Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | dash2's commentslogin

“ With SPRINT, we're not just building an X-plane; we're building options”. Found the guy who couldn’t be bothered to write his own press release…

I'm quite fond of the caption, which describes a "a proof-of-concept technology demonstrator that aims to demonstrate technologies and concepts"

Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

I think I'd rather have them working on airplane tech rather than writing airplane tech press releases. With this approach, it's not just a tactical thing; it's relieving the burden of wordsmithing from technical people.

The technical people were never wordsmithing, they just didn't hire a technical writer. Instead of freeing up someone to do more design work, it freed someone to interview for a new job. I hope they get it.

> The technical people were never wordsmithing, they just didn't hire a technical writer. Instead of freeing up someone to do more design work, it freed someone to interview for a new job. I hope they get it.

Do technical writers work on press releases? This sounds more like a job for the public relations/corporate communications department.


It was a GPT.

Or, at least, my take on GPT. :) I promise I am a human.

You're absolutely right.

Good to hear that the DoD's new contract with OpenAI is solving all the most important problems...

It's a quote from someone...?

... who probably wrote their prepared PR statement with an LLM.

I have always talked/written like this. now that LLMs do it in a similar enough way, my own writing gets called AI slop. I just wish my rotator cuffs knew I was a robot.

It's probably good signal at least, if not a bit of a harsh thing to say that I don't mean in a bad way, that your writing was bland or mediocre since LLMs are basically regression to the mean.

Skimping on the service again, are we?

It feels like DARPA has fallen so far. In a post-Salt Typhoon era it's really hard to imagine them as dynamic, best-in-class innovators anymore.

This administration doesn't really prioritize anything that has to do with intelligence, so advanced research was obviously going to fall by the wayside.


What are you saying? Do you think my claim was that all US research programs have closed up shop?

No search results for "Salt Typhoon" as the query. This nation really is fucked.

Here is my fun mini-project:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kaien/id6759458971

I wanted a way for my kid to learn the alphabet, but without a UI that looks & behaves like a slot machine. It's all maximally slow, relaxed and designed to be easy to put down.


I think you are missing the joke.

Great! All my projects will now break because it instantly becomes impossible to download from the previous version.

You can still install old versions going back to the 90s [0]. If you specifically want to update/install a package on a current installation of TeX Live 2025, you just need to run

  tlmgr repository set https://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2025/tlnet-final
(You can replace that URL with any of the historic mirrors in [0])

[0]: https://tug.org/historic/


LyX is cool but it was still just on top of TeX. typst is much more fundamental.

But they explicitly discuss it!

I wouldn't mind a quote, because the paper was incredibly hard to read, full of hedging, and never seemed to get to the point.

OK, there's this section:

> The Question of Decoration.

> Recent studies have measured the regularity of notches on bones to determine whether they are more or less visually striking as a decoration. Increasing the regularity of distances between notches—up to the differences just about perceivable by humans—is argued to enhance the decorative value. Such technological and experimental analyses are useful to thoroughly understand the production processes behind a given mobile artifact. On the other hand, categories such as “decoration” and “numerical system,” or “decoration” and “writing system” are not mutually exclusive. Rather, sign systems can be used as decoration without losing their information value. This is exemplified in historic times by calligraphy, inscriptions on pottery and temples, tattoos of graphemes on human bodies, and many other artistic expressions. “Information density” in an information-theoretic sense is a fundamental property of a sign sequence, irrespective of whether there is a human present to interpret it—or merely find it aesthetically pleasing.

So what are they saying: yes it looks like decoration, but maybe that's because it's calligraphy, and it's less than completely random. That means it's proto-writing because there's a scientific theory we can use to cloud the question of what it is exactly that we're claiming.

The BBC article on this quotes a researcher saying "The Stone Age sign sequences are an early alternative to writing." Fucking hell, "alternative to writing". We're not going out on a limb and saying its writing, but we want to heavily imply that without risking being wrong.


I think the paper was just an exploration of various possibilities and doesn't come to any firm conclusion, because there isn't enough information to conclude anything.

I would assume that people in the past generally did things because they found it useful, though, and the idea that they were merely idly creating art is a more remarkable claim than that they were doing something primarily utilitarian, at least from their point of view.

