You mean being voted into regional parliaments in the former GDR states?
Sorry, but the German far right party that just won their first state governmental majority vote has the highest share of former Stasi officials in their ranks.
So basically - being ex-stasi is nothing to be ashamed of anymore in some parts of Germany.
> And what are the systemic practices in place that led to people not following the official protocol?
I guess we'll find out. Apparently one of two drivers who were given the go ahead for normal operations requested additional confirmation because he or she (rightly) thought go-slow was the expected response for transit resumption under the fallback protocol. Some incompetence in the control authority Adif, then, but I'm sure that'll be the focus of the inquiry they will no doubt have.
I'm so fucking tired of you people constantly trying to reduce human accountability after accidents like this that claim lives. It's always the fault of the system and never the fault of any people. As if we are all just cogs in a machine that is controlled by no-one. It is your fatalistic worldview that is directly causing accidents like this. How many more people have to die before we can fix things? Just stop.
Obviously individual people can be at fault, but it is this further process of asking _why_ individual people fail—pointing to systems, procedures, cultures—that has (in part) contributed to the extraordinary safety of aviation.
So I would say on the contrary, it is that systems worldview that actually leads to lasting improvements. Because human nature is not changing in a hurry.
Minions is an internal enterprise system already in use at Apple. It pools idle Mac GPUs into a shared compute cluster for ML inference.
There is no distributed execution of a single LLM across multiple GPUs using tensor parallelism here. Instead, it relies on task-level parallelism-breaking down a large workload into independent subtasks that run across separate machines. For example, generating embeddings for a million documents.
This pattern has been implemented across hundreds if not thousands of different organizations (and between organizations). I have a patent on data distribution strategies from my time at Google running a large (>1M cores 24/7 for 3 years) idle cycle harvesting project.
it's a good idea but you often end up with huge tail latencies, slight incompatibilities due to fleet heterogeneity, and a database/scheduler management problem.
And Apple has had simple distributed video encoding since 2005, so yes it is not new in computing, but it is still useful for the gap before a given task can fit comfortably on one machine
Yes. The political payoff can be cumulative: repeated disruption makes everyday life feel less reliable and institutions look less capable.
There are - in addition to that - examples of Russian financing and influence operations alongside this. Take for example France’s Front National that received a €9.4 million loan from the First Czech Russian Bank in 2014. Separately, the US DOJ’s 2024 Doppelganger case alleged a Kremlin-directed operation using fake news sites and social-media accounts to influence elections and weaken support for Ukraine.
Those are different mechanisms, but they illustrate why the damage from an influence campaign cannot be measured solely in immediate economic losses. My concern is the feedback loop: disruption creates grievances, propaganda amplifies them, and political actors can turn those grievances into support.
That does not establish who was behind this particular refrigerator attack. Attribution still needs evidence. But “the direct damage was small” is not enough to conclude that an operation has no strategic value.
So agree with you. Just more shit flooding the zone.
Btw. there is also a separate interesting stream if one asks the question about wealthy technology investors’ attitudes toward democratic constraints.
Like Peter Thiel explicitly wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
My concern is that concentrated private power and foreign interference can both weaken democratic accountability, even when their motives differ. The results are a win for both by weakening democracy.
Concrats for finding the confidence. Looks really interesting. Put it on my list of projects to view during my down time. Thanks a ton for sharing. And congrats for getting something out the door.
One caution regarding the suggestions to publish this anonymously: this Ask HN post has already linked the project to your existing HN account. Your public comment history contains enough self-disclosed geographic, professional, family, purchase and ownership details that identifying you would likely be fairly straightforward for a motivated investigator.
I won't enumerate those details here.
The AI provider may also have account, payment, IP and conversation records connecting the generated code to you. An unrelated GitHub account and disposable email would therefore provide only superficial pseudonymity, not meaningful anonymity.
If attribution would create a material legal risk, I would assume the project is already attributable. A civil plaintiff could potentially seek records through discovery, and law enforcement could use the appropriate legal process. Getting actual legal advice before publishing seems safer than trying to anonymize it after posting this thread.
We’ve had IKEA furniture for over 15 years, sometimes storing it in the attic for a few years after disassembling it, then assembling it again. We’ve also kept the main bodies of our living room furniture while replacing the doors. We sold the old doors on eBay, and other people reused them.
I also inherited some “regular” living room furniture after my mom passed away. It cost about four times as much as IKEA’s higher-end lines. After moving it from my mom’s place to my office, I can already see it falling apart after just three years (total lifetime as my mom only had it for two). The quality is so shite that I honestly wish my mom had bought IKEA.
In the future, I’ll either buy custom pieces from a furniture maker or choose IKEA's higher end lines for longevity and reusability.
That is a perfectly valid opinion and POV to have. While I don't share it personally, I can totally understand why one has it. That does not change, that I personally actually do not care the slightest about the question of who or what wrote a novel.
But that is just me, having studied literatur and fallen into a school of literary studies that held Roland Barthes' claim of the death of the author [1] in high regard.
That might just be a German thing, but in school I hated the question of teachers asking: "What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up. You either hit the interpretation of your teacher or received a bad grade.
So when entering university and learning, that to analyse a text, to understand how structures within a text enable us humans to interpret and generate meaning, regardless of what the author originally might have intended, was freedom to me.
To make a long story even longer:
As long as the story is good - I don't give a rat's ass if an LLM wrote this, a monkey on a typewriter or a human being (or a group of authors writing under a pseudonym).
> What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up
It’s an exercise in engaging intellectually with the work. It’s not about knowing for a fact what the author wanted to communicate. Art is about engaging with human emotions and thoughts, not about deriving specific facts.
> Art is about engaging with human emotions and thoughts
Exactly. Still, that does actually not contradict what I wrote. You can still do this from a viewpoint of Structuralism, Formalism, Reader Centric Schools of Interpretation and Author Centric Schools of Interpretation.
Non of those are less intellectually" engaging with the work. Differently - and in my personal opinion more or less intellectually rewarding - yes. But not less or more.
It's not just the reader engaging in the work, but the author. If the author can't or is unwilling to put in any actual work, and also lies about it, I've lost all respect and interest in them. Saying you only care about the message and not the messenger is sort of like saying you only care about the words coming out of your friend's mouth but not your friend.
True, but that does not mean that the average teacher won't grade you badly if your interpretation is completely opposed to their and what was discussed during lessons.
There are bad teachers, sure. There are also bad students who think that the issue was that they weren't being taught when it was actually that they weren't trying to learn.
> I hated the question of teachers asking: "What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up. You either hit the interpretation of your teacher or received a bad grade.
I think this might be the most pernicious strain of anti-intellectualism online: the idea that there is no subtext, that a text only communicates exactly what it lays out on the surface level. That's not at all what Barthes was saying; you've misunderstood him.
Writing is not a noiseless transmission of thoughts, and thoughts themselves are not totally uninfluenced by the outside world, and people do not always state exactly what they mean in the simplest possible words, and words are understood by the reader in ways that writers did not intend. At every stage, there is the possibility of subtext and context being present.
Your teachers weren't trying to get you to fix on the one perfect interpretation, because that idea (Barthes would agree) doesn't really make sense. Instead, they wanted you to interpret, explain, and justify in a complex and ambiguous space.
> That's not at all what Barthes was saying; you've misunderstood him.
Thanks for misrepresenting me. Or willfully miunderstanding me. But hey. No qualms here.
Just that I never said:
> the idea that there is no subtext, that a text only communicates exactly what it lays out on the surface level.
Not sure though, what made you read that into my writing (and I am aware of the ironiy here). I actually read Barthes. And not only him. I actually used him and his ways of looking, together with thelikes of Genette and others when doing my thesis work (and before).
Because their depth and their way of looking at the depth within text was what fascinated me.
I always compared them to trying to understand the bones, the organs, the muscles and sinues of a text, compared to a surface level way we were taught in school. Combine that with a more culturally anthropologic way of looking at topics in literature and outside of it, more like Focault did (as an example) and my time in university was actually one that I cherrish deeply.
Edit:
> Your teachers weren't trying to get you to fix on the one perfect interpretation, because that idea (Barthes would agree) doesn't really make sense. Instead, they wanted you to interpret, explain, and justify in a complex and ambiguous space.
I have to disagree here. My university teachers mostly did. In school, my experience sadly was quite different. In school there was in most cases and with most teachers only one correct way of interpreting a work of literature. Regardless how well you argued your interpretation.
But I actually love the discussion. Thanks for engaging my opinion.
> I hated the question of teachers asking: What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up.
Then why does anyone write anything? Why did Orwell write 1984 instead of just making a 2 page bulleted list about how authoritarian regimes are bad?
Sure, an author can write something that is interpreted totally differently from what they meant, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they did have some intention behind what they wrote and it's worth exploring that.
There are lots of fun ways to experience literature or any art, and you can do multiple! I love reading a book and just considering it from the text alone, and then also considering it from in the context it was written. And then considering my own biases and how they might be similar or different to the author and how that might affect my interpretation.
I could probably enjoy certain LLM-generated art, but in far fewer ways.
Sorry, but the German far right party that just won their first state governmental majority vote has the highest share of former Stasi officials in their ranks.
So basically - being ex-stasi is nothing to be ashamed of anymore in some parts of Germany.
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