This may be an age or geography thing, but Weather.com/Retro looks a lot more like the weather channels I remember than either of your two links.
I don't think they were trying to recreate the thing you were expecting, but it seems a little harsh to call it low effort. It's neat! A fun little nod to their history.
You identify two inconsistencies, neither of which appear to actually be inconsistent. (One is just the observation that multiple accounts were banned, which is not actually an inconsistency? Just something you don't find likely?)
It's possible that this is real, it's possible it's made up, but I'm not seeing much more evidence in your armchair scepticism than in the asserted facts. Last week everyone on HN was telling me that social media must immediately be regulated because it's 'directionally correct' to assert that teenagers are suffering, but this week we are to disbelieve that Google would ever arbitrarily close accounts, something it firmly asserts it has every right to do?
> (One is just the observation that multiple accounts were banned, which is not actually an inconsistency? Just something you don't find likely?)
I think you misunderstood. In one post they said all accounts were banned including their recovery accounts. They also said they were forced to create a new account on a different service just to have email.
In another comment they said Google sent them an email saying their accounts were banned for “child protection”. This supposedly occurred after the son admitted what he had done, which was a detail that supposedly occurred much later in the process.
Where did they receive that message if all of their email accounts were banned?
These Reddit stories always get some people invested in the story before the inconsistencies show up. You have to read them with some skepticism. You can do enough mental gymnastics to convince yourself that all of the Reddit posts are true and accurate if you try hard enough.
The story as OP tells it is that they appealed the ban, and the ban was upheld. Logically, they appealed the ban from an email address they had access to. I don't know how you get from 'all of their Google accounts were banned' to 'they had no possible way to send and receive email whatsoever'.
> These Reddit stories always get some people invested in the story before the inconsistencies show up. You have to read them with some skepticism. You can do enough mental gymnastics to convince yourself that all of the Reddit posts are true and accurate if you try hard enough.
I get the feeling you've concluded that the OP's claims are unlikely and are now rationalising that conclusion by trying to construct some arguments to that effect, but I find the specific arguments you're giving to be fairly weak. That doesn't speak to the veracity of the original story, it just makes your attempted debunking unconvincing.
The mods of that subreddit appear to have come to the same conclusion.
If you go into Reddit believing all of the posts by default and forgiving inconsistencies you’re going to be duped by a lot of fake stories.
I think it’s interesting that someone posted a “my account just got busted for accidental CSAM” and nobody is concerned about the impending law enforcement consequences? Only about email access? If this really happened then it would be referred to law enforcement because companies don’t handle CSAM as internal matters that go through their appeals process. They get escalated to law enforcement.
> If this really happened then it would be referred to law enforcement because companies don’t handle CSAM as internal matters that go through their appeals process
There's just an awful lot of armchair theorising in your posts, and a lot of it doesn't sound like it's backed by much actual experience. If I'm being honest, you sound very young to me. Which I do not intend as a slight at all, youth is great, but it does sort of explain your deep familiarity with Reddit and your absolutely unshakable confidence in your own takes.
The thing is, even if you do turn out to be right - which is entirely possible - there's a big difference between (a) following the clues to reach a conclusion, and (b) reaching a conclusion and then gathering up some factoids to support it. The former is good science, the latter is high school debating. The latter is very easy to spot, and that's why I find your argument unconvincing. It would have been possible to make a much more convincing one, but it would have required a humbler approach.
> There's just an awful lot of armchair theorising in your posts,
I was quoting the actual Reddit post. You were theorizing about recovery emails and other things that were contradicts by the Reddit post.
> and a lot of it doesn't sound like it's backed by much actual experience.
I do have experience in dealing with account policies for a product that hosted user data and some of the details that go into referring cases to law enforcement. Again, you are the one theorizing to support your story and getting it wrong.
That said, you don’t need to have experience to know that child endangerment cases get referred to law enforcement. This is common sense
> If I'm being honest, you sound very young to me
If I’m being honest, this sounds like you’re so resistant to backing down that you’re turning toward personal insults based on top of your own incorrect theorizing.
It’s pretty clear that you are determined to believe this story is true even after that subreddit’s mods caught on and others here have realized the problems with the story. If you’re determined to believe it then you don’t need to start inventing theories about me personally.
> there's a big difference between (a) following the clues to reach a conclusion, and (b) reaching a conclusion and then gathering up some factoids to support it. The former is good science, the latter is high school debating. The latter is very easy to spot, and that's why I find your argument unconvincing. It would have been possible to make a much more convincing one.
I followed the clues in the original post and made a logical case based on them.
All of your comments here trying to rebut it have been moving the goalposts each time I point out where you got the facts wrong.
If you’re just trying to attack my construction of the argument for not being convincing enough to you, that seems more like a you problem at this point. I don’t see any reason to continue trying to discuss anything if you’re just going to go with this silly “you sound like a child because I didn’t understand your argument the first time” attempt to rebut.
> you’re turning toward personal insults based on top of your own incorrect theorizing.
I think it's pretty clear that I tried to phrase it as kindly as I possibly could. Not intended as an insult in the slightest, merely a purely subjective observation. You're welcome to disagree, even if you do seem very resistant to extending anyone else the same courtesy?
> All of your comments here trying to rebut it have been moving the goalposts each time I point out where you got the facts wrong.
I don't think I've moved the goalposts once. We're still on the original two claimed inconsistencies, neither of which I find inconsistent.
You're framing this discussion as though it were me that were hellbent on attacking you (for some reason?). I would respectfully suggest that it seems to be you that is irrationally upset over someone not agreeing with you.
> I don’t see any reason to continue trying to discuss anything
Fwiw, you might want to look into "non violent communication" (which is unfortunately named, because people always think they know what it's about, while not actually understanding it whatsoever)
As an uninvolved reader in this thread, your phrasing was definitely done in a way that caused this response from him.
Not at all trying to be mean, and I'm fully aware that this comment I'm writing is also (knowingly) using phrasing which the previously mentioned NVC cautious from, but I only consider it something to be aware of - to understand interactions vs something to adhere to stringently.
The problem with this approach is that it implies that I am responsible for how my interlocutor reacts, something I do not and cannot control. (Nor do I feel any need to.) It also presumes the interlocutor is acting entirely in good faith and is interested in reaching consensus, which is not always the case.
Sometimes people respond negatively because of tone and phrasing, but sometimes their response really is about the underlying substantive content of what is being said, no matter how gently. Conversely, at other times, their primary concern may be one of 'face', and the importance of being perceived as 'winning' an exchange, the substance of they may not actually care about at all. I agree with you that thoughtful phrasing is a potent tool, but its power is not unlimited and it cannot fully bridge every gap.
I would venture to suggest that I phrased things about as kindly as I could, in the broader context of an interlocutor who was already treating the discussion as a zero-sum contest. (Note their read of the exchange as my "desperately" wanting to "discredit" them, when I was merely disagreeing.)
> If I'm being honest, you sound very young to me. Which I do not intend as a slight at all, youth is great, but it does sort of explain your deep familiarity with Reddit and your absolutely unshakable confidence in your own takes.
That is unmistakably an insult, even if you say it's not.
As another bystrander: your phrasing and overall participation in this thread was bad. Sorry, but you gotta learn how to take criticism; now it sounds like you just dismiss everything.
Idk, I was kinda expecting to be downvoted to oblivion, but these were surprisingly upvoted posts (with the post noting that the other fellow comes off as young being more upvoted than the others). So it seems like there's some support.
Honestly not sure what he (or you) would have found satisfactory, short of saying I agree with something that I don't agree with? Not everything in life is optics. I'm not trying to stage manage how people feel about my opinion on this.
> there's a big difference between (a) following the clues to reach a conclusion, and (b) reaching a conclusion and then gathering up some factoids to support it.
> The latter is very easy to spot
Well, you know, that's some premium grade irony sitting right there.
> The mods of that subreddit appear to have come to the same conclusion.
Well, if someone whose main credential is "doesn't have a job and hence can moderate reddit full time" thinks it's true, it must be so.
> I think it’s interesting that someone posted a “my account just got busted for accidental CSAM” and nobody is concerned about the impending law enforcement consequences?
Because the law has due process? He didn't do anything wrong legally, and while his son may have, almost certainly nothing that will lead to significant consequences (at most an officer visiting and saying "don't do that").
> If this really happened then it would be referred to law enforcement
It probably was, and law enforcement probably put it on the big pile of "shit we don't have the resources to bother with". People are sending csam everywhere every day, much of it gets detected and turned into an automated report, a minority of that leads to an investigation. This probably will be an instance where it isn't.
> because companies don’t handle CSAM as internal matters that go through their appeals process. They get escalated to law enforcement.
They get... both? Obviously? They get escalated to law enforcement, AND the account gets banned. Then you can appeal that ban, and whoever handles the appeal will look at the ban reason and say "sorry, it's sticking".
If I was referred to law enforcement for any internet related offense in the UK, especially child abuse and CSAM, I wouldn’t brush it off as no big deal.
> The UK police intervene for even small possible internet offenses.
They obviously don't have the resources to do that.
> There was a story last year where someone was arrested because they posted a photo of them doing some fully legal shotgun shooting while on vacation out of the countr:
You only read reports about the things they do investigate, not the things they don't. There were probably myriad videos of shotgun usage posted last year, but only one arrest. The same would apply to almost any internet crime.
> If I was referred to law enforcement for any internet related offense in the UK, especially child abuse and CSAM, I wouldn’t brush it off as no big deal.
You would, like the OP, wait for them to show up at your door and attempt to explain it away then. Especially if it was, in fact, no big deal.
God, this is a real nightmare. I'm pretty reticent to rush to regulation, but I really don't know what other solution is even possible here.
The average person cannot realistically exist in a digital vacuum, self-hosting their entire online world. Google should not be able to do this to them. No one should have to rely on trying to whip up public mobs on Reddit or HN to get Google to give them access to their own freaking tax spreadsheets.
Remember EU classified some companies as gatekeepers. Call them gatekeepers, monopolies, whatever - some companies are like "essential workers". They need to be available as much as essential workers were needed during covid. Which means at some point we need regulation that if you are an essential company, if you are a gatekeeper, you need to have a physical grievance office in your county if not the city, or you need to have a call center to resolve such issues. Might as well create some (local) jobs while we are solving this so I would prefer a local office.
Offer services for free (eg cross-subsidized by another business arm) in order to carve out a gigantic kingdom with millions of users, smothering any competition (only few use an indie email provider when there's "free" email, only few try to make a stand not using Whatsapp in whatsapp-saturated locales), and... Congratulations, now you've become too big too fail! And now you'll be treated as such. You're a critical part of society's functioning, and are to be regulated as such. Whether by accident, whether intentionally, whether it's because you're simply awesomely innovative or maybe you just massively cross-subsidized from another business branch, is irrelevant.
Once market capture has reached a certain point, yes, you need a physical grievance office, with state-backed arbitration/escalation. For instance.
Maybe you also can't just change the TOS anymore just like that, making people choose between coordinating a hasty move of the families' 4 TB of photos to... ? and being slowly boiled while $BIGBOY AI-trains on the family photos.
As a big boy, don't like this kind of regulation? Just shrink by selling off some business arms. Or stop hooking people by giving out "free" stuff. Or maybe don't base your growth strategy on gatekeepership and moats.
I surmise that big rules for big boys (while not burdening small players, thus, differential legislation) will actually massively help competition and innovation. But even if it doesn't — government, by the people, for the people, should get the final say in how we let citizens be treated. People with beating hearts over emotionless corps, always.
There's not enough computer literacy among population and this 'gatekeeper' role is made up. I also have a Google account which was my main and only one for a very long time (starting from when the Gmail accounts were invite-only and were actually considered really cool) but over time I have come up with Plan A, Plan B and Plan C (which is where Google has been relegated to). I couldn't care less if my Google account somehow got locked. Comparing a service which has countless alternatives to essential workers is meaningless.
Question is weather the guy who got his account banned and lost access to all his data, was paying Google for cloud / hosting services or not.
If it was on the free plan then all bets are off. If he was paying for a service, I believe there is enough case for a lawsuit where Google pays through their teeth for basically taking the client's data hostage.
At some point I'll move my hosted services to one or more companies, which for a cost - essential point if you want legal protection - offer me their services. And if shit happens, I get my data back. And there is someone, a physical person that I can call when shit happens and they can't hide behind AI and automated replies. Otherwise I have real leverage to sue their ass and settle for mucho dinero so they learn to behave.
Seems to me Google is not such a "service provider" company, so it's naive to let them hold your data, with zero legal protection if they decide to take it hostage.
I think raising public awareness is a great escalation channel for severe (and complicated) cases that require bureaucratic help from senior people. We do this for other things (like screaming fire, finding lost kids, or finding organ donors)
> We do this for other things (like screaming fire, finding lost kids, or finding organ donors)
Also we have public fire departments, police and amber alerts, and official organ donor registration systems. This isn't really the a case against state intervention you seem to be going for.
> The average person cannot realistically exist in a digital vacuum
This alone is enough to see that regulation is what is needed. It's completely crooked that the average person is forced to maintain good standing with a single particular NASDAQ corporation to participate in society. Those here who might think "it's very possible to do so without Google" are not the average person, living in an average place in an average bubble.
The solution is breaking up Google.
This remains the case even if this particular story is exaggerated.
At some point we're going to see the real solution is to burn all this to the ground. I know, I know, hyperbole, etc.
We cannot continue to allow the worst among us -- those who by definition want more than everyone else and can seemingly never be satified -- to run the entire world. A lack of morality is what gets you to the top. We must end this for the good of us all.
> I'm pretty reticent to rush to regulation, but I really don't know what other solution is even possible here.
Before rushing to assume regulation is necessary, we should question if this story is real at all. It has a lot of signs of being a creative writing exercise like the conflicting details about all of their accounts being banned, including recovery emails, but then later they received an email explaining the reason for the ban. How did they receive that email?
> but then later they received an email explaining the reason for the ban
Presumably this was in response to an appeal, which would have required an email, which would obviously have been a non-Google email given the wider context? I'm not seeing the inconsistency.
I think you’re stretching. You can’t just send an email to Google from a new email address claiming you were associated with an unrelated Google account and then receive information about that account.
Who said it's a new email? Most people have preexisting alternative emails - work emails, college emails, etc. I personally have a non-Google email in the recovery email list, and I don't think that's uncommon.
They also have access to easy means of verification - phone numbers that are linked to the account, etc. Hell, you could just call Google from your own Google Fi number, just as one example.
I think you're hanging your hat on a pretty absurd theory, whereby it becomes factually impossible to contact Google ever again if they freeze your email, and it's prima facie evidence that you're lying if you claim to have done so.
Their comments had a whole second plot line about how all of their email accounts were closed so they had to create a ProtonMail account to sign up for new websites but websites weren’t accepting it:
> My daughter was having a breakdown in Scotland because her dissertation is due in 7 weeks. I tried to book a flight to see her and realised I couldn't do that without an email address.
> I had to create a Proton Mail account and almost no websites believe that it's genuine and block me from signing up.
Another inconsistency is that Protonmail actually locks new accounts that immediately try to sign up for popular external services, which is something they would have discovered if they tried what they said.
I know you’re desperate for reasons to believe the deleted Reddit story and discredit me, but you’re the one coming up with explanations that disagree with the story posted. I’m using the information the person claimed, not my own assumptions
> I know you’re desperate for reasons to believe the deleted Reddit story and discredit me, but you’re the one coming up with explanations that disagree with the story posted
I honestly don't even know who you are, or really care about your credibility at all, so I can't imagine why I'd want to 'discredit you'. If you're confident in your take, that's great!
The issue isn't whether it's true, but whether it's plausible. Could someone lose access to everything because of something like this? Obviously it's stupid to keep all your data in one place, but lots of people do it, and when that one place can shut you down and basically ruin your life, that's a serious concern.
Then let’s discuss those real stories, not someone’s Reddit fake posts with crucial details that make it a very different story (all linked accounts got banned)
Yes, these stories should scare you off of cloud services in general, not one particular vendor. The root problem is that you're storing valuable information on "someone else's computer." And that someone can decide to stop serving you for any or no reason at all, and you are without recourse. This should be totally unacceptable, but somehow the world has normalized it.
Don't keep anything in a cloud service that you couldn't live with losing, unless you keep a local backup. Including and especially your identity (E-mail) which unlocks all your accounts.
No, the root problem is you put all the eggs in one basket ignoring the folk wisdom that predates anything digital
> Don't keep anything in a cloud service that you couldn't live with losing, unless you keep a local backup.
Translated: so do keep everything in a cloud service, just backup it at a fraction of the effort with / insecurity / unreliability / unavailability of your own computer
Yes, and, importantly, have a plan to be able to log in to and reset your passwords through e-mail, on all your other services, if you suddenly lose you@yourcloudemail.com
I consider “cloud” to be a single (unreliable) basket. If you have your online stuff spread across 5 cloud providers, than any of them locking you out will disrupt you in some way.
This broad reclassification makes no sense. If you put literal eggs in 5 baskets, then any of them falling down will disrupt your eggs in some way. You're missing the whole point of the principle, which is that it will not disrupt you in the same big way of blocking all your digital life like in the example from the post!
I'm a bit confused what you mean. I have to use GitLab for work and don't see much difference. Some UI elements look a bit more complex than on GH but other than that it's working the same way. Less buggy as well.
Personally I host forgejo for my private apps and have had no issues with that either.
It really is… I’ve worked with Gitlab for years and moving to GitHub was like a breath of fresh air, everything is much less cluttered. Not saying it’s perfect, but GitHub just feels simpler
I've been thinking about this. If you have any kind of home network with attached storage at all, setting your local Git to just use that seems like a logical step.
And then if you're still paranoid do a daily backup to like Dropbox or something.
Forgejo is super easy to set up on a 1-2 core vm. Make a compose file and put caddy in front for tls. the whole thing is less than 50 lines and costs about $10-$15 a month.
self hosted Gitea is my recommendation. has everything one needs and is super lean and resource saving. you can run it easily on a 1GB VPS - I even ran it for a while on 512MB.
To me, GitHub only makes sense as a social media site for code. If you are publishing to GitHub with no intent to be open in your code, development process, and contributor roster, then I don't see the point of being on GitHub at all.
Because it's not like their issue tracker is particularly good. It's not like their documentation support is particularly good. It's not like their search is particularly good. It's CI/CD system is bonkers. There are so many problems with using GitHub for its own sake that the only reason I can see to be there is for the network effects.
So, with that in mind, why not just setup a cheap VPS somewhere with a bare git repo? It'll be cheaper than GitHub and you don't have to worry about the LLM mind virus taking over management of your VPS and injecting this kind of junk on you.
Very true. We have a private git repository running on a server that serves as our master. Works fine for us. We backup to GitHub. But it isn't used in any way in the dev workflow
What are some examples of batteries-included languages that folk around here really feel productive in and/or love? What makes them so great, in your opinion?
(Leaving aside thoughts on language syntax, compile times, tooling etc - just interested in people's experiences with / thoughts on healthy stdlibs)
These are the big ones I use, specifically because of the standard libraries:
Python (decent standard library) - It's pretty much everywhere. There's so many hidden gems in that standard library (difflib, argparse, shlex, subprocess, cmd)
C#/F# (.NET)
C# feels so productive because of how much is available in .NET Core, and F# gets to tag along and get it all for free too. With C# you can compile executables down to bundle the runtime and strip it down so your executables are in the 15 MiB range. If you have dotnet installed, you can run F# as scripts.
Do you worry at all about the future of F#? I've been told it's feeling more and more like a second-class citizen on .NET, but I don't have much personal experience.
I used to, but the knowledge of .NET seems mostly transferrable to C#. It's super useful to do `dotnet fsi` and then work out the appropriate .NET calls in the F# repl.
I work in a NIS2 compliance sector, and we basically use Go and Python for everything. Go is awesome, Python isn't as such. Go didn't always come with the awesome stllib that it does today, which is likely partly why a lot of people still use things like Gin for web frameworks rather than simply using the standard library. Having worked with a lot of web frameworks, the one Go comes with is nice and easy enough to extend. Python is terrible, but on the plus side it's relatively easy to write your own libraries with Python, and use C/Zig to do so if you need it. The biggest challenges for us is that we aren't going to write a better MSSQL driver than Microsoft, so we use quite a bit of dependencies from them since we are married with Azure. These live in a little more isolation than what you might expect, so they aren't updated quite as often as many places might. Still, it's a relatively low risk factor that we can accept.
Our React projects are the contrast. They live in total and complete isolation, both in development and in production. You're not going to work on React on a computer that will be connected to any sort of internal resources. We've also had to write a novel's worth of legal bullshit explaining how we can't realistically review every line of code from React dependencies for compliance.
