> With the AI slop being promoted on the major social media platform’s algorithm, I believe we will go back to following real humans. Back to followers, where we decide who we want to see.

This is a nice thought but I think it's wrong. If TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts have proven anything, it's that people don't want to decide they want to consume. It's cynical but it's what the data has shown time and again works for these platforms. Passive consumption is easier for the user and companies know it keeps us online longer.

When you ask people, they will say they want to see who they follow but their behaviour, incentivised by companies, says otherwise.

It is funny that people on Hackernews are (acting as if they were) against algorithmic feeds. This very site is one of the trailblazers that found out how much people prefer algorithmic feeds to chronological ones.

I think you'll find that people who are against algo-feeds are against that being the only choice.

Personally speaking I think the issue is personalized algorithmic feeds.

I want the algorithm to analyze spammers' behavior and filter them out for everyone. Not analyzing my behaviors to filter content for me.

Yes! exactly

In what sense is HN an algorithmic feed? It is neither personalised nor does it have a significant discretionary boost beyond "age" and "upvotes". It's qualitatively a different thing.

Sort by weighted upvotes vs time decay is an algorithm. You can review the psedocode here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013

Note that there is also "censorship" (!) - `gag_factor` - even in this free thought paradise. The lesson is that no matter your scale, suppressing certain content is necessary to prevent low quality posts and spam from turning your site into a swamp.

Correct, it is not personalized. So we need a different word than 'algorithmic'. People keep saying that word when they want to "ban" a certain kind of math. But they should at least be particular about what they don't like (sort your friends' posts chronologically is also a personalized algorithm, after all..)

The comments in that link claimed that gag = joke, not gag as in gag order :p

On its own an algorithmic feed is fine. Automatically give people what they want to see. Like TV without flipping channels.

It just turned into something out of control with unintended side effects and immoral goals.

Perhaps it's a bit like people preferring snacking to a home-cooked meal. At the end of a long day it's nice to be effortlessly entertained, but you can't have just bite-sized experiences. At some point you need to go deeper, to be creative, to chip in.

<< It's cynical but

But is it cynical if it is accurate.

And in such polite prose too

I agree. It's not too bad heading east to west because there is a seperated cycle path (although, it can cause issues with pedestrians and the bus stops). However, basically any other direction is awful - particularly going from Blackfriars towards Camberwell.

What really frustrates me is E&C has a lot of space. I'm not a city planner but you'd think having the room to fully seperate each form of transport would make it easy to improve.

> The black hole is actually quite special. It is different from all other known black holes, and its existence is difficult to explain with standard binary evolution models.

Given this and the difficulty in spotting dormant black holes, it will be interesting to see if these black holes are suprisingly common. Similar to the way gravitational microlensing led astronomers to find far more low-mass planets than they expected.

If you are looking if something is "surprising" then it is not surprising, by very definition.

We know BHs should be pretty common. Earlier generations of stars were composed of larger and more short lived stars (due to their low metallicity) that should mostly end up as black holes.

As to detecting gravitational microlensing it is not as easy as it sounds. A black hole remnant of a star will be microlensing the light just like a star -- only without very visible reason for the microlensing to be happening.

In practice what you would see is when a black hole moves in front of a star that star's light is suddenly magnified without any good reason. It is one time event, it is rare and afterwards there is nothing else to study. These types of events tend to be very hard to capture because they require you to look at entire sky all the time.

This is incredibly important to point out. It's sad when everyone gives up on global collaboration because some things aren't going well - that's not a reason to give up on collaborations, it's a reason to double down.

CFC elimination is a great example but even a hugely complex issue, and one we aren't doing well on, like climate change has had progress according to the latest IPCC report because of global collaboration.

Putting the ML conversation to one side, this is a fantastic piece of marketing.

It's perfect for getting attention from a wide audience and is a great demo of their product.

I write a fair amount for work, mostly dev related content. The idea of 1000 high-quality words a day for a month is terrifying.

The bit where he breaks down how these ghost writers actually need to write 1000 an hour to make a living shows how absurd and broken it all is.

I've discovered later than I should that for me, I need at least a two week break from time to time.

I need actual holiday where I don't answer emails or even do what I used to consider the minimum required. From an outside perspective, that's always been obvious to me and I've always understood that people need it, I just never applied it to myself.

Inadvertently holiday time is often when my best ideas come.

> Inadvertently holiday time is often when my best ideas come.

So you are still thinking about work? My best ideas come during work. During vacation, I don't think of anything work related but mostly philosophizing.

> The decision now rests with Home Secretary Priti Patel

Priti Patel has no problem making it as hard as possible for refugees to settle in the UK, supports the death penalty and is responsible for the absurd plan to fly immigrants to Rwanda for processing. Something tells me she wont hesitate to extradite Assange.

Why? (I'm not too familiar with UK politicians) Because she's on the Right? WikiLeaks isn't only interesting to the left you know.

I know it's not the important part of this post but their presentation really is good.

Particularly the security fixes. Easy to find case numbers, impact levels and clear descriptions. All with decent spacing that makes the page feel clear and legible.