Supposedly they don't actually monitor @ pings. If you need to contact the admins, I typically get much quicker responses by emailing hn@ycombinator.com
OED, Merriam-Webster, and Collins all show a short "e", as in "delete" or "different", i.e. /dɪ/. I've never heard it pronounced as /diː/. Do you have some kind of southern drawl where you put the stress on the first syllable, like some people do with "defense"?
California wants a ban because they specifically think safety standards are not sufficient [1]:
California’s ban would be an acknowledgment that the state’s laws
requiring safer processing techniques for quartz are not enough to
protect workers: Compliance is too low and the industry too
fragmented, with many small shops that escape inspection, according
to the California Department of Industrial Relations, which has
pushed for the ban.
What amazes me is that people who write these articles must spend so little time reading them. Or are people just so blind to the quality of writing that they don't notice?
For the most part I do my own writing, because AI models aren't even close to reaching human quality. But for things like dynamically generated technical documentation or automated tasks (like summarizing the results of an automated anomaly investigation), where I cannot be in the loop, I find writing can be improved by asking for a specific style.
For example, if you ask for Simplified Technical English, we go from:
Storing a lake as thousands of 1 MB Parquet files is a bad practice anyway, and 2.0 does not rescue it. Fundamentals still matter!
To:
It is bad practice to store a data lake as thousands of 1 MB Parquet files. Version 2.0 does not correct this. The basic rules still apply.
Claude loves gerund phrases where the important stuff ("...is bad practice") is at the end, rather than the beginning ("it is bad practice to..."). But even if "x is y" is logically simpler, I think "it is y to x" is cognitively more intuitive to humans, especially for longer sentences where the x is a long explanation, because it mentally front-loads the topic under one heading: "bad: " as opposed to ": bad".
Claude's prose causes fatigue, I think, in part because the grammatical structure is at odds with how human cognition expects to be served information in their native language. But I also suspect that's a training thing. We've not grown up reading or writing like Claude.
In Aliens, there is already a colony where they land. The colony has roads (the original prologue, which is in the special edition, shows Newt's dad driving a truck) and presumably a landing area.
In Alien, the planet landscape definitely is chaotic and hostile to landing, and indeed the crew's ship is damaged during landing.
Alas, a good-condition Tizio usually sells for around $200-$350 used, depending on the exact model. First-generation models may go a little higher, like $500-$600. I bought mine a couple of years ago for about €250.
If you browse sites like 1stdibs or Pamono, you're going to see dramatically inflated prices, but I don't see why anyone would ever buy there. Ebay, Selency, Vntg, etc. are more likely to sell at actual market prices.
I sold a few vintage Tizio lamps, with the old style halogen, for €130 per piece last year. Took a few weeks to sell them. In all fairness, they were missing bits like the glass panel and one had two paint splatters on the head.
Nice lights, but not the easiest to move, a bit fragile and not very power efficient. The LED ones don't power on when you apply power to them which is a strange choice and makes it difficult to integrate with wall switches.
The real price of anything you see on 1stdibs is about 40-50 percent lower than what you see. Their fees are egregious and if a piece is unique or the seller name has enough info it's almost always very easy to find the seller and contact them directly via instagram. Also, if you want more market price information go look at sold prices on liveauctioneers (just keep in mind buyers premium is about 25-30 percent)
Yep, agreed. I don't really understand why 1stdibs even exists, since I can't imagine anyone ever pays these prices. Chairing and Pamono (now owned by Chairish) also is generally inflated.
My go to sources are Selency, Vntg, Instagram, Catawiki, and then a bunch of online stores across Europe I've bookmarked, including auction sites like Bukowskis in Sweden. The smaller vintage stores are the ones to go to generally.
Blindsight is fantastic. The sequel, Echopraxia, is also excellent; it is very different, and I expect many people were disappointed that it wasn't just more of the same.
Also a big shout out to his less well-known novel, The Freeze Frame Revolution. It's about the crew of a "stargate"-seeding spaceship trying to stop the ship's AI, but being hampered by the fact that the AI is both near-omniscient and that they only work in short shifts before being put back in hibernation. He also wrote a handful of short stories set before and after the novel.
There's something very refreshingly direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense, and clear-eyed (some would say cynical) about Watts' style of writing. His prose tends to be tough (quite like early Gibson's noir style, with the punk attitude intact), but also beautifully cinematic. The only other write that I think comes close, aside from Gibson, is Dan Simmons with his Hyperion Cantos, but he's not nearly as darkly cynical.
Leaving aside "which book is better" (which is hard to answer), I'll say that The Freeze Frame Revolution is much more approachable for most folks. It's the one I'd recommend to my friends first, then I might recommend Blindsight if they liked it - along with other difficult to articulate factors. Perhaps the "recommend/don't recommend" choice is arrived at by non-conscious mechanisms ;)
Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.
What is less clear is why the high court, which is supposed to be neutral interpreters of the law, pre-emptively reclassified point clouds as non-document materials that are excluded from FOI requests, contrary to the lower court's judgement. I can only guess that there's some collusion going on at high levels.
