SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.

Truly a conundrum worthy of the XXI century

Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.

The leaps in logic are so idiotic "he managed to land a rocket up right, so maybe he can pull it off!" (as if Elon personally made that happen, or as if a engineering challenge and fundamental thermodynamic limits are equally solvable). This is despite multiple comments replying with back of the envelope calcs on energy generation and heat dissipation of the ISS and comparing it to what you would need for even a moderately sized data center. Or even the comments that are like "maybe there is a chance", as if it is wiser to express uncertainty...

1,604 comments jfc

The headline alone is worthy of upvoting. About halfway through the article, the author includes an embedded YouTube video of the Dilberito Flash game. Made me reflect that 20 years ago, they might simply have directly embedded the game itself. And contemplate what the Web might look like if/when external YouTube embedding craps out.

And goddamn:

his former syndicate, publisher, and professional organizations have all declined to pay tribute or even acknowledge his passing.

I didn't realize it was quite that harsh, but so it goes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

You can basically tell their personalities from the photo.

robin hanson blocked me for referring to him as aella with tenure. now i think that he's ghislaine maxwell with tenure

"pro-billionaire" sorry I just threw up in my mouth a little. Also the billionaires are the ones rushing to create the thing so many rationalists claim is an existential risk, why the fuck would you support them??

Yeah, @XiWellWisher going up against Aella on X, The Everything App is well into late-SNL stages of unfunny parody

i don't find that name too strange, it's a post-ironic Online Leftist shibboleth

Bruh

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

These are the people who come next election will be voting strictly according to an AI's say so.

A polycule with Aella, otherwise known as a nightmare fuck rotation

Scum.

edit: reasonably certain annie is annieposting from tpot.

“People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,”

Remember when Rationalists pretended to care about truth, steelmanning, ideological turning tests etc.

(Also implying that billionaires are strong and attractive is funny)

subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies

Yall still are radical hippies. Some hippies just love the boot.

California is, I believe, the only state to give health insurance to people who come into the country illegally,” Kauffman said nervously. “I think we probably should not be providing that.

Rationalism, the empathy removal training center.

“It is the intention of journalists to lie, which is why we need to not do anything to the journalists themselves, but we need to simply remove them as a class,” Annie said. “Just like Germany does to the extremist organizations.”

Well, Germany certainly did excel at removing classes of people from society

lol.

Her political awakening, she added, was watching the press “constantly pump out obviously fake information” against Trump during the 2016 election instead of reporting on the “actual abhorrent views he holds.”

Converted by Scott. (That 'people are saying I was wrong but actually I was right' disclaimer aged worse than the post).

Did any actual billionaires show up to press their case, or was it all just cronies?

gag. going full mask off now

desperately trying to latch themselves onto the coattails of whatever passes for cool among nerds these days

@o7___o7 @techtakes That's why I'm fleeing screaming back to the arms of far-future space opera ATM.

@BlueMonday1984 @o7___o7

I reread the last couple of 'main line' laundry files books before I dived into the latest. The complete capture of the US government by The Sleeper's minions tracks what's actually happened since in the US I had a panic attack and needed a day or two to calm down.
Same thing happening in the UK now. I can t think of anywhere safe to hide.

R3call

Buisness plan: daily reminders to Recall the Recall Recall. It's memento mori for CEOs as a service.

Does (deservedly) mercilessly bullying Slopya Nadella actually work?

Similarly, what's going on with Charles Murray (Bell Curve) ???

He converted to christianity? https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Religion-Seriously-Charles-Murray/dp/1641774851

But now supports euthanisia? https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-i-changed-my-mind-on-assisted-suicide/

Over in the epstein files, Jim Watson tried to make an intro but Murray never replied? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00475960.pdf

There are other posts of the same story that include the original “dev” learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.

https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdn3uu7226

There’s also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150

Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:

• Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it must've done a bit more than that to get banned)
• Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
• Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.

Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, it's obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. That's not sustainable.

I hadn’t realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.

You know what they say. Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake, as this can allow them to continue their errors and lead to their own downfall

I miss when Patrick McKenzie was just sharing an American's view on Japanese culture and reminding devs that names are not always Firstname Lastname in the Latin alphabet and 'just' paying yourself twice the average local income from your business is not a failure. The following is deep twitter pundit brain for a rich white man in Chicago who has lived most of his adult life in Japan and SoCal referring to social programs for poor brown people in Minnesota:

I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.

Edit. I also like the HN response which explains that private companies have few responses to fraud except refusing service, but the State of Minnesota can arrest fraudsters, command third parties to provide evidence about them, and send them to prison, so the People of Minnesota require strong evidence before it uses those powers.

Oh, the left doesn’t have a home for Bundy or other Christofascists

I'm willing to accept him if he converts to Communist Anarchism in his heart of hearts and writes a long treatsie on what he thinks that even is.

