Well, that's precisely what is sinister here.

Those profiling tools don't really care which features are going to be used for predictions. It's just machine learning, and it's indiscriminate. So if you have an extension that correlates with you being Muslim, it will be used for whatever ML predictions they give to other companies, and the worst case will be another "oh we didn't do this intentionally".

Of course, that's not the first time this ever happened in human history, so even if it's not "something inherently sinister", it's just "criminal negligence".

It's actually a strange situation. Tao is the only high-profile mathematician who tries to resolve the reproducibility crisis in math by popularizing proof checkers, and who used LLMs in probably the most legitimate way: to produce formal undeniable proofs with them, that cannot really suffer from LLMs being wrong all the time.

On the other hand, I still find content and arguments he produces to be quite weak, and honestly it's getting annoying to hear them that often. It's the case when he could really get some help of a ghost writer who is more experienced in popularization, otherwise this repetition might cause some serious harm instead.

Thanks for breaking it down in a balanced way.

In fact, the paper has an error in the argument that AI might find Fermat's theorem to be incorrect due to definition of natural numbers including a zero, because paper's version of a theorem explicitly says that the number should be greater than two, and zero cannot be greater than two.

Surprisingly, this mistake proves the author's point that human can implicitly understand what was said, and that it still has value to it, even if it's incorrect.

The paper explicitly states that n is greater than 2, but the issue is whether a,b,c can be 0.

In ye olden days of WASM just added to the browser, the difference between native JS and boost::spirit in WASM was x200.

In their worst case it was just x5. We clearly have some progress here.

The word "Polymarket" can be replaced by "market" there.

Global market is just the largest gambling venue. Always has been. No amount of "monitoring" and "leagues" will keep people from going Boeing whistleblower way.

The "market" isn't a zero-sum-game though. Polymarket is.

I don't see how this is a counterargument.

I would rather say that lack of VBA support is an issue, and that it's an insurmountable task for alternative Offices to solve. Yes, and absurd one too.

As a "poweruser", I'd rather prefer to have all software available in the browser, open source, and hackable, than a native-based COM-ridden turd that only became more bloated and slow over the last couple of decades. (Yeah, and don't forget Ribbon UI!)

Unfortunately, Office EU is about politics, and not about hackable open-source software available with a single click.

I reported spammers ~5 times to GH, and every time the account went down in a couple of hours. Obviously mileage may vary, but I don't want the whole HN to think this process is completely broken.

Please keep reporting spammers, usually it works.

To confirm: is this email spammers, or spam on GitHub?

I've had decent success with on-GitHub action (I'd wager ~80% action taken), but the effort to report email spammers doesn't seem worthwhile.

I did report email spam to GH, and both got reply for them and seen their page go 404.

It was years ago though. Since I've enabled "hide my email" setting, and set that GH-generated email to my git config, "try my project" spam ceased to be an issue.

Whatever is going on here, is so magnificently complicated: sockpuppeting, doxxing, ddosing, psyops, pirating, FBI, cyberpunk capitalists, Russian hackers and Finnish activists. Somehow it does feel like in the middle of information war.

When I read the original article it doesn't really feel like the Finnish guy is even an activist. He seems to be just a curious nerd who wrote one article about this topic (who's behind this big site that everyone uses) and about a whole load of completely unrelated and non-activist topics like why did Japan stop building subway lines. Then his blog gained some traction because of the reporting around the FBI threats.

The article is also really appreciative of archive.today. It doesn't feel like a hit piece at all.

>The article is also really appreciative of archive.today. It doesn't feel like a hit piece at all.

That's why it's all so bizarre. The OP claims to be supportive of archive.today, but simultaneously publishes an article detailing his attempt at doxing the owner.

It's hard to see how OP could be acting in good faith here, if they truly meant no harm and were as appreciative of archive.today as they claim to be, they'd just have taken down the article.

US is dialing back even on global warming. There is no chance current government would risk space superiority for some kessler-shmessler that nobody has ever seen.

We had that ability in Firefox, through XUL. Then it was removed. Tree Style Tab addon doesn't work properly to this day because of this.

We had that ability in Chrome, through Chrome Apps. You could make a browser app, load pages in webviews, with the whole browser frame customizable. Then it was removed.

We had an ability to make a new innovative browser, until Google infested all the standartization committees, and increased complexity of standards on a daily basis for well over a decade. Now they monetize their effort on making Chrome by removing adblockers and enforcing their own ads, knowing full well that even keeping a fork that supports manifest v2 is infeasible for a free open-source project.

There is no way forward with the web we have right now. No innovation will happen anymore.