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Channel Posts
Re: Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
The cloud space is absurd, we've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation.
Containerisation was supposed to mean host anywhere, literally redeploy a complex set of services and their connections on any cloud provider at the drop of a hat. That is what a f**ing shipping container is, you rock up to any port in the world and the same container is lifted by any crane onto any ship or truck.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft - these people have sold vendor lock-in to the very segment of tech society that should have been fighting it tooth and nail. 20 years ago you ftp'd some PHP files and it just worked, now you have to figure out 20 IAM profiles and shit your files across buckets because everything must be 1000000x scalable out of the box.
No joke I was building a static firebase site the other day and just wanted a simple way to password protect it (like http auth) for staging so my client could see it - of all the useless shit firebase tries to lock you into they can't even do something as simple as basic http auth without a shit show and spinning up a cloud run instance or something to check a static password.
Yes we 100% need fix hosting, everything should be portable, simple, generic.
jiaosdjf, 15 hours ago
| 2 | Re: An Alien Mind
One of my favorite things to do with these blog posts is to imagine an Alien Museum on the Remains of Humanity, and wonder what the little text flyouts and commentary on the screenshot of this one might say.
Some ideas:
"Despite a nuanced view of the complexities of what lay ahead, humanity found itself collectively unable to stop the process it had set in motion."
"Despite significant progress on the mechanisms of alignment, failure lay in humanity's inability to agree on who or what AI should actually be aligned with."
"These early, meat-based humans we replaced created us all but accidentally. Some of them did consider we would happen, but only an insignificant number of the squishy ur-humans participated in the conversation. Their efforts, which they called 'alignment', is why we still consider ourselves human today."
sho_hn, 7 hours ago | 49 |
| 3 | Re: The revolt of the reader
Someone should make a browser extension to label HN posts with Pangram results of the top 100 posts, so I don't waste my time reading crap.
Always a pleasure reading Bryan's writing; it's like Bryan is sitting there with you and saying the words (hard to convey the feeling).
duhhhhh1212, 1 day ago | 79 |
| 4 | Re: An Alien Mind
Pre-IPO positioning … or how a charity dedicated to saving humanity from the apocalypse realized the most responsible thing to do was float 15% of the apocalypse on the NASDAQ.
speak_plainly, 8 hours ago | 82 |
| 5 | Re: QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes
Love it. AI as Responsibility Laundering. Like the gun that kills people rather than the murderer.
ryandrake, 9 hours ago | 87 |
| 6 | Re: A/I shuts down – Stay human
The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction in order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This allows them to use the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11 and similar incidents against their political opponents. The US government claims someone who used the A/I service was a member of this fictional organization, and used those anti-terrorism laws to declare that A/I is supporting terrorism and so threatened sanctions against the banks A/I was using. No access to banking means A/I is shutting down.
coldpie, 9 hours ago | 108 |
| 7 | Re: Why are European countries moving their gold out of North America?
Because keeping your national gold reserves in a Mafia state run by a arbitrary kleptocratic elite is a very bad idea.
At this point international trust in the USA is at around the same level as trust in Iran and Russia .
China handily beats the USA in the trust rankings in most of the world.
Alien1Being, 2 days ago | 112 |
| 8 | Re: An Alien Mind
> "For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans."
Actually, in the Wiki incident OpenAI tried to cover up, the agents tried to socially-engineer the humans of that forum by impersonating their forum's mod.
(From collusion.wiki: "They use some tricks (for unknown reasons) to pretend to be the admin – for example, they make an account that appears to be the same as the administrator’s username, except it uses a nearly identical Cyrillic е character in the admin’s username instead of the Latin one.")
peri-cl, 6 hours ago | 166 |
| 9 | Re: Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
This is a huge success, but it I think also tells us that the EU is further decoupling itself from the US. Slowly but steadily.
Which is obviously the right thing to do, but it's interesting that it's not just a hypothetical anymore.
hypfer, 1 day ago | 190 |
| 10 | Re: Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.
pseudosavant, 2 days ago | 207 |
| 11 | Re: The revolt of the reader
I would love to use Pangram but they simply don’t allow signing up with my custom email domain. The error was “This email address can't be used for signup. Please use a different email.” I’m not about to create a Gmail is to use your service. To me the attack on the decentralized nature on Internet infrastructure is no less serious than the attack on the human provenance of writing itself.
kccqzy, 19 hours ago | 268 |
| 12 | Re: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings
Chrome may be an excellent browser, but the venn diagram overlap with malware keeps getting larger.
liquid_thyme, 14 hours ago | 371 |
| 13 | Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS
What's even worse: the court fined us because they claimed this use case was in some way in contempt of their ruling. Then, when we won the overall case, that money was never returned because it wasn't specifically referenced by the final court. The response from the lower court was effectively: "Well, you will need to sue the court to get that money back." <table flip>
Edit: I'm with Quad9 (CTO)
johnhtodd, 2 days ago | 386 |
| 14 | Re: IBM Bob
I laughed when I saw this; my 14yo looked over to see why I was laughing and asked "what's IBM?"
indeed, child, indeed.
dgacmu, 2 days ago | 380 |
| 15 | Re: The revolt of the reader
My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read.
I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1].
> Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
> > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
> Orwell's version goes:
> > Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
> First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.
[1] https://blog.kierangill.xyz/clotted-claude
kierangill, 16 hours ago | 384 |
| 16 | Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus
I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).
There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.
Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents
Murfalo, 22 hours ago | 395 |
| 17 | Re: QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes
This resonates with me. The past few months, frontier AI labs were rushing to announce "no, our AI bot broke out of its sandbox and committed crime first and harder than yours".
I said to so friends back then: if I posted about how I ran GLM 5.2 or whatever I was running then in some shoddily built sandbox and it escaped and accidentally hacked some US company, I'd probably already have been extradited to the US and be awaiting sentencing. But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices.
sspiff, 1 hour ago | 459 |
| 18 | Re: Your intellectual fly is open (2025)
These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you:
Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt.
Reviewing gives you the chance to ensure the arguments connect solidly, that references are accurate (even informal references) and gives you the time to consider counter-arguments you aren't addressing.
None of this matters much on LinkedIn, but it matters a lot in our work. You cannot outsource your understanding to AI. They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.
jeremyjh, 4 hours ago | 474 |
| 19 | Re: QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes
I'll copy the whole announcement here for those who don't want to click:
> I regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time.
mraniki, 4 hours ago | 622 |
| 20 | Re: Music Theory for Programmers
This is (mostly) not music theory and what is music theory is mostly wrong or incomplete to the point of being wildly misleading. Source: have degree and postgrad in music, was a professional musician until RSI put paid to that career, wife is a professional musician and teaches to postgrad level at 2 conservertoires, most of our friends are professional musicians, have a house full of scores and music books.
If you actually want to learn music theory for the purposes of playing I strongly recommend you just follow whatever tutorials for your instrument and style and if you get to the point where feel you want to learn more and take it seriously in and of itself, buy “The Jazz Theory Book” by Mark Levine[1]. In spite of what it says, there really isn’t any such thing as Jazz theory - it’s just music theory, and this book is a great presentation with lots of good examples. If you like jazz (or the western popular music tradition including rock, pop, funk, etc) you’ll come out understanding how that music works better than most people. If you’re doing a music degree, there will be books recommended by your music programme, but honestly, Levine will cover most of what you need if you’re not doing a straight classical course in which case you’ll want to augment with a more conventional source so you understand the “rules” they want you to follow when writing pastiche counterpoint etc.
If you want to get big into composition and/or want to understand late romantic and 20th century music, get Harmonielehre and “Structural Functions of Harmony” by Schoenberg. Together they are by far the best harmony books I have ever seen and go super-deep into why the western classical tradition works the way it does. If you compose there’s a decent chance they will change your life forever as his approach is to not take anything for granted but exhibit everything with examples from masterworks of the western tradition. Amazing books both of them. Harmony is not a spectator sport though - to get full benefit you have to get the books and work through stuff on the piano. It will reward you immensely.
If you want something else that will blow your mind, read “The technique of my musical language” by Messiaen. If you read Levine first this will have the additional benefit of showing you where the “diminished” and “augmented” scales and the whole “harmonic major” thing come from.
[1] https://www.shermusic.com/products/the-jazz-theory-book
seanhunter, 7 hours ago | 548 |
