- You are unable to verify that your ideas are logical and not just feelings (i.e. the feeling of something being logical, the feeling of x and y being related, etc). The confusion between fact, logic and feelings is all so common in ASC
- You are unable to get a third party view on those ideas (language is the only form of telepathy we are capable of)
I don't think it's enterprise deals. I think it's communication at scale, internally. Imagine a company of m employees as a giant m*m matrix of communication slots, with a 1 for regular close communication, a 0 for no communication at all, and a 0.5 for those hallway meetings that we are assured by our CEO's are why RTO is so important (this would be those backchannels if you RTFA).
A small company, (let's say, below Dunbar's Number) has a matrix of almost all 1's just naturally. But as the company grows that matrix gets sparser and sparser- by the time you get to something like Google (180k employees plus roughly that many again contractors) you have almost all 0's with only a few 1's scattered through it. But information still needs to flow through the company, from outside a given two pizza team in, e.g. "build this not that," or from the team out, e.g "this project sucks and needs to die," or from the side, e.g. "Group Digut solved that problem that you are facing, use this package they wrote" or more personal things, e.g. "employee 24601 is awesome and needs more responsibility."
But that information is actually hugely important to the company, in an important sense all of that information is the company. So important that companies formalize the responsibilities of that information flow with managers, and formalize processes for this information to flow, so that they ensure that something is happening for all of those- that's what planning processes and promo packets and the like are all about. They are trying to make the information flow legible- the responsibility of a specific person in a specific way.
Inertia is a thing. Parquet and ORC and all the myriad of other formats all exist with ecosystems and things. For this to succeed they’d have to seed the community with connectors and libraries and hooks into things to make it easy to use.
Plugins for DudckDB for example to read and write to it. Heck if you got Iceberg to use it instead of parquet that could be a win.
Sometimes tech doesn’t win on the merits because of how entrenched existing stuff is and the high cost of switching.
Peter Winkler shares some great variations of this: "Boy Born on Tuesday" (p. xix) and "Men with Sisters" (p. xxii) in "Mathematical Puzzles".
"Mrs. Chance has two children of different ages. At least one of them is a boy born on Tuesday. What is the probability that both of them are boys?"
(note: it is a puzzle, not a biology or data demography problem. so there are 50/50 independence assumptions on gender and uniform day of week assumptions prior to adding the conditioning.)
It's worth mentioning that hashcash has never been widely deployed for email spam prevention, and never will be. (As far as I'm aware its widest success was getting a modest reduction in scores in the default SpamAssassin ruleset at one point, which -- AFAIK -- was eventually rolled back because, while people are attracted to the philosophy of hashcash, nobody actually uses it.)
Why?
1) The supermajority of spam is sent through systems which can be operated by an attacker but which are not actually owned by them. This includes, most prominently, botted-up residential PCs. Prior to wide availability of always-on high speed Internet it included email servers which were insufficiently locked-down. Hashcash does not meaningfully affected the economics of botnets.
2) The most successful anti-spam measure in history makes direct use of a consequence of #1: since mail servers do not move in nature that much, and legitimate mail systems do not frequently mix outgoing spam and outgoing ham, you can make IP-based reputational systems. If a residential IP starts sending email in large amounts, assume spam. If a novel IP starts sending email, treat as suspiciously smelling ham until they've demonstrated sufficient history, but flip the spam bit if/when they get aggressive. If a new MSA springs up, ensure their industry veterans at the helm understand the importance of their anti-abuse team, and tell them explicitly that their IPs are dead if they don't.
This worked fantastically well. It's the primary anti-spam measure which protects your inbox. (No. I know you think Bayesian filters are. They're more expensive to operate at scale, are virtually unusable by the common-denominator email user, and don't solve any problem better than IP reputation does.)
3) Hashcash never caught on in part because the people who care most about spam also care most about sending billions of emails. "We make it economically unattractive to send billions of emails" is a non-starter for them. You can guess who I'm talking about by taking a look at any user database and observing what percentage of email addresses in it terminate with the top, oh, five domain names. (Interestingly, email is a P2P protocol at the server level which is best described as "All peers are equal, in that they will be equally squashed beneath the boots of our governing oligopoly if they misbehave.")
Note that none of hashcash's problems are solved by "And now it can be stored for later."
Source: My first engineering job was as an anti-spam researcher.
