The use case for AI is spam.
Another major use case for it is enabling students to more easily cheat on their homework. Which is why it is probably going to end up putting Chegg out of business.
Readit Newsbdw5204 commented on AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power chrbutler.com/what-ai-is-... · Posted by u/delaugust
bdw5204 commented on No One Is in Charge at the US Copyright Office wired.com/story/us-copyri... · Posted by u/rntn
So, this article describes the sequence of events as the Trump administration attempting to replace the librarian of congress, and Trump's named replacement saying he was replacing the Copyright Register with a Trump DOJ person.
I am not a lawyer but I thought it was pretty well established that (a) the library of congress is part of the legislature, not an executive branch office and (b) that the president can remove some people but can't install people in the other branches without confirmation (e.g. when a SCOTUS justice dies or retires, the president can't name a temporary justice).
https://www.govtrack.us/posts/503/2025-05-13_president-trump...
The President can, in fact, recess appoint a Supreme Court justice per Article II, Section 2, Clause 3[0].
Since the George W. Bush administration, Congress has used pro forma sessions[1] to prevent recess appointments. Both the House and Senate would have to agree on a time to adjourn Congress per Article I, Section 5, Clause 4. If they disagree but one of them wants to adjourn, the President can adjourn them under Article II, Section 3. But no president has ever done this. President Trump talked about doing it to ram through his appointments both in 2020 and last year during the transition period. But so far it hasn't been deemed necessary because the Senate has, surprisingly to me, confirmed his cabinet in a timely manner and without significant pushback even on the less conventionally conservative choices like the DNI and the HHS Secretary. In all likelihood, the threat of adjourning Congress and of using his billion dollars plus of fundraising for 2026 to primary uncooperative Republican members of Congress has forced them to largely fall in line for now.
Recess appointments to the Supreme Court were common in the old days when the Court was less politically contentious. Justice William J. Brennan was recess appointed by Eisenhower and later confirmed by the Senate. A recess appointment who is not confirmed by the Senate would be null and void at the start of the next Congress on January 3rd of the next odd numbered year. I doubt any president would recess appoint a Supreme Court justice today both because it would be likely derail their nomination and also because a recess Justice might get to hear at most 1 term of cases depending on timing. Recess appointing somebody to run the FDA or the Justice Department or even to be a district court judge would be much more useful to a President's agenda.
[0]: "The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session."
[1]: These are sessions where they immediately adjourn by unanimous consent after doing the formalities to open the session. C-SPAN broadcasts them live and they only last a few minutes at most.
bdw5204 commented on Central Park hits temp record last seen in 1888 cnn.com/2025/06/23/weathe... · Posted by u/geox
Current (and more accurate) title is “Central Park hits temp record last seen on this date in 1888 as heat wave hits eastern US”.
It's also worth noting that reliable daily temperature records only go back to the late 1800s. The way you know this is that there are no record highs or lows in 1788 or even 1828. Most likely, at least some of the real records were set prior to the invention of temperature measurement.
On a related note, global population data before about 1800 or so is also unreliable because censuses hadn't been invented yet. During the Enlightenment, people actually debated if world population was increasing or decreasing. Many thought it had been constantly decreasing since the decline and fall of Rome. In general, reliable statistics for more or less anything are newer than the United States of America.
This is just another reason why dependencies are an anti-pattern. If you do nothing, your software shouldn't change.
I suspect that this style of development became popular in the first place because the LGPL has different copyright implications based on whether code is statically or dynamically linked. Corporations don't want to be forced to GPL their code so a system that outsources libraries to random web sites solves a legal problem for them.
But it creates many worse problems because it involves linking your code to code that you didn't write and don't control. This upstream code can be changed in a breaking way or even turned into malware at any time but using these dependencies means you are trusting that such things won't happen.
Modern dependency based software will never "just work" decades from now like all of that COBOL code from the 1960s that infamously still runs government and bank computer systems on the backend. Which is probably a major reason why they won't just rewrite the COBOL code.
You could say as a counterargument that operating systems often include breaking changes as well. Which is true but you don't update your operating system on a regular basis. And the most popular operating system (Windows) is probably the most popular because Microsoft historically has prioritized backward compatibility even to the extreme point of including special code in Windows 95 to make sure it didn't break popular games like SimCity that relied on OS bugs from Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS[0].
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...
Are sites that currently try to enforce real name usage, like Facebook, noticeably better for it than mostly-pseudonymous sites like HN/Reddit?
It doesn't really fix people being gullible (so will spread spam/scams or fall for phishing) or angry about some polarizing topic. Conceivably it could encourage civility, but if anything I feel I've seen arguments turn ugly far more often due to the personal nature.
All the use of real names on social media accomplishes is a chilling effect on speech. Especially if your opinions differ from those of your employer or customers. Or if people who disagree with you are engaging in harassment campaigns or domestic terrorism against their political opponents.
This can apply to either side. Whether you're a Trump voter in San Francisco or an LGBTQIA+ person in a rural "Bible Belt" community. Doxxing is one of the most serious rules violations on the internet because exposing somebody's real world identity endangers the personal safety of the victim. A real names only policy effectively forces everybody to self-dox or be silenced.
Yep, currently brave (and others I assume) switch it on at build time, when Google removes that from chromium they may move it to their patch set, but who knows how long they’ll keep that once it starts breaking.
The best thing for Brave to do would just be to build it into their own ad blocker because Google is going to intentionally make it more and more impractical to support older extensions that interfere with their business model.
bdw5204 commented on Does “building in public” work? laike9m.com/blog/no-one-b... · Posted by u/laike9m
If I have to think on first principles, the reason why people are building things in public is because that's just a form of marketing and self-promotion. We're way past tech being the hard part of launching a product. The harder part is building the audience and trying to stand out. Building in public is probably the easiest way to build buzz, gain an audience, and name recognition.
I don't think there was ever a time when you could succeed in the marketplace on the merits of your tech. Once the tech reaches the relatively low bar of "good enough", the rest is sales and marketing. In the most lucrative enterprise market, the "good enough" bar is even lower than in the much less lucrative consumer market because the people who will actually have to use your tech aren't the ones buying it. Technical quality likely matters the most to "customers" who don't pay anything such as users of popular open source projects.
If you want to make money from a good product then becoming a social media influencer who talks about your product is the most straightforward way to advertise without having to pay for ads.
bdw5204 commented on What happened to the Japanese PC platforms? mistys-internet.website/b... · Posted by u/zdw
I mean... you can do that, yes. Or we could use the far superior medium of text, where you don't need hacks to get around how slow it is.
One reasonable compromise would be for video makers to provide a transcript or written article to complement their video. Video is a terrible format especially when you're actually using the video and not just using it as a mechanism to deliver audio. Audio is not a bad medium because you can do something else while listening to it.
bdw5204 commented on Is Tor still safe to use? blog.torproject.org/tor-i... · Posted by u/Sami_Lehtinen
You only need to control the entry and exit node - since you know the next and previous hop for all traffic you touch, and default chains are 3 long. With circuits changing every 10 mins, within a few days you would have deanonymized at least some percentage of traffic for nearly every user.
I'd call tor broken against any adversary with a little technical skill and willingness to spend $5000.
I'm 80% sure Tor is designed as a US supported project to focus those needing anonymity into a service only governments with global security apparatus (who can grab a good chunk of internet traffic) can access.
I imagine most exit nodes are likely controlled by the US government and/or its close allies. Who else wants to have their IP address banned from most of the internet and potentially get visits from their country's equivalent of the FBI?
If most Tor users ran exit nodes and most people used Tor, it would effectively make internet traffic anonymous. But without those network effects, it is vulnerable by design to deanonymization attacks by state actors.