Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44949626

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Bezos cancels planned endorsement of Harris: 300,000 paid subscribers cancel in period up to election. (400,000 new paid subscribers over the period, but they offered significant promotional discounts)

Bezos tweets change to opinion policy: 75,000 paid subscribers cancel within four days

With in the order of 2.5 million paid subscribers before all this started that's significant losses.

Edit: Source is https://www.npr.org/2025/02/28/nx-s1-5312819/washington-post...

Look at the article currently promoted at the top of Post opinion page: "Trump is off to a good start with an AI action plan" https://archive.is/ERCme

Regardless of what you think of the quality of that opinion, it took very little effort to make.

Compare the sources they used to the work it would take go out on the ground and do novel research:

- Their own news article about it (itself based on press releases and an off-the-record comment that obviously would have come from someone in the White House press office assigned to promote the press release)

- Their own past opinion pieces

- Reuters.com

- WhiteHouse.gov

- Online govt statistics

- CNN.com

- NeurIPS' blog

- Columbia Business School blog

- Matthew Yglesias' blog

- Greg Lukanioff's blog

I could have found those sources based on vague memories of tweets I've seen by following journalists on Bluesky and a few hours of googling. I suspect they did the same, except they used X instead.

It feels analogous to what would happen if you put me in front of a broken project without source control that I've never seen before and asked me to fix it without giving me enough time to actually understand it. It starts from errors and bugs, guesses corresponding source code, and tries to narrowly fix just that snippet. Generally it favors deleting, but not specifically deleting new code.

I would have thought it could record a log of its actions and use that log to think about undoing. I would also think it could annotate lines with git blame so it knows undoing wouldn't involve changing anything more than say a day old. Unfortunately that isn't consistent with what I've seen.

I just make a WIP git commit and run git commit -A --amend --no-edit after manually reviewing each unit of work.

Edit: I also wish Claude implemented undo at a higher level instead of relying on the model. Some combination of snapshotting the whole repo and tracking operations that have precise inverses. But I understand that would have drawbacks.

Couldn't any modern AI model know that Zig docs are relevant to the question, figure out how to find the docs, write some code to parse it, and guess how frequently to update it's cache?

I expect there to be plenty of problems AI can't write for the foreseeable future but they have a very different vibe from this.

Edit: I just asked Claude Sonnet 4 to pretend it has a tool that makes docs available that has an update frequency parameter. It said the zig stdlib should be updated weekly but the Java stdlib would only need quarterly. Seems reasonable to me.

This is probably a dumb question but doesn't that require an SSL cert? Obviously the NSA can get someone to issue a cert for a domain they don't own but wouldn't that be visible?

Couldn't you have every user device log the SSL certs it sees to detect this attack? What about CT?

That's historic data

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42125818

Points: 21

# Comments: 5

Oxfam attempted to add up all the numbers in various PDFs linked on the World Bank's website and got a total that's less than the headline figure in the World Bank's press releases. (See the actual report at https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...)

Some of that is probably missing data and some of it reflects that headlines like "USA donates 1 billion" don't actually always result in the US making a bank transfer for a billion dollars. For example sometimes it's a simplification of a complicated loan.

Your comment reflects a common misconception about audits. When the books don't add up that doesn't show that money is actually missing.

I don't love analogies to personal finance but a better one would be to suppose you asked a random US citizen what they spent money on last month and then compared it to their bank account. They'd probably be wrong, and you probably wouldn't have enough information to know exactly how wrong they were because they didn't save all their receipts and so on.

*edit: this report provides no evidence money is missing. to be fair it doesn't disprove missing money either

That often involves recording original trigram position, but I think that's necessary to weigh "I like happy cats" higher than "I like happy dogs but I don't like cats" in a search for "happy cats".