Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | alex_young's commentslogin

One of my favorite episodes:

I set 2 timers for the same thing somehow. I then tried to cancel one of them.

  >“Siri, cancel the second timer”
  “You have 2 timers running, would you like me to cancel one of them?”
  >“Yes”
  “Yes is an English rock band from the 70s…”
  >“Siri, please cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 10 seconds on it”
  “Would you like me to cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 8 seconds on it?”
  >“Yes”
  “Yes is an English rock band from the 70s…”
Eventually they both rang and she listened when I said stop.

My favorite is when I ask Siri to set a timer and get back "there are no timers running."

My other favorite is when I ask Siri to set a timer on my watch and it does a web search.

My favourite is when I ask siri to stop the alarm(that is currently going off) and it decides to disable my morning wake up alarm but keep the current alarm going off.

“Siri stop”

“There’s nothing to stop”

> me, suddenly aware of how the AI takeover will happen


> "Stop" is a song by English girl group the Spice Girls from their second studio album, Spiceworld (1997).

At that point I would be very impressed if you could remember what the timers are for.

Helping my kid get ready for shower I had this exchange:

Me: "Text Jane Would you mind dropping down the robe and underpants"

Siri: Sends Jane "Would you mind dropping down"

Me: rolls eyes "Text Jane robe and underpants"

Siri: "I don't see a Jane Robe in your contacts."

Me: wishes I could drown Siri in the bathtub

It's wild to me that Apple got the ability to do the actual speech-to-text part pretty much 100% solved more than half a decade ago, yet struggles in 2026 to turn streams of very simple, correctly-transcribed text into intents in ways that even a local model can figure out. Siri is good STT, a bunch of serviceable APIs that can control lots of stuff, with the digital equivalent of a brain-damaged cat sitting at the center of it guaranteeing the worst possible experience.


Why do “prediction” markets benefit from bets over nominal sums? Isn’t the power of them based on the wisdom of crowds? Wouldn’t capping bets at say $1 be better than trying to hunt down cheaters?

Seems like they actually are less predictive if you can get more votes with larger amounts of money.


If the bets on a prediction market are capped, then even if you have a better-than-average prediction (for example, if are an expert on the topic the prediction market is about), you can't bet any more than a layman. So a prediction market with capped bets will always be less accurate.

Or taking a longer timeframe: if you think you are a great forecaster but aren't, and are very stubborn, with capped bets you might get to keep trading forever. With uncapped bets you lose all your money and can't trade anymore, leaving the markets to the people who are better than you at forecasting.


Headline is misleading.

Should be something like tech employment rate of growth is lower than it was in 2008 or 2020.

There are many many more tech workers than at either of those points.


Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions, and AI is probably .1% to .5%, but sure, stop using LLMs. That will solve the problem.

> Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions

The majority of which is methane, which only has a 7-12 year life. Which means — unless for some reason you started eating way more animals than you did yesterday — that your emissions today simply replace your emissions from 12 years ago. In other words, it is a stable system, unlike carbon, which basically sticks around forever.


But aren’t we doing just that? Many more people eating more meat than ever before?

Methane has a shorter shelf life, but is far more potent, meaning that any increase is worrying, and decreases could have a dramatic impact.


I'm not. If you are, well, I guess you can't control other people.

Yes, what a bright future where we feed our bodies with a soy slop, and our brain with AI slop.

Indeed lets tear down forests to build soya fields for all that fake meat tofu.

But the real meat requires much more soy for animal feed so it's still a better choice.

You must have been misinformed, they tear down forests to grow soya to use as feedstock (mostly for beef). Nothing to do with fake meat tofu, quite the opposite actually.

The point stands.

"I'm not going to stop openly blaming vegan products after learning it's actually beef manufacturing that consumes all this soy" or how should one read this comment?

What was your point? My point is that if more people were vegan there would be less deforestation. Instead of eating the beef that eats the soy, you eat the soy directly, which is much more efficient. It's unclear if you think it's false or if you had a totally different point.

Why bring the vegans into that when they are the ones consuming the fewest resources?



A mechanical trackpad is like an unpowered treadmill iirc. Sometimes they ship with a gimbal mount so you can scroll more than one direction.


This explicitly says "Multi-Touch trackpad for precise cursor control and support for gestures", so at most it's the clicking action that is mechanical (rather than the click being faked with haptic feedback, as it is on the current models)


A war? Of course not. It’s a major combat operation. Only congress can declare wars. We haven’t had any in decades. They should call it the Dept. of Major Combat Operations.


Isn't the currently trendy term "special military operation"?


That's reserved for those lost 200,000* of personnel dead.

* Only verified number with real losses dead higher and even more crippled.

https://en.zona.media/article/2026/02/24/mapofwar


Aged quickly


The USA never even declared the Vietnam "conflict" as a war, or Korea, come to that, though that did at least have the backing of the UN.


It's not just the US, very few wars have been formally declared after WW2, because we all learned war is bad™, so we added more and more rules (both international and national) to make it harder to do it.

But the reasons wars existed didn't go away, so this just resulted in more and more people getting killed in "special military operations" or similar things. See e.g. "Why States No Longer Declare War"[0].

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228896825_Why_State...


That article says that nowadays countries no longer declare war, because now there are a lot of international treaties that restrict what may be done during wars.

Not declaring war provides a workaround, allowing the states to do whatever they desire, without constraints, while avoiding being accused that they do not observe their obligations assumed internationally.

Seems plausible.


As soon a country agrees to enter a conflict on a side, which the original axes declare to be a war, it's at war. You can tell the media whatever you want of course.


The US didn’t declare war since WW2 because such a declaration would give the president disruptive powers (such as the power to seize factories).

In fact, after Vietnam war congress specifically created a law to restrict hostilities without congress approval to up to 60 days, which is what the current (and prior) administrations are acting on.


The occurrence of a war is a fact whether or not it is declared, and whether or not the actor waging war does so consistent with the legal requirements their nation's laws put on doing so.


I like Special Military Operation better.


It's not that “I can detect AI” posts sound more templated than the writing they’re critiquing, it's the clankers are learning from it and adapting.


its not that i cant detect your AI detection, its just that i cant watch you quietly do it.


Coding is an abstraction. Your CPU knows nothing of type safety, bloom filters, dependencies, or code reuse.

Mourning the passing of one form of abstraction for another is understandable, but somewhat akin to bemoaning the passing of punch card programming. Sure, why not.


Your entire brain's model of the world is an abstraction over its sensory inputs. By this logic we might as well say you shouldn't mourn anything since all it means is a minor difference in the sensory inputs your brain receives.


We always are. And yet, number go up.


Tell that to Adolf Merckle.


Data centers in space are a hilariously bad idea. Where would the heat go? This idea is like the opposite of liquid cooling.


Shocked to see SpaceX buy the datacenter in space meme. Where does the power come from? Where does the heat go? Why add (high) launch costs to your buildout capex? Why add radiation as another risk factor to your already-unreliable GPUs? Am I missing something fundamental here...?


Money! Also power source is just solar - not too difficult. I don't think radiation would be too much of an issue either since they're in low earth orbit. Heat is probably the biggest problem. Or manufacturing & launch costs. Pretty silly idea anyway.


Aside from Elon Musk, there are a few other people with a lot of capital aiming to do the same thing. That means, either they are all wrong (possible) or this problem has been solved somehow and the solution itself is not public.

Google and Amazon are doing the same thing. Maybe it is a moonshot (pun intended), but Musk is hardly alone in the push.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...


Not to mention the huge issues of cosmic rays. Sure, if the lifespan of the satellite is expected to be low, then maybe tolerable. But even then, how would this be financially viable?


Only a person who is high as a kite can think thats a good idea.


I didn't say it was a good idea, just that if Musk perceives it's a good idea then it makes sense why he would want to combine the two businesses.


I think it's far more likely that he wants to combine his businesses to roll his really expensive, debt-ridden companies into one entity with the company that actually reliably makes money.


Some guy on hacker news argued they could just use radiators.


Radiators might be a reasonably effective way to reject heat if you can run your AI machines at 1000 K or thereabouts.


Indeed. But it's also a hilariously Musky idea! Some moderate technical competence paired with sociopathy and an ego orders of magnitude too big, and voila, you get Cybertrucks, Hyperloops, Neuralinks, Teslabots, datacenters in space, and all the other garbage the man spews.

I cannot wait for him to one day be hit in the face by reality.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: