - Nothing changes, everything generally gets worse and younger generations come into the world with no memories of the 90s internet or the world before mobile devices or surveillence everywhere.
Applying for a job or apartment or anything today means creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc
I dont know the way out if there is one, I guess we can keep fantasizing and thinking about it. It just feels like it would be easier to get the earth to start spinning the other way sometimes.
The legalization and popularity of gambling is more than just an immoral activity that has negative societal effects. It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better.
Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing. If hard work or time doesn’t make your life better, then fate is just chance, and you might as well throw your money at something that has the possibility of making your rich, no matter how tiny that likelihood.
I bought a $120 book from Amazon a couple of months ago, internationally, and they sent the wrong book.
I told them, and they said they'd refund it, don't need to send it back, and they'd even add $15 credit.
The refund never arrived so a few weeks later I got in touch again and they said I need to send it back if I want a refund. They told me the previous CSR had lied to improve ratings. I asked who I can complain to and they said nobody and closed the chat. I reopened it, restarted the refund, it was accepted and then 2 hours later I got an email saying that unless I sent them ID my refund would be rejected and that I can "no longer contact them" about this refund. I ignored that email, sent the book back and got the refund.
Another time I bought a Samsung Fold and it cracked down the middle. I told Amazon and they said they'll refund it under warranty. I sent it back and got a warning that if I return anything else in "non original condition" I'd be banned. Even though it was a warranty return.
That level of service would have been totally unheard of for Amazon 5 years ago.
As someone with an electrician's ticket (non-practicing, but the exam was no joke), this is a "not-so-good" idea.
A 3kW inverter powering a fridge through extension cords (fridges/compressors can have serious inrush current). You can't just snake "yolo" cables through a house for anything drawing serious amps (say, more than 5).
I'm willing to bet zero impedance or insulation/continuity tests were done. I hope the inverter has the RCD protection included.
This "works" 99.9% of the time. Now multiply 0.1% by every person who sees this and thinks it's a clever hack.
Update: He's plugging an extension cord directly into the inverter's output terminals? A 3kW inverter at 120V can push 25A continuously (and likely no RCD in the path). That can melt a 10/15A cord. The inverter's own breaker (say, 30/40A) is there to protect the inverter, not the cord. The cord may "become" the fuse long before the breaker trips on an overload (it doesn't trip at 30A instantly, more like at 100-200A if it's equivalent to EU class B/C).
Update2: I'm against overregulation and panicing at every perceived threat, but I must say, I wouldn't mind an inspection taking a look for the sake of neighbors.
Update3: The PDF (https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0746/0415/1079/files/POW-L...) says that the AC input "maximum bypass overload current" is 40A. If he plugs the inverter into a wall outlet for charging/bypass, it will let his appliances pull 40A through a standard 15A socket. The main apartment panel will eventually trip, hopefully.
It’s pretty depressing to see every ostensibly American value be replaced by profit-driven utilitarianism. “It improves X problem marginally and it makes money, so why not?” seems to be the reasoning for just about everything anymore. No discussion of values, of the society we want to build, or anything else. That’s the world the tech industry is building.
> 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it.
This point seems obvious, but it's one topics I've had to coach many early career people on over and over again.
Many of the people who were having difficulties or heading toward PIP could be turned around by implementing a simple loop where they:
1. Ask their manager for the top priority, explicitly. Re-confirm the top priority every time you encounter a question about what to work on or new information that might change the situation.
2. Write it down. Put it somewhere visible. Check it every morning. Remind yourself about the top priority.
3. Do the top priority until it's done. Confirm that your manager agrees that it's done when you think it's done.
It sounds simple to those of us who internalized these loops early in our careers, but some people don't see it so clearly until it's laid out for them. They get distracted, go on side quests, take too many tasks from people who aren't their manager, or avoid their manager's requests in favor of a task they find more interesting.
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance
> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
— Garry Tan, Sept 03, 2025, YC CEO while defending Flock on X.
https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
I admire Garry but not sure why there can’t be a line that we all agree not to cross. No weapon has ever been made that was not used to harm humanity.
IMO the best you can do:
- Ship often to prod (don’t do theoretical work).
- Ship wins (as defined by generally acceptable metrics.)
- Have someone in management or a PM who is good at selling your wins
Even here, though, you will run into problems. There is always a new VP or leader looking to make an impact. Because you maintain the current systems your team is engaging in WrongThink and new VP has shiny new RightThink (AI, etc). As soon as your code hits prod you have “legacy” code.
New VP can make promises of future, theoretical riches that you can’t compete with, as you maintain the boring, current reality. Reality is not sexy or interesting. You’re in the old guard now.
A lot simply boils down to patronage. Making your higher up VP look successful and being in a position to move with them to their new company.
"Ordinary people—who watched their rent, groceries, and gas bills skyrocket—saw a profession more invested in protecting Democratic policy narratives than in telling the truth. The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust."
This post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 when the President was a Republican, the majority of all economists are Republican, but somehow this writer blames this on Democrats? The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust.
It seems like this post can be summarized as follows:
1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it.
2. If your manager doesn't have something in particular they want you to do, you should figure out what they will want you to do in the future, and make any necessary preparations so that it will be doable when they want it.
I'd say it's good advice. The only thing I would add is that managers and leadership are sometimes happy to be given something different than what they asked for, so long as it's still what they wanted at a higher level. This is risky, but success can be a fast track to respect and autonomy.
> In particular, we'd like to acknowledge the remarkable creative output of Japan--we are struck by how deep the connection between users and Japanese content is!
Translation from snake speech bs: We've been threatened by Japanese artists via their lawyers that unless we remove the "Ghibli" feature that earned us so much money, and others like it, we're going to get absolutely destroyed in court.
At the very least, these folks need to have their names permanently attached to this atrocity. These weren’t decisions made by “a corporation” - these people sat across a meeting room table and actually concluded that targeting breast cancer patients was an acceptable means to an end.
Lori A. Beer was the CIO at the time. Now at JP Morgan.
In 2010 WellPoint was found to be automatically targeting insurance policies of women with breast cancer for cancellation, using any pretext. Angela Braly was the CEO at the time, now at ExxonMobile. WellPoint was the second largest health insurer in the US at the time. This required a lot of business analysis and software development - and people had to realize what this code was doing. I’m guessing bonuses were paid on the back of the “savings” this generated.
The name gets me every single time. Always think it’s going to be about radio LoRa
I'm Swedish and if someone insists on doing a transaction using cash when Swish or card is available, I'd immediately start to wonder if it's for some kind of more or less shady reason, probably tax evasion at the very least.
The big question is what "society" he is talking about? Is it the "society" that includes all people, or the "society" that includes only rich people?
https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer
> Open Source
> Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for all of its files, including electronics and mechanical design files, firmware code, and the bill of materials. We hope that people will be able to repair, upgrade, and contribute improvements to their printers.
It's a nice hope, but they've conveniently banned being able to pay someone else to make parts for you, which will make it harder. Also, not Open Source. (Shared Source is still better than proprietary, but it's not F/OSS.)
> "It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal ..."
Are you sure this isn't impression you've gotten from isolated reactions involving a small number of individuals, perhaps just a single individual? I can't relate to the sentiment at all, having lived here for just over three decades and experiencing the popularity shift from cash to debit card. I can, in fact, not recall a single time ever that someone has divulged the opinion that they consider cash "dirty and criminal".
More than anything else the Swede's favor of debit card is the convenience. Second to that I would say is the security of not immediately losing funds if you misplace the card or it being stolen - it feels less risky carrying a debit card, in particular if you're the type who prefers having more than a few "tens" on you in case you'd need or want to buy something.
The EMV standard has long supported an offline transaction flow. AFAIK it was the default almost everywhere in Finland circa 2011, contactless there was almost always instantaneous. Digging into why that was compared to the invariable wait when using contactless in the UK revealed this flow.
The card has a variety of risk counters on it that allow it to securely decide whether an offline transaction can proceed, at least some of which are also exposed to the terminal which can have its own separate policy. I imagine internally the banks and payment gateways have a huge variety of internal related tuneables.
Some context might be useful here. I spent some time living Sweden not too long ago and Swedes practically don't use cash. It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal, to the point that most don't have any at all. Digital payments are very convenient and deeply integrated, so long as you have a local ID which allows you use the local payment system Swish etc.
This worked nicely until the tensions in Europe lead to more cyberattacks rolling in and suddenly you have people not being able to buy food, medicine, and so forth. Not too long after, there was a government advisory urging people to keep some cash reserves in case a larger cyberattack happens, but cultural habits at large are hard to change. This is of course a coarse simplification of the context, but might help understand this incentive a bit better.
Yeah, that's some Gestapo level business... or since they don't like that word, Stasi.
As in, there were loads of people in the DDR (East Germany, 1949-1989) whose job it was to read people's personal mail, along with the network of neighborhood snitches.
It’s pretty clear that ICE is the seed of a paramilitary force.
Love this. My https://llm.datasette.io/ CLI tool supports plugins, and people were complaining about really slow start times even for commands like "llm --help" - it turned out there were popular plugins that did things like import pytorch at the base level, so the entire startup was blocked on heavy imports.
I ended up adding a note to the plugin author docs suggesting lazy loading inside of functions - https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/plugins/advanced-model-pl... - but having a core Python language feature for this would be really nice.
The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has very short shelf life. I think AI will be huge, I don't doubt the endgame once it matures. But the bubble now, spending huge amounts on these data centers using debt without a path to profitability (and inordinate spending on these chips) is dangerous. You can think AI will be huge and see how dangerous the current manifestation of the bubble is. A lot of people will get hurt very very badly. This is going to maim the economy in a generational way.
Yeah, only Microsoft is allowed to indiscriminately scrape the web!
I somehow want both parties to lose.
He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.
UCSD this year said they are not taking any new math PhD students due to the fiscal situation. The world of academia is in more flux than I've seen in recent memory.
I wish I could find the original source on this, but I remember reading a tweet or blog that I thought had a really good metaphor for this kind of "male friend ribbing."
The metaphor went something like this: men making fun of each other are actuall y showing that they understand their friends deeply, because they know how to stab without hitting an organ.
That is - in order to make fun of someone without actually hurting them, you have to know which kinds of topics not to touch for any given friend. You skip the "your mom" joke for the friend with parent issues, and so on.
On the other hand, though, I have very often see my fellow enginerd types badly misread this dynamic. I've seen guys come onto an established team where some mutual teasing has evolved, then fall flat when they try to emulate that it - because they haven't yet earned the depth of relationship that makes it OK.
It kind of reminds me of another "nerd social fallacy" I've often observed, which I guess I'd name: "I can't be a bully." I think a lot of times people who've grown up dealing with bullying don't realize when they've become one. Sometimes the mutual teasing degrades into one guy just being a dick to the other.
What's the issue? Everything about this is normal and expected when prototyping new capabilities for DoD.
DoD intentionally pushes hard to get testable capabilities as early as possible to shorten feedback loops, understanding that features ancillary to the capability will be limited, stubbed out, or implemented using a stopgap that you would never use in production. This will all be cleaned up in the production implementation once everyone is happy with how the capability works. Basically an agile customer development approach, similar to what is used in startups.
In my experience, the fine-grained control and security features are never implemented in the prototypes. This can be extremely fussy and slow development that isn't needed to evaluate capability. It also requires a lot of customer involvement, so they usually aren't willing to invest the time until they are satisfied that they want to move forward with the capability. The security architecture is demonstrably the kind of thing that can be mechanically added later so DoD takes the view that there is no development risk by not implementing it in the prototype.
There may be fair criticisms of the system but it looks like the article is going out of its way to mislead and misrepresent.
Perhaps this is controversial, but I think this is a mostly male way of expressing affection.
Women observing this sometimes conclude that men are horribly cruel to each other.
I hadn’t heard the word countersignaling before, but it matches something I had observed many years ago.
My closest groups of friends always make so much fun of each other. We make negative comments about the worst traits about each other, the things that we are most self-conscious about… yet every time my friends make fun of me for something I worry about, I actually feel better and more comfortable with myself.
When I thought about why, I realized it’s because of the hidden message behind the ridicule of my longtime friends; they are telling me, “we are keenly aware of the worst qualities about you, and we love you and want to spend time with you anyway.”
There is comfort in knowing you don’t have to hide your flaws to be accepted and loved.
I think there's a crisis of ineffectiveness in Center-Left institutions
They are too deliberative, and take excessive time including voices of every stakeholder. So you don't just go do the "obvious thing". You cater to trying to listen to every voice in an effort to be as inclusive as possible. Committee after committee and an obsession with process. You can spend years placating NIMBYs and people living with their own alternate reality.
Meanwhile real people are suffering from lack of action.
This level of ineffectiveness just enables authoritarianism ("at least they get something done") and gets people to seek the private industry for their solutions.
Sadly I think you are mistaken to paint it as an irrational Israel lashing out - that's too generous.