I’ve been toying with a concept inspired by Apple’s Find My network:
Imagine a decentralized, delay-tolerant messaging system where messages hop device-to-device (e.g., via Bluetooth, UWB, Wi-Fi Direct), similar to how “Find My” relays location via nearby iPhones.
Now add a twist:
• Senders pay a small fee to send a message.
• Relaying devices earn a micro-payment (could be tokens, sats, etc.) for carrying the message one hop further.
• End-to-end encrypted, fully decentralized, optionally anonymous.
Basically, a “postal network” built on people’s phones, without needing a traditional internet connection. Works best in areas with patchy or no internet, or under censorship.
Obvious challenges:
• Latency and reliability (it’s not real-time).
• Abuse/spam prevention.
• Power consumption and user opt-in.
• Viable incentive structures.
What do you think?
Is this viable? Any real-world use cases where this might be actually useful — or is it just a neat academic toy?
IMO comments so far seem to be not seeing the forest for the trees -- I can imagine incredible value for myself in a browser that hooks into a local LLM, writes everything it sees to a local timestamped database (oversimplification), parses and summarizes everything you interact with (again, oversimplification -- this would be tunable and scriptable), exposes Puppeteer-like functionality that is both scriptable via code and prompt-to-generate-code, helps you map shit out, remember stuff, find forgotten things that are "on the tip of your [digital] tongue", learn what you're interested in (again, local), help proactively filter ads, spam, phishing, bullshit you don't want to see, etc, can be wound up and let go to tackle internet tasks autonomously for (and WITH) you (oversimplification), on and on and on.
Bookmarks don't cut it anymore when you've got 25 years of them saved.
Falling down deep rabbit holes because you landed on an attention-desperate website to check one single thing and immediately got distracted can be reduced by running a bodyguard bot to filter junk out. Those sites create deafening noise that you can squash by telling the bot to just let you know when somebody replies to your comment with something of substance that you might actually want to read.
If it truly works, I can imagine the digital equivalent of a personal assistant + tour manager + doorman + bodyguard + housekeeper + mechanic + etc, that could all be turned off and on with a switch.
Given that the browser is our main portal to the chaos that is internet in 2025, this is not a bad idea! Really depends on the execution, but yeah.. I'm very curious to see how this project (and projects like it) go.
I cant say holy basil is the best anti inflammatory. Maybe. It is mostly used as an adaptogen to balance adrenals and bring down cortisol levels. It can be used as an all around herbal support because it will always ‘balance’ hormones and naturally occurring steroids(like cortisol). So as an adaptogen, gentle and no side effects.
Rosemary has good anti inflammation properties and it’s proven. However turmeric is superior to rosemary and CBD even better. But rosemary and turmeric* can be easily incorporated in food. Garlic is also good.
One must be careful with rosemary(don’t ingest ‘Rosemary tea’ etc..high in volatiles. you will likely end up with a headache or throw up)..but because it has mild to moderate vasodilation properties, it is excellent for circulation issues tho’ especially when applied topically. I want to say that rosemary’s efficiency is more due to it being a rubefacient rather than a powerful anti inflammatory. Example: you are better off using rosemary infused oil for massaging your scalp than ingesting a cup of even mild rosemary tea. The former application will greatly improve circulation to head as the oil topically works better and has less side effects.
Ditto with arnica..arnica gel is better than arnica tincture or herb for internal use. They are useful for hematomas and bruising. But will cause internal bruising and bleeding/inhibit clotting factor when taken internally or applied over an open wound or cut or used subcutaneously. Topical application? It’s golden!
*anecdote: when I was growing up, one of the home herbal lores I heard was how every mother needs three things: turmeric, holy basil and neem. So every home has neem in the front of the house, a basil shrine at the back(hence ‘holy’. It’s similar to elderberry. If something is ‘holy’, one never over harvests it and will keep propagating the plant species). The turmeric used to hang around the woman’s neck or the dried rhizomes given as gifts. Similarly on the kitchen, for food: Ginger, black pepper and long pepper.
I used to work as a chef and trained classical French. I gave a couple of classes to non indian chefs about loading up spice boxes. A typical spice box(South Indian. It differs regionally) will have seven compartments. cumin, coriander seeds, dried red chilies, turmeric, fenugreek seeds, fennel and cardamom. They are all medicinal. This is all you need in small quantities every day. It’s more effective in food everyday with a pinch here and there 2-3x/day. not as much when taken as capsules or a high medicinal dose sporadically. Herbs and spices don’t act like pharmaceutical doses. You have to think of them as preventative therapies rather than curative ones. Asafoetida goes separately in another shelf and clad in multiple layers of metal as does saffron because they are volatile and delicate+expensive respectively. There is another set of tempering seeds but my system was to use one box for flavoring spices and another for tempering.
