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Yes, I say this every time this topic comes up: it took many years to finally have mainstream adoption of client-side interactivity so that things are finally mostly usable on high latency/lossy connections, but now people who’re always on 10ms connections are trying to snatch that away so that entirely local interactions like expanding/collapsing some panels are fucked up the moment a WebSocket is disconnected. Plus nice and simple stateless servers now need to hold all those long-lived connections. WTF. (Before you tell me about Alpine.js, have you actually tried mutating state on both client and server? I have with Phoenix and it sucks.)

> We can expect videos of unpopular minorities, doing horrible things

Expect? You can post a random image of an unpopular minority, add some caption saying they did horrible things, that is not reflected in the image at all, and tons of people will pile on. Don’t even need a fake video.


What people tend to forget or dispel is that everything in society is based on trust. You can of course try to test every new fact for soundness with all the facts you already know, but fundamentally you need to trust something and in the end it just becomes a function of how much you trust the messenger. Undoing trustworthiness is a big issue and will lead to a lot of unrest in society.

The reason you are not murdered today is not, because murder is hardly punished or hard to do, it is because most people aren't murders. If they were, we wouldn't be able to suppress it with force, we would simply live in hell.


>What people tend to forget or dispel is that everything in society is based on trust

Trust seems to have been completely erroded on the internet. Majority of the mainstream sites feed users "news" posts from unverified unknown accounts. Its bad, we need a way to get back a base level of trust.


For some reason this hurts worse.

I was listening to James O’Brien on LBC, and [IIRC] he said he was serving jury duty with a woman who was convinced that Volodymyr Zelenskyy had spent hundreds of million of dollars on a super-yacht.

He asked if she had any evidence for that claim, and she produced a picture of a boat.

He said “That’s just a picture of a boat.”


Ironically, there is no evidence that woman ever said that.

There is, in fact, evidence that hundreds if not thousands of random people have said that: https://xcancel.com/KimDotcom/status/1729171832430027144

Perhaps you could even find that specific woman leaving an outraged comment over photos of boats if you looked hard enough!


Yes, but in that story, parent only has the word of that Journalist. I personally don't even have that, I only have a post about it.

My deeper point is that it's arguably very difficult to establish a global, socially acceptable lower threshold of trust. Parent's level is, apparently, the word of a famous Journalist in a radio broadcast. For some, the form of a message alone makes the message worthy of trust, and AI will mess with this so much.


Whether you trust the word of the journalist has little relation to the story. The "socially acceptable lower threshold of trust" is not static for all stories; it changes depending on the stakes of the story.

Non-consequential: A photo of a cat with a funny caption. I am likely to trust the caption by default, because the energy of doubting it is not worth the stakes. If the caption is a lie, it does nothing to change my worldview or any actions I will ever take. Nobody's life will be worse off for not having spent an hour debunking an amusing story fabricated over a cat photo.

Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything. The factor from the story that might influence your worldview is the knowledge that there are people in the world who are so easily swayed by false captions on photos, and that itself is a trivially verifiable fact, including other people consuming the exact photo and misinformation from the story.

More consequential: Somebody makes an accusation against a world leader. This has the potential to sway opinions of many people, feeding into political decisions and international relations. The stakes are higher. It is therefore prudent not to trust without evidence of the specific accusation at hand. Providence of evidence does also matter; not everything can be concretely proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We should not trust people blindly, but people who have a history of telling the truth are more credible than people who have a history of lying, which can influence what evidence is sufficient to reach a socially acceptable threshold of trust.


The point about the stakes is a good one. But there is an individiual factor to it. And maybe it's exactly because of the stakes you mention: if you perceive your personal stakes to be low, or might even gain something out of redistributing the message, no matter if fabricated or not, your threshold might be low as well.

> > Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything.

> The point about the stakes is a good one. But there is an individiual factor to it.

Indeed. The so called "trivially consequential" depends on whether you're the person being "mis-informationed" about or not. You could be a black man with a white grandchild, and someone could then take a video your wife posted of you playing with your grandchild, and redistribute it calling you a pedophile, causing impact to your life and employment. Those consequences don't seem trivial to the people impacted.

True story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/20/family-in-fear...


This is a complete and total misrepresentation of what I said. The key point here is that the "accused" in the trivial story is anonymous. They are fungible. Their identity is irrelevant to the story; it is merely an anecdote about the fact that a person like this exists, and people who exhibit the exact same behaviour as them verifiably do exist, so there is nothing to be misinformed about. A tangible accusation against a specific individual is completely different, and obviously is consequential.

Who cares about a single or two Yachts. Ukraine likely made 100 billion USD disappear and there were many people expecting just that. Just like some of the "donated equipment" started showing up on all sorts of black markets once it was shipped to Ukraine. It's just the obviously controlled media in Europe that stopped mentioning Ukraine's corruption issues right after February 2022.

Obviously I can only be a Putin-loving propaganda bot for saying such things.


Everybody is aware the Ukraine has major corruption issues. It is frequently covered in the media and is common knowledge.

