Austin Wright

I don’t think people realize how selfless and wonderful the StackOverflow’s founders were. Unlike reddit, x etc they insisted ALL of their content will be 100% open, nothing will ever be locked up in walled garden. They made it a point by even offering structured data downloads! They didn’t cared people cloning the website. They didn’t worry about putting the whole monetization thing at risk. It was a true hacker spirit in it’s purest form. Most folks won’t be able to grasp how hard this is. You are on top of the world. Millions of people depend on you daily. You have the rarest opportunity to rack in billions. And you still stay true to your principles. This exactly in turn later enabled AI revolution. I still remember downloading entire SO archives and preparing it for pre-training while Reddit and others went onto lawfare and firewalling the content. Note that this was the content their users - not reddit employees - had created for free and voluntarily to help others and the world. But they locked it all up for profiting from it personally. SO did none of that. I think they knew they will be sacrificed at the altar. Yet it will exactly serve the intent of their founding principles to help others and the world, now through AI, even at bigger scale. All of today’s models are built upon efforts of such true pure hackers who spent their days and years to create training data for AIs. I was a proud SO contributer for many years and there are couple of times while testing models I did felt that models might have used my answers 😇. Hats off to @codinghorror and @spolsky and so many builders and hackers at SO for moving the world forward, one revolution at a time 🫡.

The owner of a French anime shop who went viral has released security footage showing his store being looted.

how did nobody leak this, manhattan project level of opsec from tesla

A thief has been mocked after stealing empty Apple Mac Mini boxes instead of the actual computers “Our computers were right there in front of them. Really low IQ,” an employee said

It's crazy that there's a tool out there that's become vital to they way I do my job, parent my kids, and make major life decisions; and yet we barely spend more on it than AI

I take great joy in stubbornly being like "I can't find this object? oh yeah? I'll keep buying more until the problem solves itself". For example, I've bought 12 of this towel, and I can't find a single one right now, so I just bought another 4. At some point either I'll stop running out of towels, or eventually I'll successfully saturate every single nook and cranny that can swallow up towels. I learned this from a professor at MIT, whose policy for his lab was that whenever someone sent out an email asking where the broom was he would immediately buy another broom, and reply being like "I will saturate the lab with brooms until this stops being a problem".

Dangerous precedent. There is zero reason to believe that models are conscious, and granting them human-like empathy is one of the most dangerous things we could do. It increases their power to manipulate humans dramatically.

Believe it or not, America's 5 largest cities lie perfectly on a 4th-degree polynomial

Nintendo was founded 137 years ago today 🕹

Phone cases are worthless. Specifically for iPhones. Allow me to give you some personal confirmation bias. I haven’t used a case since the Steve Jobs bio came out in 2011 (he despised them). Since then, I’ve dropped my phone ti the point of needing replacement THREE TIMES. In 15 years. I’ve had my screen replaced a grand total of ZERO times. I’ve had my phone replaced for hardware issues unrelated to dropping about ten times. AppleCare+ for an iPhone 17 Pro is about $140/year. A good case is about $25–$60/year, depending how long you keep it. Plus you get theft and loss protection with AppleCare+. No case will cover your phone if you lose it. If the point of a case is to keep your phone looking nice, then why do you make your phone look ugly by putting a case on it?

Apple Music logo over the years

A lot of people grow up and think “things just work.” They haven’t had a real job, or built anything on their own. They just assume all things have been like this forever. And this isn’t just a rich kid problem. Capitalism has raised the standard of living for so many people now that relative wealth to 100 years ago is easy. Our homeless people literally have smart phones. But you know what happens next when easy times bring weak men.