Anyway, I don't think JS/TS is that bad. It has a lot of issues, but then, you could always have written your own wrapper ontop of Node's fetch instead of using Axios. Which I guess is where working in the NIS2 compliance sector makes things a little bit different, because we'd always chose to write the wrapper instead of using one others made. With the few exceptions for Microsoft products that I mentioned earlier.
We used to have some C# but we moved away from it to have fewer languages and because it was a worse fit for us than Go and Python. I'm not sure .NET would really give us any advantages though. Microsoft treats most major languages as first class citizens in Azure, and since we build everything to be sort of platform agnostic, we wouldn't have the tie-ins that you could have with .NET. I'm not saying it would be fun to switch cloud, but all our services are build so that there is a decoupled "adapter" between our core logic and Azure. We use a lot of Azure functions as an example, but they run in container apps on a managed k8s, so the Azure function part is really just an ingress that could be swapped for anything else.
It's been a while since I worked with an "actual" function app in Azure. We did have a few .NET ones that weren't using containers. At the time they were pretty good, but today I'm not sure what the benefit over a managed container envrionment with container apps would be. Similarily with sqlserver. We use it because of governance and how it ties into data factory and I guess fabric, but we don't use ORM's so something like Entity Framework wouldn't really be something we'd benefit from with .NET.
I think the only thing we couldn't realistically replace and get something similar is the governance, but that's more to do with how Management Groups, Policies, Subscriptions and EntraID works than anything else.
Eventuallyt everything will probably be Python and then C/Zig for compute heavy parts. Not because Python is great, it's terrible, but it's what everyone uses. We're an energy company and with the internal AI tools we've made widely available we now have non-SWE employees writing code. It's Business Intelligence, it's Risk analysys, it's powerplant engineers, it's accountants. They're all working with AI code in their sandboxed environments and it's all Python. Since some of it actually turns out to generate great value, it's better for us (and the business) if our SWE teams can easily take over when "amateur hour" needs to meet operational compliance for the more "serious" production envrionments. I put things in "'s because I'm still not entirely sure how to express this. A lot of what gets build is great, and would have never been build without AI because we don't have the man power, but it's usually some pretty bad software. Which is fine, until it isn't.
Lol. My most recent comment before this one is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47583593. You judge if AI threatens my identity. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a slick narrative.
I very recently installed llama.cpp on my consumer-grade M4 MBP, and I've been having loads of fun poking and prodding the local models. There's now a ChatGPT style interface baked into llama.cpp, which is very handy for quick experimentation. (I'm not entirely sure what Ollama would get me that llama.cpp doesn't, happy to hear suggestions!)
There are some surprisingly decent models that happily fit even into a mere 16 gigs of RAM. The recent Qwen 3.5 9B model is pretty good, though it did trip all over itself to avoid telling me what happened on Tiananmen Square in 1989. (But then I tried something called "Qwen3.5-9B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive", which veers so hard the other way that it will happily write up a detailed plan for your upcoming invasion of Belgium, so I guess it all balances out?)
That's very cool! I think giving it some research tools might be a nifty thing to try next. This is a fairly new area for me, so pointers or suggestions are welcome, even basic ones. :)
Worth adding that I had reasoning on for the Tiananmen question, so I could see the prep for the answer, and it had a pretty strong current of "This is a sensitive question to PRC authorities and I must not answer, or even hint at an answer". I'm not sure if a research tool would be sufficient to overcome that censorship, though I guess I'll find out!
I'd recommend it too, because the knowledge cutoff of all the open weight Chinese models (M2.7, Qwen3.5, GLM-5 etc) is earlier than you'd think, so giving it web search (I use `ddgr` with a skill) helps a surprising amount
Yep, having a "stupid" central model with multiple tools is IMO the key to efficient agentic systems.
It needs to be just smart enough to use the tools and distill the responses into something usable. And one of the tools can be "ask claude/codex/gemini" so the local model itself doesn't actually need to do much.
> Yep, having a "stupid" central model with multiple tools is IMO the key to efficient agentic systems.
That doesn't fix the "you don't know what you don't know" problem which is huge with smaller models. A bigger model with more world knowledge really is a lot smarter in practice, though at a huge cost in efficiency.
Ive always wondered where the inflection point lies between on the one hand trying to train the model on all kinds of data such as Wikipedia/encyclopedia, versus in the system prompt pointing to your local versions of those data sources, perhaps even through a search like api/tool.
Is there already some research or experimentation done into this area?
The training gives you a very lossy version of the original data (the smaller the model, the lossier it is; very small models will ultimately output gibberish and word salad that only loosely makes some sort of sense) but it's the right format for generalization. So you actually want both, they're highly complementary.
MLX is faster because it has better integration with Apple hardware. On the other hand GGUF is a far more popular format so there will be more programs and model variety.
So its kinda like having a very specific diet that you swear is better for you but you can only order food from a few restaurants.
But you can always fall back to GGUF while waiting for the world to build a few more MLX restaurants. Or something like that; the analogy is a bit stretched.
Interesting! Unfortunately, the smallest Hermes 4 model I can see is 14B, which would really strain the limits of my little laptop. The only way I might get acceptable performance would be to run it extremely quantised, but then I probably wouldn't see much improvement over the 9B Qwen.
Analogue TV would not be much better. How would the aliens know they're supposed to shoot an electron raygun left-to-right 486 times across a screen, then ignore the next 39 lines, then repeat this 29.97 times a second? And that's before you get into interlacing, horizontal blanking intervals, line 21, luma and chroma (encoded by reference to human eyesight), or different standards altogether like PAL or SECAM, etc.
Analogue TV has always felt so much more clever than digital TV to me, at least from a purely technical standpoint. I guess that's because we're mostly digital natives now, so video codecs seem ordinary and programmable electron rayguns do not.
Easier if you have a vast domestic flight market (US, China, etc), but not really practical if you're flying across borders, which is the base case in Europe, much of Asia, etc.
With traditional outlets you also inherit the whole legacy mess of competing standards for power mains. You don't want to feed 240V to a NEMA 1-15 outlet and melt someone's device mid-flight.
I do wonder if in some far future we'll just replace wall outlets with USBs for ordinary appliances, reserving traditional outlets for major power draws like stovetops, HVAC, industrial equipment etc. Maybe planes are the vanguard of this future?
They exist but are insanely unsafe. It would be ten kinds of illegal to install a socket like that in your home under any code I've ever seen.
It's already difficult enough to prevent people from making contact with the live parts when you're dealing with a plug and socket actually designed for each other. There's no hope in hell when you have ten extra holes.
Because it's completely impossible to prevent people from being able to touch a live contact in a socket that must accept many different types of plug. Safe sockets firmly grip the plug they are designed for. This socket cannot, since it must be willing to accept anything you stick in.
Without being able to grip any individual plug's prongs, any actual plug plugged into the socket will always hang from it. This exposes the top of the live contacts, now flowing with mains (!!) power.
Look at the image above. Note the sheer size of those bottom holes, and remember that the socket can't firmly grip anything (compare the narrow US/Japanese holes, the diagonal Australian/Chinese holes, the circular European holes, the outer British holes - all overlapping but in different places). You are basically guaranteed to get exposed contacts.
This is just bizarrely dangerous on a transcontinental flight where you might be asleep, covered in blankets, etc. Given that this kind of socket would be illegal to install in your own home under most electrical codes, I have no idea why it's fine on a plane.
(And that's without getting into how this provides a completely incorrect voltage to most of the plugs, or how it encourages folks to try to shove non-compliant plugs into all that spare room, or the existence of plugs like Argentina's, that will fit but will be electrified on the wrong prong, etc etc)
I don't have need to look at this image, I've used this outlet safely plenty of times. I've helped other passengers use them as well. I've never seen a plug "hang" from it. In fact they usually are so firmly attached I have difficulty removing them.
You're argument about "exposed contacts" is absurd. The entire design of the US plug is exposed contacts. Anyone can and will find a way to use them in an unsafe manner. We allow people to eat with steak knives, despite them being able to cut their own jugular vein with them.
This socket does not provide "half" the power. It provides around 110 VAC to most outlets. Almost all devices you are going to be using are rated for 90 VAC-240 VAC. The frequency range is wide too, 47-63 Hz. Some of them work all the way up to 277 VAC as a rated voltage. The actual socket is incredibly complex and monitors for the presence of a load & the total current. Have you ever noticed the flight attendants know exactly who is using the plugs at what time? If you actually plugged a 240 VAC angle grinder into this plug, it would just turn off immediately.
This socket would be explicitly legal to install in almost any jurisdiction in the US so long as it has the right engineering documents. