Still, this idea bears merit for other reasons. Americans routinely underestimate how much money is spent on Social Security, healthcare, and debt payments, and overestimate how much money is spent on education and infrastructure. More clarity into that could help build real political momentum to actually balance the budget.

I’m no security engineer, but this is flatly unacceptable, right? This feels like Vercel is covering its own ass in favor of helping its customers understand the impact of this incident.

Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.

Crazier question: what’s wrong with a well-intentioned surveillance state? Preventing crime is a noble goal, and sometimes I just don’t think some vague notion of privacy is more important than that.

I sometimes feel that the tech community would find the above opinion far more outlandish than the general population would.

But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.

Also, I don't think their depiction of John Adams's representation of the British soldiers is accurate. From what I can tell, Adams sought only to give his clients as strong a legal defense as possible. In the trial, he called the American protestors a "mob", gave a racist depiction of one of the victims to justify the soldiers' panic, and ultimately saw all but two soldiers acquitted. Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.

But I don’t think this makes much sense anyways. The hotel industry is not one that thrives from repeat patronage, and “the bathroom has no doors” features rarely in marketing.

Most MCP servers are just wrappers around existing, well-known APIs. If agents are now given an environment for arbitrary code execution, why not just let them call those APIs directly?

This seems to be a problem specific to AI. No one casts startups that build off of blockchains as thin, nor the many companies that were enabled by cloud computing and mobile computing as recklessly endangered by competition from the maintainers of those platforms.

The reality is that applying AI to real challenges is an important and distinct problem space from just building AI models in the first place. And in my view, AI is in dire need of more investment in this space - a recent MIT study found that 95% of AI pilots at major organizations are ending in failure.

Unfortunately, having a very high ratio also makes systems much more vulnerable to collapse during periods of economic downturn, which is exactly what BART has been dealing with since ridership collapsed during Covid.

I'm no expert in this topic (in other words, I just asked Claude this), but AFAICT part of the reason Japanese rail systems did better appears to be that they are owned by diversified companies that own numerous other assets, like hotels, restaurants, and office complexes.

> OpenAI remains Microsoft’s frontier model partner and Microsoft continues to have exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity

This should be the headline - Microsoft maintains its financial and intellectual stranglehold on OpenAI.

And meanwhile, while vaguer, a few of the bullet points are potentially very favorable to Microsoft:

> Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties.

> The revenue share agreement remains until the expert panel verifies AGI, though payments will be made over a longer period of time.

Hard to say what a "longer period of time" means, but I presume it is substantial enough to make this a major concession from OpenAI.

Over the past year, AI copilots like Cursor and Windsurf have fueled a dramatic shift in software engineering workflows. And yet, many technical users in adjacent fields like data science and analytics have been unable to reap the rewards of this revolution.

It turns out that the existing tools are a poor match for analytical workloads. Beyond that Cursor and similar tools have very poor support for Jupyter notebooks, data science is a fundamentally different discipline from software engineering and we believe it requires a correspondingly different tool.

We're excited to announce the launch of Sphinx to fill this gap. Sphinx is a data-native AI copilot for Jupyter notebooks. Unlike existing copilots, Sphinx understands that data science often requires an experimental, exploratory approach.

Some highlights of Sphinx's capabilities: - A fully agentic loop, able to break tasks into discrete steps and implement them cell-by-cell - Able to create and read charts and graphs to guide its next steps - Fluent in working with common data connectors, like Snowflake, Databricks, and databases - Full MCP integration, and large outputs can even be processed programmatically as data directly in the notebook

To make it as easy as possible to use, Sphinx operates on ordinary Jupyter notebooks and is available as a simple VSCode extension with a generous free tier.

Excited to hear what you all think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45181926

Points: 6

# Comments: 2