People really really want LLMs to output a highly reliable finished product, and I suspect we're probably never gonna get there. Lots of progress over the past couple years, but not on that.
I think it's much more interesting to focus on use cases which don't require that, where gen AI is an intermediate step, a creator of input (whether for humans or for other programs).
Frustratingly I can't recall specific examples, but in the past year there have been several major discussion-worthy tech stories I've seen on The Verge or wherever, and I come to HN a couple hours later and there's either literally nothing or the post got zero interaction. Strange!
A ton of the early discourse about ChatGPT was as an outright Google killer. It mostly hasn't really panned out that way; there's some overlap but the web ain't dead yet. If nothing else, search is a necessary input to the machine.
Still, nice that Google has woken up, even if the search result quality hasn't improved much.
I can't be the only one that will reach for ChatGPT first over Google for most of my search needs. Stuff like looking for recipes, guides on how to do certain things. From a user perspective, ChatGPT is 100% a Google killer. Search engines may still be powering the AI (for now), but if we aren't exposed to their ads, that's a losing proposition for the incumbants.
Fentanyl is a fascinating market case study because nobody actually wants fentanyl, they want oxycodone or heroin.
It's the "market data reveals that consumers actually want the cheapest shittiest airplane tickets" of drugs. And you can read that in a couple different ways.
> VisualC++ doesn’t have its source code available
Got all the way here and had to look back up to see this post was from 2019. The MSVC standard library has been open source for several years now. https://github.com/microsoft/STL
Though to be perfectly honest, setting a breakpoint and looking at the disassembly is probably easier than reading standard library code.
I was working at MS at the time and actually had access to the source code (my project involved devdiv). I don't remember the exact details, but I opted for not adding any of my "private" knowledge to the post.
I agree with you that I prefer looking at optimized assembly with symbols rather than following code through files (which are usually filled with #ifdefs and macros).
As STL (nominative determinism at work) points out in the r/cpp thread about this, even when that git repo didn't exist you could have gone to see how this template works because C++ has to monomorphize generics somehow and that means when you write shared_ptr<goose> your C++ compiler needs to compile the source code for shared_ptr with the T replaced by goose.
There are tricks to cope with C++ macros not being hygienic, layered on top of tricks to cope with the fact C++ doesn't have ZSTs, tricks to reduce redundancy in writing all this out for related types, and hacks to improve compiler diagnostics when you do something especially stupid. Do its maintainers learn to read like this? I guess so, as it's Open Source.
It's certainly a socially weirder thing to do, but honestly I think someone playing music on their phone is probably less annoying/distracting than people having a loud conversation, which is far more common.
Space aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.
The recent article on the WOW signal is "Arecibo Wow! II: Revised Properties of the Wow! Signal from Archival Ohio SETI Data" https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10657 by Abel Méndez, Kevin N. Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (and many others)
This is a follow up to a September 2024 paper (the article you link is November 2024)... "Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal" by Abel Méndez, Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, Jorge I. Zuluaga (just those three).
How? We don't know gods exist. We know beings with technology and agency living on planets in space exist. There seems nothing at all similar between the two explanations.
Planet. Man has reach the moon (not in my lifetime) but that isn't a planet. There are robots out a little farther but so far as we can be sure only one planet has life. (you can calculate odds of others but there isn't enough data to be confident)
In the ancient view of the cosmos, God/gods, the heavens and other divine beings were part of the same universe. They were literally above the Earth, but made of a different kind of substance. Or down in the depths.
At some point more this shifted to the divine being an entirely separate supernatural domain.
I doubt they'd be all that unfathomable. We come from the same universe after all, and as far as we can tell it's all governed by the same physics. It stands to reason that life on their worlds would have developed under at least some of the same rules we developed under on Earth. That should put at least some constraints on their forms and functions.
They might have learned different things than we have, they might know a lot more about our universe than we do, but I'd guess that much of what we've managed to learn so far will still be a part of their reality regardless of their level of familiarity with it. For example, more than 90% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen. They might have discovered things that are more exotic and never seen on Earth, but the hydrogen atoms we've studied won't be any different from hydrogen they'd have studied. We share a home. By the time they've figured out enough of how the universe works to reach us it's pretty likely that we'll have some common ground to talk about.
Apple is big and rich enough that surely it could operate its own carbon offset program, rather than simply throwing money at unreliable third parties. Buy the land, why not?