The "we'll save some bucks by removing physical knobs and pose this as futuristic by making some vital functions only accessible via multiple levels of menus on a touchscreen" thing is the worst and should be banned.

the last time I drove a car was in 2015 or so, and back then every car I got had no computers in them. I dread the day that I need to have a vehicle again and my friggin car will upload bullshit into the cloud or whatever. the idea of having screens of any kind on a car is repulsive to me

I’ll have you know we’re acting like someone who’s rude to “serving staff” right now, where serving staff is defined as a formerly chrome currently mozilla developer relations marketing guy with fucking flatlined vibes

for those who hadn’t seen before, FWD is an account that showed up on the fedi not too long ago (3~4mo?), and has been acting as a Mouthpiece (and semi consent manufacturing outlet)

across a number of “polls” (with forced answer paths) they’ve had their replies absolutely blasted, and across literally hundreds of replies they’ve dodged the point so hard they might have invented a new sports class

earlier today I attempted to (quite lightly) check with them if they understand why their responses aren’t all-liked. it didn’t take much of long for them to go off the rails

Thanks for lighting his ass on fire. o7

The first issue filed is called "Hello world does not compile" so you can tell it's off to a good start. Then the rest of the six pages of issues appear to be mostly spam filed by some AI guy's rogue chatbot.

I wonder what actual experts in compilers think of this. There were some similar claims about vibe coding a browser from scratch that turned out to be a little overheated: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/27/cursor-lies-about-vibe-coding-a-web-browser-with-ai/

I do not believe that this demonstrates anything other than they kept making the AI brute force random shit until it happened to pass all the test cases. The only innovation was that they spent even more money than before. Also, it certainly doesn't help that GCC is open source, and they have almost certainly trained the model on the GCC source code (which the model can regurgitate poorly into Rust). Hell, even their blog post talks about how half their shit doesn't work and just calls GCC instead!

It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot Linux out of real mode. For this, it calls out to GCC (the x86_32 and x86_64 compilers are its own).

It does not have its own assembler and linker; these are the very last bits that Claude started automating and are still somewhat buggy. The demo video was produced with a GCC assembler and linker.

I wonder why this blog post was brazen enough to talk about these problems. Perhaps by throwing in a little humility, they can make the hype pill that much easier to swallow.

Sidenote: Rust seems to be the language of choice for a lot of these vibe coded "projects", perhaps because they don't want people immediately accusing them of plagiarism. But Rust syntax still reasonably follows languages like C. In most cases, blindly translating C code into Rust kinda works. Now, Rust does have the borrow checker which requires a lot of thinking to deal with, but I think this is not actually a disadvantage for the AI. Borrow checking is enforced by the compiler, so if you screw up in that department, your code won't even compile. This is great for an AI that is just brute forcing random shit until it "works".

The fact it doesn't have an assembler or linker, and I am doubting it implemented its own lexical analyzer, I almost struggle to call this a compiler.

The claim it is from scratch is misleading since it has all prior training from open source.

Building a small compiler for a simple language (C is pretty simple, especially older versions) is a common learning exercise and not difficult. This is very much another situation where "AI" created an over simplified version of something with hidden details on how it got there as a way to further push the propaganda that it is so capable.

Waiting for some promptfondler to complain that this kind of assignment is not really fair for an AI because it has actual requirements.

This could be regarded as a neat fun hack, if it wasn’t built by appropriating the entire world of open source software while also destroying the planet with obscene energy and resource consumption.

And not only do they do all that… it’s also presented by those who wish this to be the future of all software. But for that, a “neat fun hack” just isn’t enough.

Can LLMs produce software that kinda works? Sure, that’s not new. Just like LLMs can generate books with correct grammar inside, and vaguely about a given theme. But is such a book worth reading? No. And is this compiler worth using? Also no.

(And btw, this approach only works with an existing good compiler as “oracle”. So forget about doing that to create a new compiler for a new language. In addition, there’s certainly no other language with as many compilers as C, providing plenty of material for the training set.)

@dovel @BlueMonday1984 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04

Imagining an LW enjoyer attempting to tackle Proust and getting straight armed into the Shadow Realm.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made mushroom clouds.

In the Baker test at Bikini Atoll, the bomb was underwater, dimming the initial flash and making initial transient effects more visible.

Wow, I also now found the migrating to codeberg post. I should revisit Zig.

I was taught to take off every Zig, not install them! Clearly it was a more innocent time.

there isn’t a simple solution to this

How about just not creating the problem in the first place. How about that.

The people who are worried that Moltbook is where agents are gaining self-consciousness forgot the part of Accelerando where all the AIs were basically scammers (the Slug)

The real damning thing is the speed that the true believers abandoned this garbage fire. You used to be able to string these guys along for years, and now they can barely keep the trend going for a week. Gonna be real weird when the scammers realize they've finally burnt out all the good will.

@rook

Peter should go back to PDF manipulation libraries.

I don't think I disagree with much of what Asimov is saying here! Aside from the silly bits about left infighting and scifi as forecasting (yawn), and the horrible recount of the Spanish civil war, I've made pretty much the same observations about 1984. It's nihilistic and reactionary, it's profoundly misogynistic and it reeks of contempt for the working class. It's also shockingly naive and paradoxically enthusiastic about the workings and effectiveness of propaganda and censorship. There's certainly nothing prescient about it. It's baffling to me that it's still popular with leftleaning people to this day.

The most generous thing I can say is that the book might have been intended purely as satire, and as such it would at least be coherent. But sadly I don't think this is how people tend to read it.

There's a letter in the book of Asimov's correspondence that his brother edited where Asimov says that he'd been asked "How close are we to George Orwell's 1984?" again and again in the years leading up to 1984, to the point that he was sick of it and dreading the actual year 1984, when no one would ask him about anything else. I figure he had a lot of venom built up in his system that came out here.

He was also a veteran of science-fiction fan club drama, after which he worked in academia, so yeah, he knew sectarian in-fighting.

Sour indeed. There are some decent observations in there. He correctly notes that the book is dissing Stalinism specifically. Newspeak never became a real problem and superficially similar phenomena don't mean language is losing its expressive power. And yes, those depictions of working class people have more than a whiff of classism to them.

Then there's a lot of complaining about leftist infighting. It's pretty appropriate for this to be hosted on that site. It's only anti-revisionism if it comes from the Vanguard Party region of Marxism-Leninism, otherwise it's just sparkling sectarianism.

The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed

Better organized than the POUM, I'll give it that. "Won out" is an interesting choice of words to describe any republican faction in the Spanish civil war.

And then there's the cringe. No robots and computer? My stories have robots and computer because it's impossible for someone to always pay attention to spying a bunch of people. The panopticon doesn't work, actually, because even if at anytime someone could be watching you, they couldn't possibly be watching you all the time unless they have robots and computer. Also why isn't this dystopian society more feminist?

I’m confused that anyone thinks that the world needs another linkedin…

Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation

Either deliberately whitewashing the situation or completely missing the point of why people are mad at Epstein, Yud really can't help himself.

edit: Or depending on the timeline and the fact that 'prison time for soliciting a 14 year old' was on top of Epstein's wiki as early a 2016 he's explicitly saying they didn't mind that part with 300k on the line.

Lots of ‘this isn’t a big deal’ shrieking in that thread.

I might be crossing a line into conspiracy theory nut over here, but is it weird that both this and his response to the zizzian’s rape allegations have undertones of “i don’t know/im not completely sure”??

I feel like I just read someone reviewing Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by complaining that there's no upbeat sections and no overall chorus and the song isn't about anything, that we're just "tossed about on the storms of emotion that by the end we are all seasick to"

I happen to know there are multiple translations of the novel into English, and I'm confused as to why the reviewer refers to

My copy was the 2016 Moncrieff/Schiff English translation

which doesn't really mesh with anything here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time#English-language_translations

Not that it matters much in the end.

im gonna shit

The comment, see my prediction that when a movement runs out of idea they inevitably start a dating site for the in crowd, and 'lets do book summaries so we can all read faster'. Esp vague self help style places do this all the time.

In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is one of those books that people like to claim to have read but never did.

First I heard of this.

I find it very funny to see worm listed among the other “long books everyone says they read but didn't” because I am 100% percent certain that literally noone outside of LW does that

intellectual elite my arse.

Username is one “t” off from being an anagram for enteritis

Here's a fun exercise: go email the author of that blog (he's very nice) and ask how much of it he still stands by.

Has someone already done it or should I send the email? Ludic would be delighted I'm sure

It does seem kind of vulnerable to a determined gonzo journalist, doesnt it?

pegged butts

Hmm, we already tried the thing where a bunch of startups have their cash on deposit with a couple of normal, FDIC-insured banks that had grossly mismatched duration in their capital structures. I wonder how this will play out

"They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work"

Love the idea of having the plagiarism machine do compliance work. The computer takes care of everything!

Larry Garfield was ejected from Drupal nearly a decade ago without concrete accusations; at the time, I thought Dries was overreacting, likely because I was in technical disagreement with him, but now I'm more inclined to see Garfield as a misogynist who the community was correct to eject.

I did have a longpost on Lobsters responding to this rant, but here I just want to focus on one thing: Garfield has no solutions. His conclusion is that we should resent people who push or accept AI, and also that we might as well use coding agents:

As I learn how to work with AI coding agents, know that I will be thinking ill of [people who have already shrugged and said "it is what it is"] the entire time.

Don't want to use AI because it's built on copyright infringement and literally destroying the planet? Well, I guess you can't work in software anymore, sorry. It is what it is.

Every time someone like Jeffrey Way says "it is what it is," it makes it so. It is not inevitable just because Sam Altman tells his over-leveraged investors it is so. It becomes inevitable when you, you personally, decide that you just don't want to think about the externalities or put in the work to find better alternatives.

We are making this choice. But really, that means you have already decided for me. And I curse you and the ground you walk on for it. No, I'm not joking or exaggerating. Burn in hell.

10/10 No notes.

i thought they were yet another rationalist offshoot

that one METR graph was also a big part of the AI 2027 “prediction”

if realized, this allows volkswagen group to manufacture regular cars for a long, long time even after oil refining stops. originally, it was proposed as a hypothetical luxury product for antique car owners, because it’s physically possible, but doesn’t make sense in energy or cost terms.

If VW is trying to mainstream this, that tells me they're scrambling to keep milking the premium end of their portfolio that relies on extravagant IC engines (Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi etc.). Very bad sign for them, as the ID Buzz van looks to be a complete failure to the point of "pausing" production, and VW Commercial Vehicles is their backbone in Europe, much like Ford relies on truck sales in the US. I watched a video a few weeks ago that discussed how their European van/utility vehicle portfolio is aging and totally fragmented, to the point that they are selling rebadged Ford Transit vans manufactured in Turkey. I thought it was bad when they were badge-engineering Dodge Caravans for the US market for a few years, but totally bungling the EV van rollout in Europe is seriously bad business for them.

It was also hilarious how the rich guys on the Porsche forums were bad-mouthing the rather sexy Mission X EV supercar concept a couple years ago. No matter how cool a 9,000-rpm flat-six is, letting yourself be driven by the guys who just want you to keep making that forever will not stave off everyone else (now including China and Vietnam!).

Wait so they figured how to use renewable energy to create something that still generates emissions? Is this a ploy to get Trump on board with renewables?

So, the idea isn’t entirely as stupid as it initially sounds. There are two things that you gain from this approach:

• You can more easily separate your energy generation and consumption. Power lines are lossy, and there are a lot of very sunny and very windy places that are a long way away from where people actually want to live. Massive HVDC infrastructure buildout isn’t cheap or easy.
• Energy density of chemical fuels is higher than batteries. Being able to travel long distances without convenient nearby power sources is useful… long distance high speed rail isn’t always convenient to electrify, but also long haul flights and rocketry are Quite Difficult to run on batteries.

FWIW, I suspect the cost will end up being even higher, because you’ll start losing the economies of scale that modern vehicle infrastructure has, because normal people will just use EVs.

It can only ever be an intermediate technology anyway. Artificial photosynthesis and more sophisticated fuel cells seem like much more plausible longer-term futures.

Called it, 2 years ago: https://lobste.rs/c/fhob3x

actually didn't call, had forgotten all about it

@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984

What a shame

#FFFO

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/05/amazon-pulls-melania-from-cinema-after-owners-criticism-as-rumours-mount-over-fake-ticket-sales

https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-white-house-ballroom-is-being-bankrolled-by-genocide-and-ice-profiteers/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/world/europe/icc-judges-us-sanctions-trump.html

https://www.axios.com/2026/01/20/amazon-prices-trump-tariffs-andy-jassy-davos

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/business/media/amazon-melania-trump-film-critics.html

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/01/business/melania-box-office-amazon

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/20/amazon-jassy-trump-tariffs-prices-shoppers.html

https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/jeff-bezos-washington-post-defends-trump-demolition-white-house-east-wing-ballroom-1236561444/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/11/03/trump-ballroom-donors-contracts-enforcement/

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4962902-billionaires-2024-election-bezos-musk/

"Fund a Fascist and Find Out"
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/tech/tech-leaders-supported-trump-lost-money-dg

https://www.commondreams.org/news/amazon-tax-breaks

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jan/27/neil-young-gifts-music-greenland-removes-from-amazon-over-trump

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/23/trump-inauguration-donors-include-meta-amazon-target-delta-ford.html

https://www.wsj.com/business/trumps-tax-law-sharply-cuts-amazons-corporate-tax-bill-ee94ac24

Boycott these too
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/apple-google-trump-white-house-ballroom-donors-21118578.php

I am a better sysadmin than I was before agentic coding because now I can solve problems myself that I would have previously needed to hand off to someone else.

more fodder for my theory that LLMs are a way to cash on the artificial isolation caused by the erosion of any real community in late stage capitalism (or to put it more simply, the "AI" is a maladaptative solution to the problem of not having friends)

did that imbl thread get locked? I get 404 on it

This is the first time I have ever seen the term "AI design agency," which raises some yellow flags

for a second i thought we were talking about the audio codec and got mildly interested but no