I think it's quite the opposite - there has been a very clear, cold, calculated strategy - which is to use the conflict as an cover for doing what some in the government have always wanted to do ( and been quite open about it ) - which is to create a greater Israel - drive out all Palestinians from the river to the sea ( Gaza and West Bank ), as well as push to the river in the north into Lebanon and take more of Syria.
Those in government understand the potential reputation loss - but see that as temporary and something that can be managed under the protection of the US, while viewing the gain of territory as permanent.
I love RSS. I literally just bought an app on itch.io, and to my surprise the devlog page for it, which lists all the new updates, supports RSS. I love when it happens. [1]
RSS didn't stick for me until:
1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would miss stuff I actually care about.
2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing. Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles, OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50 unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio.
3. https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs.
I pay for Feedbin, and it's great.
---
1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.
Just in case anyone else parsed that sentence the same way as me, ati detected "quake" as the executable and changed things like texture quality etc to increase benchmark performance. Some people discovered this after they renamed the executable to "quack" and the image quality improved but the benchmarks were lower, proving that the ati drivers "optimised" by reducing quality.
Ati did not rename quake to quack as I originally thought from this! :)
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" all over again. I am appalled at how many people use Gmail, giving up their privacy, control over E-mail, and leading to an overly centralized system where our mail is controlled by 2-3 companies at most (about 30% of my spam comes from Google servers, they pretty much ignore abuse reports, and I have no way to block it, because they are "too big to fail").
Now we will get a slowly introduced proprietary encryption scheme that will pretend to be "open", but will be carefully controlled so that it is slightly broken for everyone except Google. Several years down the road we'll wake up in a world where people will be annoyed that you can't receive their E-mail and will tell you to "just use gmail".
Replace "Google" with "Microsoft" and "Gmail" with "Outlook" and it's the 1990s all over again.
Heh. Does anyone remember when almost 25 years ago ATI (AMD) caught manipulating the Quake III benchmarks by renaming the executables to ‘quack’?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230929180112/https://techrepor...
https://web.archive.org/web/20011108190056/https://hardocp.c...
https://web.archive.org/web/20011118183932/www.3dcenter.de/a...
https://github.com/triton-lang/triton/pull/7298#discussion_r...
> By disassembly of ptxas, it is indeed hard-coded that they have logic like: strstr(kernel_name, "cutlass").
> it is likely that, this is an unstable, experimental, aggressive optimization by NVIDIA, and blindly always enabling it may produce some elusive bugs.
I have a couple of older relatives with Macs, and every time you fire them up for the first time in a while (these people might go several months without using their computer) the Apple ID sign-in nagging is insane. It'll pop up the same sign-in notification a dozen times and seems to lock up the settings app until you deal with it. I usually think of myself as quite patient but when I see that little window it inspires strong feelings.
Consumer brand quality is so massively underrated by tech people.
ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand. That's worth 100x more than "product stickiness". They have 700 million weekly users and growing much faster than Google.
I think your points on Google being well positioned are apt for capitalization reasons, but only one company has consumer mindshare on "AI" and its the one with "ai" in its name.
What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.
What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure?
Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all, so their usage numbers are highly dependent on marketing. Google has massive distribution with world-wide brands that people already know, trust, and pay for, especially in enterprise.
Google doesn't have to go to the private markets to raise capital, they can spend as much of their own money as they like to market the living hell out of this stuff, just like they did with Chrome. The clock is running on OpenAI. At some point OpenAI's investors are going to want their money back.
I'm not saying Google is going to win, but if I had to bet on which company's money runs out faster, I'm not betting against Google.
The iPhone - and macOS too - used to be a paragon of simplicity.
Today the setup experience on a brand-new iPhone or Mac is abysmal. Entering the same username and password multiple times - then sometimes a different username and password - competing notifications, irrelevant feature nags, a popup from some random product manager about their pet thingy. Permission questions from some meddlesome privacy team about the feature you just said you wanted to turn on. Uncertainty about whether you’ll break something irreparably by “skipping” the expected setup path. A choice of several inscrutable interface modes because no one has the balls to commit to a single solution. Just terrible.
I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.
There's a quote from Bjarne Stroustrup showing it's not just Seniors having trouble:
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
This is exactly what's wrong with Apple's app store exclusivity. It's also what's wrong with mandatory notarization where regulations forbid that, and Google's plan to require developer verification.
Google is making it so sideloading APKs on Android is no longer possible. This is one of many great reasons why that should not happen.
