What are these tools? I often write about stuff on my blog and I know a lot of what I’m writing or thinking about are ideas someone else has come up with (and that I’ve read but not remembered or not read and come up with a poor version of) but bog standard LLM DeepResearch never picks up the things I want.
I imagine any tool that’s good at plagiarism detection would also kill it at this kind of literature research.
An example of something where it worked like this is that I had some ideas around how tribes evolve and so on and wrote them as I could think of them and ChatGPT was able to find that Darwin’s Cathedral had a far better synthesis of various much more rigorous takes on the subject.
It is to America’s great fortune that her technological innovations are not passed by committee. In particular, polls always capture the status quo. Other things that were widely unpopular: interracial marriage, gay marriage. And especially for technology, public opinion led to the stalling of fission power in the US.
So hurray for ignoring the majority of people. I’m glad people can offer other people services in a generally neutral way without needing to pass a committee.
Interracial and gay marriage were not "wildly unpopular" "technological innovations". What an extraordinary stretch to try to tie the in-fact deeply unpopular, job-destroying and wealth-concentrating AI boom to human--HUMAN--rights victories.
Everyone is going to dislike this comment because you're cutting across two different polarized groups and comment sections rarely champion the middle ground.
Amusingly, I actually tried something like this using /r/wallstreetbets and there was no signal I could extract on a sufficiently small scale. Far dominated by Trump antics and rate actions. Perhaps others will have better luck.
This is wonderful. Many of these reports are makework paperwork. One even wonders if pushing for them is just taking a page from the CIA Sabotage Manual and applying it to us. Considering Congress members barely read the bills they’re voting on, it’s probably insignificant that this pointless paperwork is dispensed with.
When we finally end Environmental Impact Reports by generating them at scale with AI we will finally be able to escape this plateau of ossification.
I’m not particularly attached to bullshit being manufactured by human minds.
If these reports truly are so bad, the law should be changed to stop requiring them. But, lawmakers aren't choosing to do that. Maybe there's actually some good reasons for them to exist.
Some open source projects use PRs as an inspiration machine and just reimplement the feature themselves if they like it. I think that’s entirely sound and as a user I prefer that.
But also as a user I fork them for personally desired changes. Even keeping everything working with upstream is low cost these days.
The national security and defense arguments are fortunately the only things that protect any forward progress. Without DoD cover, every Starlink launch would be governed by the California Coastal Commission and friends. Frankly, living in the Bay Area, where people use anti-pollution laws to prevent student housing, I think I understand a little the law structure of the United States. It is perhaps analogous to the way Jewish people treat the halakha. The idea being that if you can find a way around the law, it is meant to be operated that way. So students are noise pollution, bike lanes need environmental impact reports while highways don't, solar power is polluting while gas isn't, endangered species genetically identical to common species are discovered when they would block dams, and 50 years of having a Nuclear Regulatory Commission means exactly one reactor approved by them built.
So there's outrage and all that, but this is the fundamental law of the USA: the law is the Word; and all bugs in it are features.
For the most part, I get why this helps the USA. But boy does it feel like there's going to be a reckoning one day.
Also the law is not static. Things can go back and forth. Out of phase with whatever trends in news cycles. Watch the Germans debating Nuclear phase out over 30 years.
The problem with large scale industry investments like nuclear power plants is that they don't follow easily whatever trends in news cycles. It takes years to build a nuclear power plant, but it takes just a single vote in the parliament to stop it. Or a referendum like in Austria.
So even through some German politicians are currently discussing nuclear phase-in, no investor will invest in nuclear power in Germany, because no investor could be sure that the next or over-next government with participation of German Greens would not again vote for nuclear phase-out.
As much I like some political ideas of German Greens, I understand that for the older generation of Greens, nuclear power is the prime evil which has to banished from face of the Earth and the reason for existence of the German Green party.
The scales of money at play always seem so strange. Oh a few hundred million for ocean sensors, or about what a few OpenAI / Cursor employees or a few hundred FAANG employees could personally fund if they desired to do so.
Cost has nothing to do with it. This was all laid out in the project 2025 manifesto. Burn it all down with no regard to money previously invested. Makes it harder for future administrations to rebuild. Halting the collection of data is not enough. Maintenance is 5% or less of the cost to deploy new. If they destroy it, it makes the cost to rebuild (including having to re-seek congressional approval) that much harder and time consuming.
The US military budget is 900 billion dollars. The government can afford a few hundred million for some sensors, it should not need private sector patrons
That number, incidentally, is the entire NATO military budget. Which scares me because I can imagine someone planning on taking action that would result in the dissolution of NATO thinking they can make up the difference that way and choosing that number with that in mind.
Is it actually coming out of the military budget? I assumed we were just going to get taxed for it, or they'd pull it from some other places that actually needs the funds.
Alternatively, they could just increase the military budget by 300 billion (or more).
"Walk through some of this. The Iranians are saying that they're gonna have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund, true or false?" O'Keefe began.
"Well, Ed, that's the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you're going to see, Ed—and people have to be skeptical of this—is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will overemphasize the benefits that Iran gets, while underemphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits," Vance replied.
NBC news. He said the "Gulf Coast coalition", but it's unclear exactly who is going to be paying into that.
That's only part of it, the US and allies are reportedly going to set up a $300 billion fund for Iran, the particular terms of accessing it aren't clear at this point. GP is correct in that the US is not putting up $300 billion, but it will be putting up part of that money. The US fought and lost a war and Iran comes out ahead, and the US and its allies come out worse and poorer.
Its not even about saving money. If they just wanted to save money they'd just stop paying attention to the data coming in, retask/lay off the people working on it, and let the buoys stay out there. A dumb idea to me, but at least that's consistent. Let other organizations decide to manage the buoys. While I'd prefer for the government to do it, it could be possible to have other groups fund such things. It would be a lot cheaper, easier, and allow for a smoother transition with no lost data for some other org or government to take over the project.
Instead, we're paying money to pull the sensors out of the water. We're actively spending money to blind ourselves to things we know are growing areas of concern.
But that just seems like par for the course for the current administration, whether it's tariffs or ballrooms or ocean sensors - do the illegal thing ASAP, let the courts argue for months or years, and maaaaaybe get a slap on the wrist sometime way in the future.
> do the illegal thing ASAP, let the courts argue for months or years, and maaaaaybe get a slap on the wrist sometime way in the future.
don't forget that the courts have already decided that anything this president does is legally okay because he's immune from punishment for breaking any law as long as they decide the illegal activity was an "official act".
Well the majority party in Congress could put a stop to it at any time. The fact that they don't, and haven't just on about any related issue, tells you everything you need to know. They just don't want to put their names on it in case public opinion sours, then they can at least try to keep their jobs and claim innocence.
Congress isn't toothless so I just don't see how I can believe anything but that the majority of congress, whether they claim opposition or not, is onboard with this nonsense. They are completely out of touch and it seems like they are just playing a game of PR hot potato to avoid taking any real action.
This is the strangest part to me. They will spend millions and several years to dismantle a system that, realistically, could also just be abandoned. Not that we should leave more random, unused equipment out in the world, but if this were really about cost savings, and given this administration does not care at all about the environment, then leaving the equipment in place was the best option by their stated rationale.
they are intentionally making it difficult for the next administration to flip the switch back on to monitoring again; it would now require $100s of millions to reconstruct the system, money that may not be easy to get congress/taxpayers to agree to
This administration is extremely wasteful despite the mantra about reducing waste, fraud and abuse. In fact it's done the opposite of all three things.
Whatever delusions I once held that software engineers are above average intelligence were completely eradicated by seeing how many HN commenters eagerly bought into the obvious lies about DOGE and their goals (amongst other things). It was embarrassing. They sure seem to be a lot quieter about that now, though.
Have to sternly disagree: at least on the conservative side, it is thoroughly lapped up. Right wingers the world over constantly vote to fuck themselves and the rest of us over with this never ending whingeing about debt, spending, pork, what have you. On this particular issue it's even less surprising since the only thing perhaps a right winger wants to hear less about than government spending is climate change.
The entire debt ceiling bullshit is political theatre and always has been. We didn't even have a debt ceiling for the majority of our existence as a nation, and since it's creation by right wingers, it has been used as a bludgeon by right wingers to kneecap anything that stood to benefit the civil good of our country. Austerity politics have been deployed here and elsewhere to great effect to destroy social programs, demonize those who need them, and reallocate trillions of dollars to the private sector to provide the same services the public sector did, but worse, and while enriching greedy assholes the entire way. And the whole way it has been done by an enthusiastic and approving portion of the public who can be persuaded to feel outrage that seventy cents of their yearly taxes are going to some program in some far off part of the country they'll never see.
Meanwhile the actual national debt soars, and under who? Yep, fucking right wingers again. And every time we want to do something science and evidence backed like give the homeless somewhere to live, we're met with a chorus of WHO'S GONNA PAY FOR IT, but every goddamn time there's another country full of brown kids to blow the fuck off the face of the Earth, we always, always have money for that.
> Meanwhile the actual national debt soars, and under who? Yep, fucking right wingers again.
Exactly. If the people on the right cared at all about government spending they'd never vote republican again, which just shows us that they don't actually care about government spending. They don't seem to want to talk about the things they really do care about too loudly though.
I'm not following what this comment is supposed to address from what I wrote.
The US government is taking some action (they take all sorts of actions people agree or disagree with, fund or defund various programs or initiatives), and because some people disagree with that action we should create a special tax levy on "some rich text workers" to pay for something that some number of citizens want to see exist despite the government that was democratically elected defunding that various program? Maybe when Democrats win we can just tax a few Anthropic employees and have them pay for the natural gas power plants that get shut down and then we can tax them again when Republicans shut down the wind and solar turbines. Perfect!
That, which is an accurate description of what was proposed, seems a bit unworkable, to say the least. Any why limit it to these sensors? Why not pay for all sorts of things? Let's just tax tech workers and they'll fund all sorts of activities that some political groups want to see happen?! lol that's so crazy and doesn't at all make sense in a democratic nation that respects the rule of law.
Pass the generated text through some kind of quality prompt. It’s got too much filler right now.
The story is interesting but it’s hard to read because it’s hard to tell which parts are meaningful and which parts are filler.
E.g. “we pulled the card cold - straight from the rig to the workbench”. Okay, but why would going straight from the rig to the workbench make it cold? If anything it would be warm. But it turns out the temperature is meaningful in your story.
I imagine any tool that’s good at plagiarism detection would also kill it at this kind of literature research.
An example of something where it worked like this is that I had some ideas around how tribes evolve and so on and wrote them as I could think of them and ChatGPT was able to find that Darwin’s Cathedral had a far better synthesis of various much more rigorous takes on the subject.
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