I agree that the punchy staccato and the rhetorical questions smell AI-ish, but the way this person uses them, there’s, like, a payload each time. Versus LLM-speak, where the assertions are at best banal and more frequently just confusing.

https://economist.com/interactive/1843/2026/02/27/the-uttar-...

When I’m dealing with small businesses, I tend to explain my frustrations long before I cancel, and offer them a chance to fix them. Whereas with an off-the-shelf product, there’s no point: I say “just cancel my subscription please and thank you.”

I could see that being coded as “confrontational,” but more often than not, I and the vendor fix what’s bothering us and continue with our mutually beneficial relationship.

Oftentimes, I’m not the only customer with that pain, and fixing it with me has the happy side effect of making their product or service more attractive to others too.

By the time I do leave for good, that process has failed, so it doesn’t surprise me that there will be residual reasons for leaving…

Reminds me of rougher-and-readier days, when everything about online discourse felt more self-evidently… what’s the word… contingent? Provisional? Local? Playful, game-like, made-up? Afforded the seriousness of pub banter, rather than any kind of indicator of some broader Truth.

I think my point—which I apologize for putting a little snidely—echoed @rkomorn’s: I completely accept that you or “agencies” can manipulate HN’s proudly old-school mechanics. I just feel like our hangout here is less important in the scheme of things than we’d like to imagine it to be. At least to the sort of agencies who do that kind of work. They could, but why?

In that sense, maybe this is Facebook doing its part for domestic harmony…

For example, I had a reaction to their ethical objection:

> During our initial experiments with porcelain, we were immediately aware that the higher temperatures, and therefore electric consumption, were not compatible with our standards for ethical hardware.

If an ATMega IC is in bounds, would solar-sourced electricity be in bounds? Maybe accumulated in rust batteries if lithium is out for supply chain reasons? If you’re seeking to avoid electricity in general, would technologies like bellows and charcoal-making get you where you needed to be?

Of course—as they demonstrated—why do all that, when the local clay and stick fire work just fine! In that sense, my pre-conceived requirements would have gotten in the way of my learning what they learned.

So often we’re stuck so far down the road of “the way things are done” we forget how many of those technology choices reflect path dependence along the road to maturity, rather than the One True Technique… good on the authors for developing within different, human-scale production constraints.

'Decapitated bodies, death threats, that's our daily life': Tennis players, helpless targets of angry gamblers [ https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/08/decapita... ]

https://www.wtatennis.com/news/4288181/wta-and-itf-release-a...

When the vice industry kept gamblers mainly confined to their own community, it was ugly enough (see the “people with pipes” debt collection trope you refer to). I don’t care too much about how people get their jollies. But I don’t see much good in letting vice behaviors and motivations slop out onto the wider world uninvited.

To your question, then: I’d draw the moral line at “don’t base forecasting gambles on any indicator produced by someone who didn’t agree to be used that way.” If I—as the entity or constituency who incurs the cost to produce an indicator—want to hire the prediction market to run bets on it at arms’ length from me, fine. If not, no.

The burden should be on the gambling interests to prove they’re contributing value to a specific domain, not on everyone else in every domain to prove gambling’s specific negative externalities.

While I imagine it’s reasonable to assume “one vehicle per licensed driver” across much of America, that assumption seems much less reliable in NYC, where space is at an extreme premium and large families often share space. Can’t punish Mom for Dad’s speeding habit just because the car’s in her name. Plus, that doesn’t get Dad off the road!

And it doesn’t really seem cost-effective (or politically viable) to build out an elaborate appeal system to litigate which human was driving every single time. (Or to layer some kind of AI facial recognition onto the cameras. No. Bad hackers. :) )

I was of the impression that, in our golden age of individualized surveillance, merely interacting with the kiosk was enough to leave a facial-geometry calling card these days.

I feel like I may have heard this from one of those Illinois BIPA class action suits [0], which reliably have a whiff of crackpot to them from a technical perspective. But it surely seems an obvious enough sort of application…

[0] https://www.law360.com/articles/2372764/home-depot-s-self-ch...

https://status.claude.com/

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

”But first, before we get into Gas Town’s operation, I need to get rid of you real quick.

WARNING DANGER CAUTION

GET THE F** OUT

YOU WILL DIE

Let’s talk about some of the reasons you shouldn’t use Gas Town. I could think of more, but these should do.”

https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html#:~:text=there%2...

Governments and corporations controlled enormous mainframes far beyond the compute available to the hacker kid we were waxing nostalgic about, didn’t they? Not to mention the PhDs, the mountains of capital, and so on?

My money’s on team human.

It’s been a long time, but I thought there was a whole Raoult’s Law thing, about partial pressures in the vapor coming off the solution combining in proportion to each component’s molar fraction * its equilibrium vapor pressure (at that temperature, presumably). Or something.

Point being, if you’re starting with a bunch of volatiles in solution, there’d be quite a bit of smearing between fractions boiling off at any given temperature/pressure. And you’d be very unlikely to get clean fractions from a single distillation anywhere in that couple-dozen-degree range.

