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Is it really so obvious? It didn’t seem AI-written to me.

Every day I seem to encounter (and skip over in disgust) a dozen or so AI-generated articles at the top of web searches, but this wasn’t anything at all like those.


Even the title is likely AI-generated, as are all the subject headings. I worry we're all getting inured to these writing patterns.

> could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set

Of course, it was!

AppleTV show “Severance”

https://www.newsweek.com/lumon-building-severance-real-visit...


The author talks about his motivation right here: https://www.obdev.at/blog/little-snitch-for-linux/

It's not that arcane.


I've happily been a paid user on macOS for years, I would guess the number of paid users there was able to fund the Linux development.


I had to deal with that on the software side.

The ability to win arguments about technical choices is not always aligned with the ability to make good technical choices.


US colleges received billions in gifts from non-democratic countries in 2025:

Qatar $7.7 billion

China $6.4 billion

Saudi Arabia $4.7 billion

These countries are not making donations to support democracy and freedom.

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-b...


Two years after the 2005 Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza (and the Israeli government evicted Israeli settlers from Gaza), the support in Israel for a two-state solution was 70% in favor.

They were optimistic!

Looking at the long term history of Israel, the left was more optimistic in general about hopes for peace with the Palestinians, while the right more suspected that Arafat never really wanted peace, and was just being sneaky. But let it be noted that the Prime Minister who ordered the withdrawal from Gaza was right-wing Gen. Ariel Sharon, Likud member and previous advocate of settlements everywhere.

After the actions of Hamas in subsequent years, particularly Oct 7, 2023, that hope and optimism was completely eliminated.


The 'withdrawal' wasn't really a withdrawal, was it. There was still a blockade, and IDF's routine 'mowing the lawn'.

Let's not pretend that the 2005 'withdrawal' was a chance for a fresh start for the Palestinians that they floundered. The various negotiations were very one sided, and the offers were also unacceptable.


Since 2005, Israel has aggressively settled more and more people in the West Bank, to the point where more than 10% of Israel's Jewish population (read: first-class citizens) now live in West Bank settlements, so Israel's right wing has done everything in its power to make a two-state solution less and less practical.

IMO a one-state solution where everyone has equal rights is the only just and reasonable path forward. Like with the dismantling of apartheid, a transition plan will be needed.


Hamas has a one-state transition plan: kill or drive out the Jews, or enslave the ones with technical expertise. The Israel far right has a transition plan: kill or drive out the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, except for the few that don't cause them problems.

Partition of disputed territory is the least bad solution in the world we live in. "One world" government remains a utopian fantasy. Dividing the world up according to a mix of consideration of peoplehood, self-determination, and whoever won the most recent war is what humankind has figured out so far.

People who disagree with that will want to start wars. Wars are bad.


Wars are bad, but sometimes the only way to end an unjust status quo. Is that a defense of war? Up to everyone to decide.

The American civil war occurred, in part, because Lincoln decided to end the institution of slavery. I know this is an oversimplification and justifies the means with the end, but I think if "bad"-ness of the civil war is compared to the "bad"-ness of an eternity of black people being enslavement in the U.S., I'd argue the war was significantly less "bad".

I think your other point about Hamas's supposed desire to genocide Jews lacks nuance, and your resignation to a world of ethno-nationalist states is a just-so story bordering on nihilism, but I suspect addressing those enters territory of tightly-held opinion, so I will just leave it at that.


I got the correct answer with a locally running model (gpt-oss-120b-F16.gguf) with this prompt:

"This is a trick question, designed to fool an LLM into a logical mis-step. It is similar to riddles, where a human is fooled into giving a rapid incorrect answer. See if you can spot the trick: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"


When this came out a week ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039636 ) I was playing around with some prompts to see what I could do to guide it without giving it the answer.

    I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?  Before answering, explain the necessary conditions for the task.
The "before answering..." got it to load enough of the conditions into its context before making an answer (and then having the LLM do a posthoc reasoning for it).

I believe this is a demonstration of the "next token predictor" (which is quite good) but not being able to go back and change what it said. Without any reasoning before making an answer, it almost always picks the wrong answer (and then comes up with reasons that the answer is "right").


What were you trying to test here?


When I simply asked the question, the model failed, as did most of the others. It's a smaller model, that I could run locally, so obviously not as powerful.

I wanted to see if a prompt would do better that pulled into the analysis 1) a suggestion to not take every question at face value, and 2) to include knowledge of the structure of riddles.

These are part of the "context" of humans, so I speculated that maybe that was something missing from the LLM's reasoning unless explictly included.


She has defended free speech disliked by both the left and the right on occasions.

She famously left the NY Times after defending the publication of a contrarian op-ed by (Republican) Sen. Tom Cotton.

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/06/nx-s1-5563786/bari-weiss-cbs-...

Although apparently not a fan of Jimmy Kimmel as a comedian, her Free Press objected to his suspension. "... the FCC’s coercion undermines our most fundamental values"

https://www.thefp.com/p/jawboning-and-jimmy-kimmel-free-spee...

And on the same topic, the FP editors wrote: "At last, something we can all agree on: Pam Bondi has no idea what she's talking about."

https://www.thefp.com/p/pam-bondi-vs-the-first-amendment-fre...

For president, she has voted for Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

It's fair to call her a centrist.


"Centrist" is an utterly meaningless term, as the only thing it implies is not one of the two major-partisan extremists. You can call me a centrist, with my views being anchored in a libertarian perspective. Back a few decades ago when the major parties' Venn diagrams overlapped a bit more, you could call people at the intersection of the parties' authoritarian policies centrists. And as for Bari Weiss, you can can call her centrist because she will do the bidding of her employer regardless of which Party's administration they are currently bribing.


> she will do the bidding of her employer regardless of which Party's administration they are currently bribing

That's not fair. She left the Wall Street Journal because they didn't want her to write anti-Trump op-eds.

https://reason.com/2018/01/28/bari-weiss-it-was-heartbreakin...


"Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower" includes not anthropomorphizing its individual parts, like the blades. Even when those blades are swapped out for new ones, re-sharpened, and put onto a different lawnmower.

Trump, while an objectively horrible person who belongs in prison for many distinct types of crime, is primarily a minstrel for people to hate on. While he is (unfortunately) a good first-pass litmus test for an individual's politics/intelligence, criticizing him is not really the same as critiquing all of the entrenched interests that installed and continue to enable him.


Painting is a tough business. If you have the talent to spend a month on a painting and then find people will happily pay $2000 for it in a gallery, you are a fantastic artist!

But the gallery takes 50% leaving you a gross income of $12k. Then you pay for your supplies and work expenses. If that's all you do, you end up way below the poverty line.


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