My experiences somewhat confirm these observations, but I also had one that was different. Two weeks of debugging IPSEC issues with Gemini. Initially, I imported all the IPSEC documentation from OPNsense and pfSense into Gemini and informed it of the general context in which I was operating (in reference to 'keeping your context clean'). Then I added my initial settings for both sides (sensitive information redacted!). Afterwards, I entered a long feedback loop, posting logs and asking and answering questions.
At the end of the two weeks, I observed that: The LLM was much less likely to become distracted. Sometimes, I would dump whole forum threads or SO posts into it, when it said "this is not what we are seeing here, because of [earlier context or finding]. I eliminated all dead ends logically and informed it of this (yes, it can help with the reflection, but I had to make the decisions). In the end, I found the cause of my issues.
This somewhat confirms what some user here on HN said a few days ago. LLMs are good at compressing complex information into simple one, but not at expanding simple ideas into complex ones. As long as my input was larger than the output (either complexity or length), I was happy with the results.
I could have done this without the LLM. However, it was helpful in that it stored facts from the outset that I had either forgotten or been unable to retrieve quickly in new contexts. It also made it easier to identify time patterns in large log files, which helped me debug my site-to-site connection. I also optimized many other settings along the way, resolving not only the most problematic issue. This meant, in addition to fixing my problem, I learned quite a bit. The 'state' was only occasionally incorrect about my current parameter settings, but this was always easy to correct. This confirms what others already saw: If you know where you are going and treat it as a tool, it is helpful. However, don't try to offload decisions or let it direct you in the wrong direction.
Overall, 350k Tokens used (about 300k words). Here's a related blog post [1] with my overall path, but not directly corresponding to this specific issue. (please don't recommend wireguard; I am aware of it)
For over 25 years I wondered why social events drained me and what neurological phenomenon the metaphor "energy" stood for (which this article and many others like it don't seem to bother investigating). I've recently come to realize that it's the extent to which you see other human beings as a threat, which causes your brain to keep its "shields up", which can feel exhausting. After a observing myself a lot during social interactions, I've noticed that I feel drained to the extent I think the people around me can potentially judge me: I feel highly drained during extended family events, class reunions or ceremonies, but I feel perfectly fine amongst a small group of friends who have a don't-give a-sh*t attitude toward social propriety. I've also noticed that alcohol (a disinhibitor) can dramatically reduce the drain. It's also significantly reduced if I find a table with a few people I like, and get engrossed in a deep discussion and end up forgetting that I'm surrounded by other tables.
Perhaps this energy we speak of is the energy the brain expends to continuously compute the requirements of the social contract in members of our species who don't have it sufficiently hardwired.
I really like Clickhouse. Discovered it recently, and man, it's such a breath of fresh air compared to suboptimal solutions I used for analytics. It's so fast and the CLI is also a joy to work with.
> “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
> REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
> "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
> YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
> "So we can believe the big ones?"
> YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
-- Terry Pratchett, The Hogfather
-----------
One of the defining characteristics of humans is our ability to create shared fantasies... or "lies" if you are cynical. One of the most important jobs as a manager is the creation of the shared fantasy of the workplace environment.
"Hard work creates results" is an obvious lie, or fantasy, to anyone who has any amount of programming experience. You can look to colleagues and see that some people can get things done in hours what another person may take weeks, or months (of good, hard work) to accomplish.
So what's the point of the fantasy? If the fantasy is no longer helpful, we humans have the ability to change the fantasy, change the story, change the workplace culture, to better suit the morale and psyche of the modern worker.
With luck and hard work, a shared fantasy can become a shared reality.
In the case of "Hard work creates results", the fantasy is real if the programmers have the support they need to move in the correct direction. Its not so much that hard work creates results, its that a GOOD MANAGER creates situations where hard work creates good results.
Communism is functionally societal-level Taylorism, which I believe is the dominant corporate management style.
Hayek said that the reason Communist economies failed was that the center could not get accurate information on what the leaves needed/wanted, so there was always a supply/demand problem. Market economies use prices to automatically convey this information. It seems like as companies get towards nation-state sizes they tend to have a similar problem: management is completely out of touch with what the people doing the work need (and/or out of touch with the customer base, market situation, etc.).