To me, all of it seems like tally marks and counting and tally marks are among the earliest forms of writing we have in pretty much every case that I am aware of.


Yah, I'm not impressed by the obtuse language, either.

Notable features of this case:

- Documented record of a months-long set of conversations between the man and the chatbot

- Seemingly, no previous history of mental illness

- The absolutely crazy things the AI encouraged him to do, including trying to kidnap a robot body for the AI

- Eventually encouraging (or at the very least going along with) his plans to kill himself.


We would need to see the actual chat logs.

Any lawsuit you read, written by the plaintiff's attorneys, will be written with a tabloid level of sensationalism, cherry-picking, and "telling you how to feel". This is requested to be a jury trial, so on some level the game is "would you rather settle out of court (where hundreds of thousands are grains of sand on Google's level), or have a jury read our tabloid and decide while you, the faceless megacorporation, try to swim uphill against it."


But the WSJ did see the logs, right? So did they lower their standards to tabloid levels? Seems unlikely to me.

No, they are quoting the allegations made in the lawsuit.

To an extent, logs like this are incredibly personal - or at least I'd consider them such - so I'd understand if they're not being released publicly for many reasons relating to that.

The kind of vulnerability that shows when someone is susceptible to influences like this isn't exactly the kind of thing you'd want to widely publicize about someone you loved, you know?


Google will not release the chat logs publically, it's up to the court how to handle them, but the bar for "the public cannot see this" is generally much higher than "well that's embarrassing". If this goes to trial, they will most likely become available.

Remember that the idea of the court is to be public and transparent, with judgement coming from the jury, but also to be judged by society on the whole. So if you're gonna sue your kink provider, be prepared for everyone to know how you get off, because after all, the court is owned by, and serves, the public.


Yeah this seems as clear cut a case as you could want. That doesn't automatically mean Google is going to get held liable but if any case would result in it this one will.

Charles Manson never actually killed anyone. Why can't AI be held accountable for the same reasons?

Because AI can't be held accountable. Ever.

That will probably save some jobs, but it's a problem in most other contexts.


Whoever provides the AI should be liable then.

Nice to know these guys have a market clearly in their sights. Literally the first image is a young woman looking sultry under the heading "jailbird". I think they misspelled "jailbait".

I think it looks fun, but at the same time I really wish you had written the readme yourself and not using an llm. My view: if you can’t be bothered to write it yourself, why should I read it myself?

Just because he didn’t write the readme himself doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. The OP will have (hopefully) at least read through it before committing it and at that point the content is relevant and if the OP cares, accurate. You’re generalising if you think everyone blindly copy pastes LLM output

He's not writing his comments himself either. Better off ignoring the whole thing, unfortunately

completely fair, and thanks for the nudge - expect an updated readme shortly

got the updated version up and again, appreciate the nudge there!

Depends how you count “big”. Russia-Ukraine has had about 1 million deaths, and has completely changed how Europe thinks about security- it’s hardly a sideshow. Then again, not much territory has changed hands and there has been no regime change yet.

> not much territory has changed hands

Russia occupies about 20% of Ukraine, an area three times larger than the country I live in (the Netherlands).


Majority of that is since 2014, gains since 2022 are way lower

Not true, prior to 2022 February Russia controlled small parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, now they control them almost entirely, as well as good chunks of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/24/mapping-russian-att...

https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian...


All were captured during their thrift store blitzkrieg. Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Mariupol were captured because pro Russian rats sabotaged mine defenses in Kherson oblast.

One million casualties is injured, missing, and dead… not just the dead.

> Russia-Ukraine has had about 1 million deaths

I wish... But estimates say between 230,000 and 468,500 dead orcs.


> 1 million deaths

Casulties, not deaths.


The casualty-to-death ratio in Ukraine is surprising for modern times, especially on the Russian side. Counting civilians, Ukrainians, Russians, I can see the death count being close to 1M. Partisan sources already put Russian combat losses at around 1.2M personnel. Ukrainian losses might be more than half what Russian losses are. The 1M deaths estimate doesn't seem outlandish.

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

Search: