Imagine a Vendor API that adds a way to link from the page straight into a device purchase workflow. As a trial of the API in Chrome you can order a new Google Pixel 9b directly from any page with the word Android in it!
Or a LocalNet API that integrates with trusted hardware devices on your local network. As a trial (Chrome beta programme — strictly limited but here’s 3x signup links to share with your friends) you can adjust your Google Next Mini underfloor heating directly from Chrome!
Or a DirectCast API that lets you stream <video> elements to a device of your choice even over a VPN. As a Chrome trial, you can use your Google Cloud account to stream directly from YouTube Premium to any linked Google Chromecast devices you own!
It feels very close to “right to repair”. The coffee grinder you bought came as a single package but it has burrs, gears, machine screws, a motor, etc. If one of those components fails, we should be able to replace it ourselves and as such they should be documented.
The laptop has various pieces of hardware in it and corresponding drivers in macOS to make them tick. Did we buy the hardware and the drivers as an inseparable package, or should we be provided with the manual to make one component work when the other breaks, be that either third party trackpads or third party (Linux) drivers.
Apple might argue that drivers, unlike gears or motors, will never wear down and fail. They won’t need repairing so you don’t get to know how they work. Does right to repair only apply to products that could ever need repairing? Does it also extend to knowing how your purchased product is built so that you could repair it?
Maybe we’ll see a test case some day when a cosmic ray blows out /System/Trackpad.kext and a litigant applies to a court for the documentation to repair their laptop — to write their own driver!
(Or vice versa: a manufacturer of coffee grinders arguing in court that they are exempt from right-to-repair because they repair their machines for free at their Genius Espresso Bar.)
This is an interesting thought exercise. I immediately thought of the counter argument that Apple's driver quality is worse, especially for laptops nearing end of life (for the sake of argument assume this were true).
Could I then submit a warranty claim and demand Apple replace my aging laptop with their latest model?
I think there is a strong case that "the right to repair" includes software. If that doesn't mean drivers must be open source, it should at least mean hardware is documented such that a driver can be written from it.
But the US still doesn't have the right to repair hardware, haha.
I hope the EU is listening. They won't get far with their sovereign software push if hardware cannot be used. Even on the Android side, you can't write an alternative to Android because all of the hardware has locked bootloaders and hidden drivers. Good luck reverse engineering the hardware/drivers on a Samsung Galaxy - let alone an iPhone or MacBook.
I asked ChatGPT to draw the outline of an ellipse using Unicode braille. I asked for 30x8 and it absolutely nailed it. A beautiful piece of ascii (er, Unicode) art. But I wanted to mark the origin! So I asked for a 31x7 ellipse instead. It completely flubbed it, and for 31x9 too.
When a model gives a really good answer, does that just mean it’s seen the problem before? When it gives a crappy answer, is that not simply indicating the problem is novel?
No, that simply is not the case. The whole point of deep learning - and the reason it has been successful in so many domains over the last 20 years - is that generalization does occur. Leela will kick your ass at chess whether she's seen the position before or not, even if her search depth is set at 1 ply.
In the case of LLMs, the compression ratio alone absolutely requires this.
Do you posit that there are enough examples of 30x8 ellipses encoded in braille online for ChatGPT to learn from but not 31x7 or 31x9 ellipses? That seems unlikely.
Yes, or the model got lucky with the quality of output for a particular combination of my prompt and the reasoning behind its answer that lined up with something it had seen before — quality which it was unable to recreate under slightly different circumstances.
I wouldn't ask an LLM to output this directly. For an ellipse ascii I would guess that having it write a python program to generate it and then run it would work much better. Using claude sonnet 4.6 on a free account it seemed to work (sorry in advance if the hacker news formatting is horrendous)
You can use two spaces at the beginning of each line to trigger the "code" mode. I tried to reconstruct your drawing, but perhaps I didn't guess correctly:
Edit: I had to delete the two first spaces or each line and replace them with newly typed spaces from my keyboard. Perhaps there is some white-space-unicode-magic-character that is confusing HN.