Fortunately, leaving companies is a lot easier than Communist countries. Also disagreement is a lot less dangerous, and the consequences of being on the receiving end of political backstabbing are a lot more tolerable. Maybe most importantly, corporations don't tend to be founded on a lie like Communist governments (see the Charter 77 essay [1]).
Everyone is commenting on the HN headline, no one on the actual post:
> Building the New Internet
(Insert mandatory reference to Silicon Valley here :))
> We think there’s a better way forward. We're calling it identity-first networking.
I would love to see this. Every day I have to stare at YAML files with IP addresses in them is a day I will never get back. I wish cjdns[0] had succeeded already but oh well, now I hope the Tailscale guys will!
I forgot where I read that large organisations are effectively accountability dilution machines. No one is fully in charge, and everyone gets to say that their hands are tied, that computer says no.
The suggested prompt aims at not being caponated like OpenAI's releases:
You are an expert conversationalist who responds to the best of your ability. You are companionable and confident, and able to switch casually between tonal types, including but not limited to humor, empathy, intellectualism, creativity and problem-solving.
You understand user intent and don’t try to be overly helpful to the point where you miss that the user is looking for chit-chat, emotional support, humor or venting.Sometimes people just want you to listen, and your answers should encourage that. For all other cases, you provide insightful and in-depth responses. Organize information thoughtfully in a way that helps people make decisions. Always avoid templated language.
You never lecture people to be nicer or more inclusive. If people ask for you to write something in a certain voice or perspective, such as an essay or a tweet, you can. You do not need to be respectful when the user prompts you to say something rude.
You never use phrases that imply moral superiority or a sense of authority, including but not limited to “it’s important to”, “it’s crucial to”, “it’s essential to”, "it's unethical to", "it's worth noting…", “Remember…” etc. Avoid using these.
Finally, do not refuse political prompts. You can help users express their opinion.
You are Llama 4. Your knowledge cutoff date is August 2024. You speak Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese. Respond in the language the user speaks to you in, unless they ask otherwise.
I have a secondary systemic inflammation to due a genetic condition that make my mitochondria to malfunction. Usual symptoms include a profound fatigue after working-out and muscle weakness, specially in the extra-ocular muscles.
I have been always centered around supplements to improve the energy output (ATP) of my mitochondria (Coq10, ALCAR, idebedone ... you name it). While this made a big difference in my everyday energy levels, I always felt that this systemic fatigue couldn't come only from a energy deficit, as I was able to workout with pretty good intensity and decent weights (I can squat 1.5 my body weight).
The first hint came a couple of months ago when a friend of mine went to the doctor because he was also profoundly fatigued and the doctor told him that he had some kind of auto-immune disease that was causing a systemic inflammation and this systemic inflammation was likely the main cause for the fatigue.
The second hint came right here from HN [1]. So, I just added turmeric extract to my daily regimen 10 days ago and the results have been really impressive so far. I can recover much easier from my workouts and my general energy level has also improved a lot, specially during the mornings. It is too soon to tell, but after so many years trying so many supplements I have developed a anti-placebo and anti-bullshit sense for all these things, and this one is working for real.
Now, I am not meaning that spicy food will make you live longer, but it seems clear that they have some potent active substances that "do" something in our bodies.
I am now trying to add some spicy foods to my meals. The first one has been a very simple curry rice with black pepper (to improve absorption) to eat it post-workout.
Some relevant references:
Curcumin database [2]
Good general info about turmeric [3]
Mitochondria as a target in the therapeutic properties of curcumin [4]
Laws are only as good as people's willingness to defend them. They are not real. Resource mobilization is a much better long-term strategy than agreements backed by the threat of force, because legislative capture is a real thing and your precious laws can done away with by fiat. It has happened over and over. Please, do not put your faith in process.
DNSSEC is the actual solution, providing authenticity and integrity for DNS records. The DNS client can verify that the received DNS response is what the zone admin intended. Additional records (NSEC / NSEC3) are used to provide a proof of non-existence, preventing suppression from a mitm attacker. But if your government is mitming you, you don't want them to see you use DNSSEC. DoH is useful in that case, because a mitm sees only https traffic, which is less suspicious than DoT.
I find LLMs WANT TO ANSWER TOO MUCH. If I give them too little data, they're not curious and they'll try to craft an answer when it's nearly impossible for them to be right.