I have no doubt however that Europe (and hopefully the wider world) is less worried about that corruption than they are about Russian military aggression. And there will be some level of media focus on that – rightly so, where the focus should be on grinding the Russian kleptostate into dust as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

You're not a propaganda bot; you're just making their lives easier.


Where does the corruption come from?

It comes from an old culture that Ukraine is trying to remove themselves from, hence the large amount of corruption charges we see.

The same culture is incidentally what makes Russia one of the most corrupt countries in the world.


If you're happy with your tax euros disappearing in Ukraine, good for you.

I know for a fact via family ties that major newsrooms in Germany received instructions to tune out the corruption angle once the war started. I'm sure it's all nothing though and that Putin will find himself in Poland next year. Of course!


What's your point though? There's corruption in Ukraine. Ok.

There's corruption in your country too, do you refuse to pay taxes? Or do you still pay them because some good comes with the little bad? Same deal.


If sending hundreds of billions of tax payer money to a known oligarch run cleptocracy is comparable to some German conservative party affiliate making a couple of millions using shady COVID mask deals is comparable to you, I rest my case.

It's all corruption in the end so who cares, right?


Two things can be true at the same time - we don't want Russia to absorb Ukraine and then further threaten the eastern border of the EU, and we don't want Ukraine to be corrupt.

And in the Ukraine we see that the corruption is uncovered punished, even if it is in the direct circles of the president.

There are problems in uncovering it, but the attempt to get rid of corruption is a big factor in the whole situation and one of the things Russia fears.

For Russia a corrupt system was a lot simpler to influence and Ukraine showing how a partially Russian speaking country, where people moved back and forth, fighting corruption was a threat to the system.


> to tune out the corruption angle once the war started

Oh man, wait until you hear about what’s going on in the US, we’re experiencing corruption to a degree you can’t even imagine.


this is true, my dad is Volodymyr Zelensky

Corruption in Ukraine is constantly in the news. https://www.economist.com/search?q=ukraine+corruption&nav_so...

Ukraine was, and is still, one of the most corrupt developed countries in the world. Whether it is slightly more or slightly less corrupt than Russia I do not know. Both are Oligarchic in nature. In my opinion one of the reasons the various peace deals have not succeeded yet is because they fail to acknowledge the Oligarchic nature of both states and that they will both need to continue in that mode going forwards, probably as a frozen conflict or in a system where it is in neither interest to disrupt the balance (because it would end the corruption, pocket-lining, theft, etc). Of course for the ordinary unfortunate Ukrainian, well he/she matters little or not at all to rulers on either side.

Hah, Kim Dotcom is still around? In the 90s he was bragging that he's this super hacker that made millions, his website posted pics of parties, cars, girls, and yachts, and it turned out those were bought/rented using swindled investor money (ironic that he's accusing Zelensky of the same crime). Then he became a sort of hero when the US/NZ governments Team 6-ed his house for the crime of aiding copyright infringement.

Now he's a Putin/Trump apologist...


Still around and at a huge cost to the New Zealand taxpayer - people used to have some sympathy but public opinion turned against him years ago. His extradition was declared ok, long overdue he was put on a plane and made somebody else's problem.

The people of New Zealand should be mad at the illegal tactics used by the FBI and GCSB. And why should he be extradicted to a country he never visited?

But a fake video has a much greater effect that can even prompt companies or gov orgs to take action in response (as in this case).

In fact, this is already happening on a daily basis.

IA ain't the problem here, so called social media are.


Well, some news organizations are more than willing to spread fake news as well, so it's hardly limited to social media. I think it's just in-group vs out-group mentality, and a need to hate.

It was not happening on a daily basis on Twitter before Elon Musk. The endless flow of racism and bigotry on that website is a choice.

It's convenient to blame the amorphous thing "social media" instead of the actual people responsible. There are only a handful of them: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.

And stopping it is simple. It's a choice.


It was, but it wasn't pushed into everyone's filter bubble.

In my opinion, this isn't a problem of AI. the people who get deceived by this are willing participants in the lie. When proven wrong, they will fall back to the echo chamber and rely on it to give them more false facts. They won't seek information outside of their own circle. They cannot be understood as merely passively misinformed. They are actively lying to themselves.

What you'll tend to notice with "willing participants" is that they're not looking for truth, they're looking for confirmation. No-one asks for proof when you tell them what they want to hear.

> You can post a random image of an unpopular minority, add some caption saying they did horrible things, that is not reflected in the image at all, and tons of people will pile on.

We call this journalism and this is a respectable profession. /s


> "It's just not. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests." Talented students get to college, start struggling, and run for a diagnosis to avoid bad grades.

Okay, I was an undergrad at Stanford a decade ago, I graduated with two majors (math, physics) and almost another minor (CS) so I took more credits than most and sat in more tests than most, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single person given extra time on tests; and some of the courses had more than a hundred people in them, with test takers almost filling the auditorium in Hewlett Teaching Center if memory serves. Article says the stat “has grown at a breathtaking pace” “over the past decade and half” and uses “at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years” as a shocking example, so I would assume the stat was at least ~10% at Stanford a decade ago. So where were these people during my time? Only in humanities? Anyone got first hand experience?


They go to other rooms. I had several friends who would not be around during the exam days. On a high stress day like final exam day it's hard to notice but they were definitely gone (so like 1-2 people in a 20ish person class). UC system, mid 2010s.

> So where were these people during my time?

Testing accomodations are generally done at a separate time. So students with an accomodation requiring a low distraction environment or extra test time would all take their test after the main test takers.

This came with the dual advantage of providing an alternate time for students who had excused absences to take the test as well.

TLDR: You don't normally see the students with accomodations during tests unless you also have an accomodation or you had a conflict with the test time/date.


Most of my courses beyond freshman year were 10-20 people where I basically know everyone (unless they never come to class), so I would know if they weren’t showing up at exams. I’m pretty sure if these people were evenly distributed I would notice every exam for every class missing 1-2 people. So this is not it.

It really depends on the environment tbh. I know just for the "low distraction environment" accomodations, those normally aren't used for small classes but they are used for the big exams where they stuff the entire freshman class in the program into a series of auditoriums.

And of course some professors do double time accommodations by having the students take the test with everyone else and then follow the teacher to their office to finish the exam afterwards but tbh I didn't see that very often.


Really? Even the CS140 series had hundreds of students. I don't think I remember any CS class that had fewer than 70 students.

At another university I once had extenuating circumstances preventing me from taking an exam in one of the main exam halls. I was invited to take it in a normal classroom, where a session was being held at the same time for people who get additional time. I was able to start later and still finish with the normal allowance but without having a chance to collude with other students.

Or it wasn't diagnosed, defined, or the diagnosis wasn't good. Doesn't mean that they weren't there.

TFA is specifically about students claiming disabilities to get extra time on tests. I’m saying from first hand experience that I didn’t know a single instance of anyone getting extra time on tests, and wondering where those alleged instances were occurring. Anything that “wasn’t diagnosed, defined, or the diagnosis wasn’t good” (huh?) has nothing to do with the 38% stat, or anything else in the article, really.

Guess that’s the flip side of selling sometimes three to four years old hardware with zero price cut (I know they’ve been doing better in the M-series era)—the price also stays there when it’s skyrocketing elsewhere.

Sounds like you don't know the CJK font market. AI assisted font design is nothing new and especially useful for CJK since there are so many glyphs. There are plenty of foundries openly advertising AI-assisted fonts, e.g. https://izihun.com/fontxiazai/ziti-2673.html

Also, generating images and programs are basically orthogonal. AI could generate impeccable photorealistic images of clocks years ago, and they're much more complex than font glyphs (specifically talking about transferring a style to other glyphs; you still need to do the initial design to get something appealing, obviously*).

*Edit: Maybe AI can even handle the initial design now, not sure. What I’m saying is AI-assisted style transfer in CJK fonts is definitely old news and commercially available.


Those fonts look awful in a hard to describe way. Font uncanny-valley? I feel like a barcode reader trying to OCR meaning out of ink blots.

Those fonts are completely indistinguishable from the average cartoon/artistic font from the 2000s which are definitely not created by AI. I don’t like most of them, but I don’t like most of the human-designed ones either. Plus AI-assisted fonts in CJK often means hand drawing a couple hundred characters, maybe more, then generating the thousands of remaining characters (I assume the current crop of SOTA models could change that, but these fonts have been going around for a while), so the odds are what you see in the samples are mainly or maybe even completely human-generated.

I do not know the market well; very interesting, thank you.

My Windows 11 Pro installation is helpfully stuck on 23H2 since every time it attempts to install a newer version it simply gets stuck on a black screen and requires a forced power cycle and subsequent auto-restore, wasting forty minutes in the process.

Golang builds pulling a github.com/foo/bar/baz module don't rely on any GitHub "build workflow", so unless you mean they're going to start restricting or charging for git clones for public repos (before you mention Docker Hub, yes I know), nothing's gonna change. And even if they're crazy enough to do that, Go module downloads default to a proxy (proxy.golang.org by default, can be configured and/or self-hosted) and only fall back to vcs if the module's not available, so a module only needs to be downloaded once from GitHub anyway. Oh and once a module is cached in the proxy, the proxy will keep serving it even if the repo/tag is removed from GitHub.


Wrong. Wheels were available long before pyproject.toml, and you could instruct pip to only install from wheels. setup.py was needed to build the wheels, but the build step wasn’t a necessary part of installation and could be disabled. In that sense its role is similar to that of pre-publish build step of npm packages, unless wheels aren’t available.


Not only do we not call coworkers losers or monkeys when they fuck up, I don’t think I’ve seen this when telling mean jokes about competitors in private conversations either. Individuals who are jerks about people you don’t like tend to also be jerks about you behind your back, and we don’t want that, so we don’t it.

If your workplace has a lot of name calling, consider the possibility that it may be unusually toxic, and the possibility that you’re making it toxic.


Well at least he's being a jerk on his own blog here, so it's easy to ignore. I've seen instances of him unreasonably lashing out without the decency of understanding others' writings first on third party properties. A quick search turned up https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-libc-taking-a-dependency-on... can't remember the details of other instances.


Nothing to see there, sorry.


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