FWIW, everyone who claims that Apple fundamentally needs the centralized ability to control apps on their platforms "for everyone's safety" -- despite how that obviously and repeatedly makes them become patsies for governments all over the world to enforce their censorship regimes -- are complicit in this stuff (in addition, of course, to the people who build it at Apple...).
Methinks this won’t be the last politically-motivated removal from Apple’s App Store; the more apps they remove then the more they weaken their own arguments about how a locked-in walled garden is in consumer interests.
Israel's response to Oct 7th has been a major blackpill.
Their strategy was, I think, as bad as it could possibly be. In fact, it really seemed, and still seems, like no strategy at all -- they lashed out wildly and extremely destructively, without a clear picture of what the post-war Gaza Strip will look like.
Hamas successfully baited Israel into a disproportionate response that killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, which played directly into the dynamics of guerrilla warfare where a strong state's extreme actions against a weak opponent undermine its legitimacy.
Walking into such a trap tends to be a real world-historical blunder for any nation.
Yet, rather than adapting, Israel's network doubled down with censorship campaigns, crackdowns on protests, and weaponizing "anti-semitism" accusations to silence critics -- actions that have all backfired. Now international support is collapsing, the EU is pushing sanctions, and the US is slowly distancing itself. Israel's best option right now is to end the war as quickly as possible, and devote all of its efforts to repairing damaged relationships and mitigating the war's effects, before isolation accelerates to the level of sanctions similar to those imposed on South Africa.
I'll also note that it's interesting how all sides seem to have lost. Hamas lost the shooting war, the people of Gaza have lost lives and livelihoods which may take more than a decade to rebuild, and Israel lost the information/media war so damn badly that it may genuinely not recover from this.
I think people are massively underestimating the money they will come from ads in the future.
They generated $4.3B in revenue without any advertising program to monetise their 700 million weekly active users, most of whom use the free product.
Google earns essentially all of its revenue from ads, $264B in 2024. ChatGPT has more consumer trust than Google at this point, and numerous ways of inserting sponsored results, which they’re starting to experiment with with the recent announcement of direct checkout.
The biggest concern IMO is how good the open weight models coming out of China are, on consumer hardware. But as long as OpenAI remains the go-to for the average consumer, they’ll be fine.
As you say definitions matter - so let's not invent hypothetical scenarios to dismiss points.
Israel was not arguing about the definition of 'acute malnourished'. The threshold for famine is 15%. The IPC said it had just hit 16% and was thus a famine. Israel was arguing that other data showed it was only 12.2-13.5% and therefore not a famine. When you get to the point of arguing "only 12% of the children are starving, not 16%" you probably shouldn't bother.
I'd love the current generation of POSs in power to die off naturally before those advancements will be applied, thank you.
The habit is in the 7th paragraph, after 2 images:
> Rather than trying to complete your task in 20 minutes, take this time to write down your thoughts, and a step-by-step action plan of what you think you need to do to finish your task. Then go home. Rest. A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day. Only you will be full of energy, together with a settled plan. No doubt you’ll accomplish your task before lunch.
It's wild to me how many people here use the "it's war, bad things happen" to justify the situation. Weird that it needs to be said, but this is why war crimes are a thing. Just because it's an armed conflict, doesn't mean anything goes.
There is simply no excuse for blocking the entry of food into a region wholesale. For that alone they should, at the very least, be an outcast in the international community. But here we are.
Always overlooked point in these pro/anti-spreadsheet discussions:
A spreadsheet gives you a DB, a quickly and easily customized UI, and iterative / easy-to-debug data processing all in a package that everyone in the working world already understands. AND with a freedom that allows the creator to do it however they want. AND it's fairly portable.
You can build incredible things in spreadsheets. I remain convinced that it's the most creative and powerful piece of software we have available, especially so for people who can't code.
With that power and freedom comes downsides, sure; and we can debate the merits of it being online, or whether this or that vendor is preferable; but my deep appreciation for spreadsheets remains undiminished by these mere trifles.
It's the best authoring tool we've ever devised.
EDIT TO ADD: the only other thing that seems to 'rhyme' with spreadsheets in the same way is: HyperCard. Flexible workbench that let you stitch together applications, data, UX, etc. RIP HyperCard, may you be never forgotten.
Not to be a downer, but even as someone very optimistic about technology and AI generally, "TikTok but AI" sounds like a societally terrible thing to try and create.
What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of.
I haven't seen comments regarding a big factor here:
It seems like OpenAI is trying to turn Sora into a social network - TikTok but AI.
The webapp is heavily geared towards consumption, with a feed as the entry point, liking and commenting for posts, and user profiles having a prominent role.
The creation aspect seems about as important as on Instagram, TikTok etc - easily available, but not the primary focus.
Generated videos are very short, with minimal controls. The only selectable option is picking between landscape and portrait mode.
There is no mention or attempt to move towards long form videos, storylines, advanced editing/controls/etc, like others in this space (eg Google Flow).
Seems like they want to turn this into AITok.
Edit: regarding accurate physics ... check out these two videos below...
To be fair, Veo fails miserably with those prompts also.
https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68dc32c7ddb081919e0f38d8e006163...
https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68dc3339c26881918e45f61d9312e95...
Veo:
https://veo-balldrop.wasmer.app/ballroll.mp4
https://veo-balldrop.wasmer.app/balldrop.mp4
Couldn't help but mock them a little, here is a bit of fun... the prompt adherence is pretty good, at least.
NOTE: there are plenty of quite impressive videos being posted, and a lot of horrible ones also.
To add to this & the Jobs interview - an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.
It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s.
There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company.
Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA
This was a pre-existing problem, even if reliance on LLMs is making it worse.
Naur (https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf) called it "theory building":
> The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results. The actual state of death becomes visible when demands for modifications of the program cannot be intelligently answered. Revival of a program is the rebuilding of its theory by a new programmer team.
Lamport calls it "programming ≠ coding", where programming is "what you want to achieve and how" and coding is telling the computer how to do it.
I strongly agree with all of this. Even if your dev team skipped any kind of theory-building or modelling phase, they'd still passively absorb some of the model while typing the code into the computer. I think that it's this last resort of incidental model building that the LLM replaces.
I suspect that there is a strong correlation between programmers who don't think that there needs to be a model/theory, and those who are reporting that LLMs are speeding them up.
One quote that really stood out to me:
> Rodney: The robots—they’re not embodied. I always say about a physical robot, the physical appearance makes a promise about what it can do. The Roomba was this little disc on the floor. It didn’t promise much—you saw it and thought, that’s not going to clean the windows. But you can imagine it cleaning the floor. But the human form sort of promises it can do anything a human can. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people—it’s selling a promise that is amazing.
Currently a one-man side project:
Last year PlasticList discovered that 86% of food products they tested contain plastic chemicals—including 100% of baby food tested. The EU just lowered their "safe" BPA limit by 20,000x. Meanwhile, the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe.
This seemed like a solvable problem.
Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent testing of specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid's snacks, whatever you're curious about.
Here's how it works: Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, get detailed lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn't reach its funding goal within 365 days, automatic refund. All results are published openly. Laboratory.love uses the same methodology as PlasticList.org, which found plastic chemicals in everything from prenatal vitamins to ice cream. But instead of researchers choosing what to test, you do.
The bigger picture: Companies respond to market pressure. Transparency creates that pressure. When consumers have data, supply chains get cleaner.
Technical details: Laboratory.love works with ISO 17025-accredited labs, test three samples from different production lots, detect chemicals down to parts per billion. The testing protocol is public.
So far a couple dozen products have received some funding, six products have been fully funded (five product results published, the sixth is at the lab as I write this!)
You can browse products, add your own, or just follow specific items you're curious about: https://laboratory.love
I had access to a preview over the weekend, I published some notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/29/claude-sonnet-4-5/
It's very good - I think probably a tiny bit better than GPT-5-Codex, based on vibes more than a comprehensive comparison (there are plenty of benchmarks out there that attempt to be more methodical than vibes).
It particularly shines when you try it on https://claude.ai/ using its brand new Python/Node.js code interpreter mode. Try this prompt and see what happens:
Checkout https://github.com/simonw/llm and run the tests with
pip install -e '.[test]'
pytest
Archivist here. Google is not an archive. Neither is Tumblr or Flickr or any other platform that might delete your content at any time. They're companies and it's their job to make money. This is why my profession exists. We don't make money, which is why we're not well funded, but we have a whole lot of training, technical knowledge, and professional ethics around saving information and making it accessible. If you want to preserve your records, talk to an archivist because you can't assume some faceless corporation will do it for you.
I wonder if it's a generational or cultural difference present in the comments here.