It states in the article *[our lawyer] advised us that [...] the judges would be extremely deferential to the Rodin Museum and would grant it the benefit of any doubts* but doesn't dare to say why they would be deferential.... It's probably because these high level cultural institutions basically get to do whatever they want... France definitely loves their institutions.
I think the part that stands out is how at least one court went out of its way to invent a new argument on behalf of the museum. I was surprised to learn this is actually somewhat common in French law. The court itself, at least with cases involving administrative actions, has every right to step in like this. It is not a neutral arbiter.
>reclassified point clouds as non-document materialast
Someone needs to make "FOI-B-Gone," an app that bidirectionally converts arbitrary PDFs into one of these (apparently) magically un-FOI-able point cloud documents.
Just "emboss" the text into 3D space, write that to a 3D file, and voila no more pesky fourth estate oversight! Watergate, eat your heart out...
So, just add a 0 z-coordinate. And fwiw, points are usually represented on a computer with a 4D position, not a 3D one. So; if they specify "3D" then point clouds likely aren't covered.
Standard point clouds files are magic, standard bitmap files aren't! I don't make the rules, France does.
Of course it doesn't make any sense. We're engineering for (particularly inane) legal requirements, not information theoretic ones.
However, if The Rules are somehow that industry standard point cloud files are un-FOI-able, then any file can be made un-FOI-able, because any file can be translated to/from a standard point cloud file.
Is the museum supposed to have such a monopoly? Because then the ruling would be disappointing but ultimately not incoherent.
What's the law like on photographs? Those are effectively equivalent are they not? Or does the entire argument hinge on the fact that point clouds can be stored in a human readable format?
> Just speculation on my part, but the museum's motivation seems clear enough: they realized that point cloud documents could be used to make extremely high-fidelity copies and thereby threatened the museum's monopoly on official reproductions and other merch, and indeed create counterfeit versions of Rodin's works. The repeated allegations that the author is a counterfeiter with malicious intent suggest that they care about reproductions very much. To me, at least, that explains every single action on the part of the museum.
You're badly confused. The scans are not a financial asset, and they don't even try to make money on them.
From Cosmo Wenman's earlier exploits:
> In August 2016, with the help of the Berlin-based attorney and law professor Kristoff Ritlewski, I sent the Egyptian Museum a request for the scan, citing German freedom of information laws
> The museum quickly referred the matter to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin's state museums. The foundation—known in German as the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK)—is one of the largest cultural organizations in the world. When it received my records request, it acknowledged the existence of the Nefertiti scan and acknowledged that the organization was required by law to give me access to it. But it also declared that directly giving me copies of the scan data would threaten its commercial interests. The Egyptian Museum sells expensive Nefertiti replicas in its gift shop, and it implied that it needs to protect that revenue to finance its ongoing digitization efforts.
> In museum-world parlance, this argument against open access is known as "the gift shop defense."
> I asked them to reconsider their position, and to prioritize the benefits to the public of open access over gift shop revenue.
> I also made a new freedom of information request, this time for info about that revenue. I asked for records of their revenue from the sales of replicas of any artifacts, including the Bust of Nefertiti, that were derived from their scans. I asked for records of revenue from the licensing of any of their scan data to third parties. And I asked for any records that demonstrated how that revenue was directed to digitization projects. Finally, I asked them if they would accept a financial donation in exchange for making their Nefertiti data freely available to the public and, if so, what their price was.
> SPK's response, five months later, was revealing.
> SPK confirmed it had earned less than 5,000 euro, total, from marketing the Nefertiti scan, or any other scan for that matter. SPK also admitted it did not direct even that small revenue towards digitization, explaining that it was not obliged to do so.
The fact that another museum tried to avoid giving out scans because the museum felt it would impact their gift shop sales supports the parent's claim about the museum's motivations, not refutes it.
Did you read the quotes? They tried to avoid giving out scans by saying that they felt it would impact their gift shop sales. But we know that they were lying about this, because they had no gift shop sales to impact.
I'd like to see AI "democratize" the world, but I have a much more pessimistic outlook. One thing we see with technological revolutions is that (once the dust settles) they provide general improvements for all strata of societies. But as some boundaries are erased, others are magnified a hundredfold wherever robber barons can stake an exclusive claim.
If genuine AGI is developed, its everyday conveniences may continue to be shared with the common masses, but the powers that own the technology and the data centers will have no incentive to give everyone access equal to superintelligence, and that includes giving governments the same access.
Every stage of the industrial age has seen powerful, wealthy people/groups (whether you call them oligarchs or industrialists or whatever) become able to exert disproportionate power over the state, and we're already in a place where this is happening. Humans have shown time and again that once you have some resource (whether it be oil, gold, or data centers), someone will want to own all of it, and that they're always willing fight for that ownership, and this fight rarely benefits ordinary humans like us.
Developed countries have been enjoying an unusually long peace time thanks to the wonders of capitalism and the emergence of stable, progressive capitalist-friendly democracies. The road to utopian basic income and limitless leisure is going to be fraught with riots and violence, and make Marx suddenly utterly relevant once again, because there's too much at stake, and too stark a division between the haves and the have-nots.
The alternative timeline is one where governments get together to regulate AI into some kind of international agreement under the UN. That requires taking power away from the private corporations; historically, that's been a tough sell.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/...
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