The "information wants to be free" discourse of just under 30 years ago feels so charmingly naive now that we've seen how lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow.
What exactly is this "information wants to be free" discourse? The arguments for and against freedom of speech as a foundational social principle span at least 300 continuous years.
The discussions about intellectual property rights are quite recent, but the idea that "lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow" was well-explored over 300 years of discussions about freedom of speech (and not only discussions, but also jailings, executions, witch hunts, etc).
I think it should be pretty obvious that dissemination of information and lies today—when you can’t even know if the person on the other side is real or from your own country—is much different than 300 years ago. The “information wants to be free” motivation is much closer to the world of today than the one in your distant past.
More importantly, I don’t understand why you’re so hung up on that. What difference does it make? If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important? It doesn’t matter to the discussion, it’s only distracting from the point.
> I think it should be pretty obvious that dissemination of information and lies today much different than 300 years ago.
Of course, so what? If your implication is that none of the arguments made over 300 years are relevant today, I would say it is pretty obviously completely wrong.
> when you can’t even know if the person on the other side is real or from your own country
Did people in England and France use to know the authors of seditious pamphlets that were produced in the Dutch Republic and smuggled into those countries? Most of them were anonymous. Not only they didn't know the authors, the authors 100% were enabled by foreign actors.
> it’s only distracting from the point
The point: we've seen recently how damaging the fast spread of lies is therefore only naive fools would be against information control. My rebuttal: we've seen how damaging lies are for 300 years, yet it is a deep ongoing debate that many great thinkers contributed to, therefore it is not just a matter of fools believing into something.
Or do you see "the point" to be something different?
Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea. It’s merely anchoring it to something recent HN readers have a good likelihood of being acquainted with. It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
I’ll ask again:
> If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important?
> No, the point is that for the purposes of this discussion it is irrelevant when the arguments were first made.
How is that irrelevant if the whole statement is literally about when the arguments were first made and supposedly disproven?
> Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea.
It literally says __now__ that we've seen how lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow, as if it is something recent.
> It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
If someone says that our views on colonialism were naive before Avatar 2 changed our perception of Avatar, of course it is fair to mention Pocahontas and 300 years of nuanced discussions of colonialism.
Why do you assuming only true information is information. Information can be anything not to mention that the definition of truths and lies can change with time and location.
So if a book is banned by a widespread movement of extremists taking control of local governing bodies and the federal government is not involved, that's okay then?
that was the only point I was making. Mein Kraft, Selected Works of Lmao The Dong, and The Anarchist Cookbook may be removed from sale/access in some specific locations, but it is very much legal to buy, own, and sell them.
the US federal government historically banned books under the Comstock Act of 1873 which is still on the books and is still active federal law. it only currently isn't being enforced following some cultural changes in the 1960s. another change in the cultural winds could bring it back unfortunately
don't you have lots of those dormant old timey laws that would be promptly invalidated as unconstitutional if an attempt to enforce them was made these days, like sodomy laws were?
the Comstock act was unconstitutional at the time that it was actually enforced. i don't want to get into politics but there are many dynamic factors at work here
AI could theoretically also be used to optimize existing code instead of producing new features, allowing existing tech to run on lighter hardware. Rent me an rpi if the software is fast.
Yup. Not sure which particular stopped-clock struck right within the generally anti-science MAHA movement but I think everybody is happy to take the win.
Ironically enough, the psychedelic field sort of defies some scientific analysis, so could be construed as "anti-science". I've seen some commentary that it's difficult to test. As an example, you can't really do a double blind study with a placebo because it's obvious to everybody who got the drug.
The same could be said for a lot of drugs that have strong side effects, just one difference here is the main "side effects" are something some people consider fun. Though you could still do double-blind for comparing the effectiveness of different psychedelics, e.g comparing LSD to Psilocybin.
Double blind studies became a requirement in order to protect the people from the greed of pharmaceutica companies and their natural desire to cut corners in research.
that feeling of a clock striking right is actually a momentary glint of light pouring through a crack in the cold stone shell that has become encrusted around the hearts of those soaking too often in the type of extreme rhetorical panic which broods a curated and embedded fear similar to the kind that makes children afraid of the bogey man, they feel safer to stay hidden with the fear than to venture out enough to discover it was just a chimney sweep on the distant rooftop and everything is fine outside after all where they soon discover some great adventure or purpose in the richness of the world
To play devil's advocate for a moment (although I hate it): LoC often actually means NIH... but NIH suddenly has a pretty big proponent in the form of resistance to supply-chain attacks.
Basically the choices are:
1. Roll your own
2. Lockfile your deps for too long
3. Chase the bleeding edge for every dependency
The first is security-through-obscurity because DIY libs will have bugs and vulns but they won't be well-known. The second means missing known vulnerabilities. The third means supply-chain risk.
The rash of attacks and the ease of LLM-powered roll-your-own has shifted the risk-reward calculus towards 1.
But I hate it. This is the further Peter Pan never-gonna-grow-up of our industry that we cannot develop solid best-practice tools and must churn endlessly.
Cosmic rays can probably be resolved with some parity bits and redundancy. Especially since these don't have to be located way up in geosynch, lower orbits get you more magnetosphere protection.
Not that it isn't a problem, but I think heat dissipation will have the edge.
I worked at the architecture level on designs to mitigate signal corruption inside the asic. I don't remember the exact numbers, and obviously it depends on the design. but you need to add error detection and correction on every path (busses, mixes, registers, function units, etc). the number I seem to recall was a 25% area overhead and a nominal decrease in clock rate. this was for an earth-bound very large machine, so idk if that would be sufficient for space. usually those designs have much larger nodes and much slower clock rates. primarily because of damage caused by ionizing radiation that accumulates over time.
so sure, the heat issue seems fatal, but rad-hard designs will certainly have a bottom line impact
Sounds like they slapped in a bunch of common plugins and released it as a product to promote the free-for-a-limited-time use of their new coding AI service.
> promote the free-for-a-limited-time use of their new coding AI service
Not sure which "free" service you're referring to, but MiMo v2.5 Pro is plenty capable & (after its recent 70%+ price drop) one of the most affordable options in its class (DeepSeek v4 Pro, MiniMax M3, & Qwen 3.7 Plus). I read somewhere that Labs are incentivized to implement custom harnesses because each model has its strengths, quirks, & blindspots (like Qwen forking Gemini CLI)?
I'm guessing the greatest reason behind each provider creating and agent harness is that (a) there is not a clear winner still and (b) it is harder to switch models with a competitor, as you also have to switch harness
Or by using a proxy, yeah. Personally I would still prefer a multi provider harness over CC when using it with another provider, if alone for the visible reasoning, model switcher, cost estimation and so on. So far I've only preferred CC when I needed to work with Jupyter Notebooks because it has built-in tools for that.
The latter. It looks like it's meant to be a batteries-included agent to promote their free-for-a-limited time AI service that it connects to by default.
Ok, fair enough compared to the rest of the proeminent actors I guess, but quite confusing from dev point of view. Lately I started to experiment with model like Qwen2.5 on local. Good enough to ask simple question, but didn’t manage to do anything remotely close a agents I started to experiment with through Copilot.
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