I am sympathetic to the author, and I also find video a bit invasive of privacy in a way that photos aren't.
I therefore find the (obviously common) attitude that videos are just "something you need to accept" quite alien, but I wonder how much of that attitude is just comments coming from a younger generation that have grown up with the idea that they're recorded all the time.
I'm old enough thankfully to have grown up without video being present, that's probably not true for someone 10 years younger than me.
There's also a big difference in my mind between, "You might be filmed on occassion" and, "A recording of this goes up on youtube every single week".
With the former you can still reasonably anonymous, with the latter you risk becoming a side character in someone elses' parasocial relationship.
> F-Droid is different. It distributes apps that have been validated to work for the user’s interests, rather than for the interests of the app’s distributors.
F-Droid's curation saved me at least once when I wanted to upgrade my Simple™ apps and couldn't find them in F-Droid anymore, which led me to learn that SimpleMobileTools was sold to a company that closed sourced the apps[1] and that there's a free fork called Fossify[2].
Had I installed these through Google Play, they wouldn't have cared about this particular change and I would've gotten whatever random upgrades the new owners pushed.
Each app store's policies have their pros and cons, but that's why it's so important to have a diversity of marketplaces.
[1] https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...
[2] https://github.com/FossifyOrg
F-droid has been stellar in steering the alternative app store environment over the past 15 years or so, and I'd heed their call on this.
A small call to any googler on the thread - put your support towards this internally. I understand the internal dynamics, and it may seem current option is best amongst imperfect choices, but in this case F-droid is right in that closing out anonymous (but good) software is a line crossed with peril for any open ecosystem. Today it's play store, tomorrow it will be the web, and that will have a significant negative impact on Google.
个人数据存储已经到来这一想法
美国人越来越认为合法体育博彩对社会有害
早已过时：亚马逊为何变得这么糟糕？
无需繁文缛节的912美元能源独立
Flock 的枪声检测麦克风将开始监听人声
我如何作为一名员工软件工程师影响科技公司政治
你在考虑监控？你应该有底线
我如何作为一名员工软件工程师影响科技公司政治（续）
平凡人眼中的经济学博士就业市场崩塌
我可以做的就是向前看——影响力的门槛
Sora 更新 #1
被要求在工作中做违法的事？这些软件工程师做了什么
被要求在工作中做违法的事？这些软件工程师做了什么（续）
LoRA 无悔
离线卡支付应在2026年7月1日前实现
Jeff Bezos 说 AI 处于泡沫期，但社会将获得“巨大的”利益
喷墨打印机与 DRM-free 墨水将通过众筹推出
离线卡支付应在2026年7月1日前实现（续）
离线卡支付应在2026年7月1日前实现（续续）
离线卡支付应在2026年7月1日前实现（续续续）
ICE 想组建全天候社交媒体监控队伍
ICE 想组建全天候社交媒体监控队伍（续）
Explicit lazy imports（明确的懒加载导入）
Jeff Bezos 说 AI 正在泡沫，但社会将获得“巨大的”收益（续）
LinkedIn 起诉据称抓取个人资料数据的软件公司
Jeff Bezos 说 AI 处于泡沫期，但社会将获得“巨大的”利益（续续）
econ PhD 就业市场崩塌（续）
社交焦虑并不是因为不被喜欢
Anduril 与 Palantir 的战场通信系统存在缺陷，军事备忘录称
社交焦虑并不是因为不被喜欢（续）
社交焦虑并不是因为不被喜欢（续续）
加州应该向休斯敦和达拉斯学习解决无家可归问题
How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized（以色列行动如何导致加沙饥荒）
In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information
Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cutlass" in it
Google Workspace Updates: Send Gmail end-to-end encrypted emails to anyone
Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cutlass" in it（续）
Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cutlass" in it（续续）
我花一天教长辈使用 iPhone
OpenAI 的上半年：收入43亿美元，亏损135亿美元
OpenAI 的上半年：收入43亿美元，亏损135亿美元（续）
我花一天教长辈使用 iPhone（续）
我花一天教长辈使用 iPhone（续续）
Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ
Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ（续）
Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ（续续）
Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ（续续续）
How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized（以色列行动导致加沙饥荒）
In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information（对 RSS 与可控信息源的赞美）
Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code
iRobot Founder: Don't Believe the AI and Robotics Hype（iRobot 创始人：别被 AI 与机器人热潮蒙蔽）
Ask HN: What are you working on?（September 2025）
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU
What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?
F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree（续）