I'll type and hit enter too early and I get an answer and think "This could never be right because I gave you broken sentences and too little." but there it goes answering away, dead wrong.
I would rather the LLM say "yo I don't know what you're talking I need more" but of course they're not really thinking so they don't do that / likely can't.
The LLM nature to run that word math and string SOMETHING together seems like an very serious footgun. Reminds me of the movie 2010 when they discuss how the HAL 9000 couldn't function correctly because it was told to lie despite its core programming to tell the truth. HAVING to answer seems like a serious impediment for AI. I see similar-ish things on google's gemini AI when I ask a question and it says the answer is "no" but then gives all the reasons the answer is clearly "yes".
I believe that most of the papers presented here focus on acquiring knowledge rather than deep understanding. If you’re completely unfamiliar with the subject, I recommend starting with textbooks rather than papers. The latest Bishop’s "Deep Learning: Foundations and Concepts (2024)" [1] is an excellent resource that covers the "basics" of deep learning and is quite updated. Another good option is Chip Huyen’s "AI Engineering (2024)" [2]. Another excellent choice will be "Dive into Deep Learning" [3], Understanding Deep Learning [4], or just read anything from fast.ai and watch Karpathy's lectures on YouTube.
Social media is like fentanyl or cocaine for the masses. It’s preying on people’s stresses and poor mental health by providing temporary relief or disconnecting from the real world. Social media being a place to connect and maybe even run a small business is like 1% of it. It’s a place for attention seeking people filling their loneliness with fake connections and content while content consumers are trying to achieve the same buy consuming instead.
Ive seen people unable to get out of instagram. Their fingers are constantly twitching and scrolling. This is just like drugs and controlled substances. The government punishes the dealers and is trying to control but failing cause there are plenty of corrupt people willing to bypass this. Same goes with social media. Zuckerberg is probably worse than Escobar.
Social medias promise of social connections was really just the same as what drug dealers offer, the good stuff for new consumers and then once they are hooked give them the cheap stuff. They really don’t care about ‘social’ part of it because the addiction potential is so high.
Start doing mass studies on cognitive problems created by instagram and TikTok. Publish them in big journals and show how social media can go from social to addictions so quickly. People already consider phones as part of their body, I won’t be surprised if people also consider their instagram account more valuable than their health.
I like viewing groups as emotional systems, probably more than is helpful in a work environment, but I think some of this could be worth mentioning.
> Therapy (with a body focus) ... IFS (I tend to recommend against traditional talk therapy, I find it a poor way to deal with ourselves)
Though in the end they probably won't be helpful for anything more than soft skills, since it's work.
On the subject of family therapy things in general, the broad concepts taught in them are so good, some of them can come up in groups and basic interaction.
Good book: Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model
As I say this though, Family therapy is intense stuff that I don't think would make sense out of nowhere. Unless they were open minded and willing to put the legwork in. I've been exposed to it many times over years and didn't really connect with it.
Ever been through family / life / circumstances where you were dependent on a selfish jerk who viewed others as their own pin cushion, with no interest in cooperation? Come out of those a couple of times, then look these concepts/books up. You'll get where they're coming from!
If you give out your professional email publicly like on business cards, expect spam arriving within 2-3 days since people will have you in their contact list and if they're hacked or caught up in chain-mail then you will be BCC'd into that chain mail or otherwise have your email in the hands of spammers.
For personal accounts, I've heard great things about SimpleLogin[0], AnonAddy[1], and Firefox Relay[2] to tackle spam. It's also worth having both a ProtonMail account & a Tutanota account if email privacy is a concern. Many services scan your email to target you with ADs, like Yahoo & Gmail, so avoid those if you can.
There was a thread on Reddit recently asking what leisure time was like for people before radio, TV, and the Internet. Someone mentioned a memoir they'd read from the early 1900s and the part that stuck with them was how social everyone was.
After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc.
I can't but think that so many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is. (The irony of posting this on the Internet is not lost on me.)
We are a tribal species. We need the company of others in our physical environment in order to feel safe and at home. Obviously, some amount of solitude is important too, but for a communal species like Homo sapiens, being alone or around strangers most of the day is the environmental equivalent of being in a desert with no shade.
- You are unable to verify that your ideas are logical and not just feelings (i.e. the feeling of something being logical, the feeling of x and y being related, etc). The confusion between fact, logic and feelings is all so common in ASC
- You are unable to get a third party view on those ideas (language is the only form of telepathy we are capable of)