Have you considered killing the alianthus tree? I know loosing a big tree is a tough sell, but tree of heaven is one of our worst invasives in the eastern US. Every year that tree is producing wind-born seeds that mean it is going to be causing huge problems for anyone attempting to plant natives anywhere in your neighborhood and actively degrading any natural spaces in the area. You’d do the environment a lot more good just by getting rid of that tree than via anything you plant under it.
Also as an aside, it’s possible that the problem for your cup plant and asters is shade, not chemicals. There are a lot of species of aster so I can’t say for sure there, but cup plant is a prairie species that absolutely wants full sun.
Either way though, please, please, kill your tree of heaven.
Pacing the frontier is a front to get federal regulators/evaluators involved that they can then point to open source usage and cry "look they're not being safe!"
I try to read fiction and non fiction in parallel, so my current pairing is How Asia Works by Joe Studwell and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Enjoying both so far!
Other books I’ve enjoyed recently:
The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft - I read Endurance by Alfred Lansing last year so it was fun having a real Antarctic adventure in my mind while reading it.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I actually started this a couple of years ago and quit part way through deciding I couldn’t put myself through it anymore. I kept thinking about it though, until I finally picked it back up and finished it this summer. Horrifying, but quite a masterpiece.
If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky - I was about a year late to the party on this, but it still holds up. I would recommend it.
The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Malaby - Excellent! Fascinating seeing a glimpse inside of the companies currently eating the world.
I think it can simultaneously be the case that OpenAI was grossly negligent in directly causing this AND that the AI’s ‘went rogue’ in that they are displaying behavior which is misaligned with OpenAI and humanity generally.
The past months demonstrate that AI systems are quickly becoming powerfully intelligent and that the companies building them are terrible at controlling them.
AI is starting to feel like that line about magic: “a sword without a hilt”
OpenAI is itself misaligned with humanity, as their mishandling of such incidents (and the many other other issues their model have been causing) shows.
Doesn't rogue in this context imply "outside of set limitations"? And then not "failed to properly instruct"? The same applies to humans when given bad instructions.
Pangram links several third party evaluations [1] that all seem to agree with 90+% detection, and very close to 0% false positives. Obviously those could be cherry picked, but I’ve yet to see arguments to the contrary that actually include any supporting data. (E.g here’s a prompt that will get Claude to spit out text that pangram doesn’t detect or here’s an article authored in 2018 that pangram says is AI.) Detection is an arms race, so this could change (though I’d expect in the direction of false negatives), but right now it seems like defense is winning.
The "could" isn't required here, since Pangram calls many of the evals "collaborations", and some received direct support. Results that don't favor Pangram as being among the least-worst of a questionable product category* surely wouldn't be featured.
I replaced my Pixel 2a with an SE3 when the pixel stopped getting security updates and have been pretty disappointed with the iPhone’s performance. The battery life out of the box was worse than the 5 year old Pixel, and I regularly notice apps getting killed and loosing my place when I tab away.
Maybe if you want to use all of the big mainstream apps the experience might be different, but I tend to have a fairly minimal setup on my phone. On android I would disable animations, use Nova launcher, Firefox with UBO, and a bunch of fdroid apps. This all added up to a very snappy and efficient system that I haven’t been able to replicate on iOS.
It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.
I mean one look at both commentary and it's clear HN has devolved considerably. Just look at the atrocious difference in intelligent reasoning in this thread's comments compared to a LessWrong post right now:
LW stayed selective as a forum, HN became the home of refugees from Reddit. HN reads more like yet-another-subreddit these days than an independent forum.
FWIW I think this is an artifact of site design more than anything else. A commentary site like HN in 2026 encourages hot takes and karma farming. All the "social media" with higher quality commentary like Substack and LessWrong center a large text blob of thought at the top and encourage reading more than writing. This puts up just enough of a barrier to write a hot take that you need to read the whole article and puts enough UI friction from leaving a throwaway angry comment that those folks will scroll away.
HN on the other hand all but encourages shallow posting. The article isn't posted, commentary is more prominent than the article itself. Leaving a comment takes 2-3 clicks and the comment editing flow excludes every other comment on the site, encouraging a write-first mentality. Ranking commentary based on upvotes offers a sweet dopamine hit over collecting karma. In 2026 these all encourage low quality engagement.
HN's UI has stayed relatively the same over the years while the Internet around it hasn't and I think its UI now acts as a low quality commentary attractor. LW changed its site design to stem the tide of low quality comments that show up here. LW comments certainly have their problems, but then, we humans all have problems :) On balance the community is much sharper and much more capable of having intellectually heavyweight, sober discussions on controversial topics. Of course nothing seems to trump my own friend network.
substack has devolved into the same thing. opening the app first thing you see if a infinite scroll of twitter like takes
and i honestly would rather have a reddit lite site like hacker news where there appears to be at least a diversity of opinion than the pseudo-intellectualization cjing occurring among the exact same sort of AI cockgobblers on LW
> and i honestly would rather have a reddit lite site like hacker news where there appears to be at least a diversity of opinion
Why? Isn't that available on literally every single other tech comment section on the Internet? Like what distinguishes these angry comments from the ones on Techcrunch or Ars or Reddit subs that tolerate AI? If I wanted mindless diversity I'd just have the LLM generate random perspectives.
I’d be curious to play with this with some different open weights models. I’d think that a single next token would end up having similar probability distributions so given that this a probabilistic method, you’d be able to get at least some signal.
I suppose if that did work someone would have been able to work backwards and crack their key already, so I must be missing something.
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