All the whitespace appears to be a blank braille character, so it still displays correctly even without the indentation formatting: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2800
(Passed it through xxd to get the utf8 hex values)
Ug wants to borrow ten of my best sticks in exchange for future options to buy berries from his friend Og. Og has a watertight deal with Oog to invest the sticks in a five year mammoth hunting expedition but Oog first needs berries to exchange for sticks to cover his exposure on berry-puts he’s take out against Urrrg’s remortgaged stick pile.
Well, I said no. Not getting burned that way again!
If you or anyone else reading this haven’t finished Stephen’s Sausage Roll to the very end, including reading all the story book paragraphs along the way (which increase in poignancy and frequency as the game winds to a close) then I strongly encourage you to do so. No spoilers!
What if they use someone else's device though? Or circumvent the filter? Come on, this is Hacker News, "we" circumvent guardrails because we can and because we know no security is perfect, often from a young age.
I love how a lot of the "this is the parents' responsibility" opinion-havers don't seem to remember what it was like to be a kid themselves and / or don't have kids of their own.
The metaphor still works, minors in pubs are, presumably, under the supervision of their parents, otherwise they have not business being there in the first place.
Is there an industrial valley anywhere in the world with expertise in silicon chip making that is also situated next to a bay-like area surrounded by brine ponds? Suggested search terms: “valley of silicon” and “bay-like area”.
Joking aside, is this what those brine ponds were for — the ones you see from the air on approach to SFO — or were they just for regular sea salt?
I’m confused about too many things being measured at once. Is Phelps banning AI to ensure her students are fit to pass terminal examination? And doing so to ensure that her class has a good pass rate, proving she is a good teacher and can keep her job? What if her cohort are particularly dumb? Is she incentivized to make it easy to pass her classes to get that A you paid so much for? Or hard or make that A worth something?
My mentor, a PhD in classics, told me it was never about outcomes and only about improvement. I suppose that answers my question. If your AI gets you an A at the start of the course and an A at the end, then, in the sense that you have not succeeded over anything, you have failed.
My impression was she just brings the typewriters into class as a one-day novelty thing per course, not that it becomes the norm for the whole semester. The goal is to give the students a taste of what the old-fashioned way is like, to get them thinking about it.
What a ridiculous idea. As hard to read as it is dumb!
For a senior engineer like myself with decades of experience it is trivial to see how to fix this to make it much more readable.
1/ pick a sunny day
2/ at each hour, measure the bearing to the sun
3/ encode as a dict[str, float] e.g.
{“twelve”:180.00}
4/ sort the hours by dict.get
Voila.
As an added bonus, for some reason this ends up sorting the minutes and seconds too. (“# wtf?!”)
For now, I was only able to fix the hours when I could see the sun (eleven, twelve, and two to eight — I don’t get up very early and I like lunch). Patches form the arctic circle welcome :P
I also need to tilt my head a bit as eleven is at the top instead of twelve. Other than that I would say it’s a considerable improvement on the OP’s rather naïve implementation! Scoff!
Jam a stick in the ground aligned with the earth's axis and take your bearing from the shadow's direction. Then follow GP's instructions. Never mind that we've reinvented the sundial...
The closer you are to the equator, the taller the stick needs to be. If you're really close, the height requirements diverge, and the stick is at this point technically more of a space elevator[1] than a stick.
But don't lose hope, just tell Bezos that Musk wants to fund your space elevator, and vice versa, to goad one of them into funding your $10tn near-equatorial sundial boondoggle.
Or a LocalNet API that integrates with trusted hardware devices on your local network. As a trial (Chrome beta programme — strictly limited but here’s 3x signup links to share with your friends) you can adjust your Google Next Mini underfloor heating directly from Chrome!
Or a DirectCast API that lets you stream <video> elements to a device of your choice even over a VPN. As a Chrome trial, you can use your Google Cloud account to stream directly from YouTube Premium to any linked Google Chromecast devices you own!
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