Probably mangled the description, but isn’t that why people do reflux columns?

> Convergent evolution is real. Every major GDS independently arrived at the same underlying platform. That is not coincidence — it is the market discovering the optimal solution to a specific problem.

I struggle to understand the claim that GDSes “arrived independently” at interoperability standards through “convergent evolution” and market discovery. Isn’t it something closer to a Schelling point, or a network effect, or using the word “platform” to mean “protocol” or “standard”?

Isn’t it like saying “HTML arose from web browsers’ independent, convergent evolution”? Like—I guess, in that if you diverge from the common standard then you lose the cooperative benefits—see IE6. And I guess, in that in the beginning there was Mosaic, and Mosaic spoke HTML, that all who came after might speak HTML too. But that’s not convergent evolution, that’s helping yourself to the cooperative benefits of a standard.

“The market” was highly regulated when the first GDSes were born in the US. Fares, carriers, and schedules were fixed between given points; interlining was a business advantage; the relationships between airlines and with travel agents were well-defined; and so on [0]. IATA extended standards across the world; you didn’t have to do it the IATA way, but you’d be leaving business on the table.

If anything, it seems like direct-booking PSSes (he mentioned Navitaire [1]) demonstrate the opposite of the LLM’s claim. As the market opened up and the business space changed, new and divergent models found purchase, and new software paradigms emerged to describe them. It took a decade or two (and upheaval in the global industry) before the direct-booking LCC world saw value in integrating with legacy GDSes, right?

…the LLM also seems bizarrely impressed that identifiers identify things:

> One PNR, two airlines, the same underlying platform.

> Two tickets, two currencies of denomination, one underlying NUC arithmetic tying them together.

> One 9-character string, sitting in a PNR field, threading across four organisations' financial systems.

[0] https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/airline-deregul...

[1] https://www.phocuswire.com/Jilted-by-JetBlue-for-Sabre-Navit...

> Read the whole piece. Not the first section. Not the first section and a skim. The whole thing.

...boy. Sure seems in tension with the claim that

> when the receipts are this good you don't need to editorialize. You just need to line them up and let people read.

tl;dr: Proton complies with legal process, and Proton Meet routes traffic through California.

And somebody paid for something they wanted to keep secret using a credit card in their name. The latter of which was disclosed via MLAT request, when the former came under investigation for terrorism.

Perhaps their Proton Wallet product might be of interest to the more discerning breed of alleged-terrorist...

I don’t follow how it’s necessarily selfish for the developer to reduce that.

There certainly are selfish ways to reduce support load, like making it harder to ask for help at all. But this way seems like the right way: listen to users’ problems and act to avoid them.

If your remedy causes more pain and frustration than the status quo, you’ll end up with more support load, not less.

Sure it’s greyer when the developer’s trying to sell something, but what does Signal gain from pushing notifications on users?

This seems to be about making the software humane and forgiving—meeting users where they are, not tricking them into something they don’t want.

Because it’s meaningless for what it’s being marketed for. It’s conceptually inverted. It’s a detector that will detect 100% of the stuff that doesn’t mind being detected, and only the dumbest fraction of stuff that doesn’t want to be detected.

No fault of the extremely smart and capable people who built it. It’s the underlying notion that an imperceptible watermark could survive contact with mass distribution… it gives the futile cat-and-mouse vibes of the DRM era.

Good guys register their guns or whatever, bad guys file off the serial numbers or make their own. Sometimes poorly, but still.

All of which would be fine as one imperfect layer of trust among many (good on Google for doing what they can today). The frustrating/dangerous part is that it seems to be holding itself out as reliable to laypeople (including regulators). Which is how we end up responding to real problems with stupid policy.

People really want to trust “detectors,” even when they know they’re flawed. Already credulous journalists report stuff like “according to LLMDetector.biz, 80% of the student essays were AI-generated.” Jerry Springer built an empire on lie detector tests. British defense contractor ATSC sold literal dowsing rods as “bomb detectors,” and got away with it for a while [2].

It’s backward to “assume it’s not AI-origin unless the detector detects a serial number, since we made the serial number hard to remove.” Instead, if we’re going to “detector” anything, normalize detecting provenance/attestation [e.g. 0]: “maybe it’s an original @alwa work, but she always signs her work, and I don’t see her signature on this one.”

Something without a provable source should be taken with a grain of salt. Make it easy for anyone to sign their work, and get audiences used to looking for that signature as their signal. Then they can decide how much they trust the author.

Do it through an open standards process that preserves room for anyone to play, and you don’t depend on Big Goog’s secret sauce as the arbiter of authenticity.

I hear that sort of thinking is pretty far along, with buy-in from pretty major names in media/photography/etc. The C2PA and CAI are places to look if you’re interested [1].

…and that is why I am “con.”

[0] https://contentcredentials.org/

[1] https://c2pa.org/ , https://contentauthenticity.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651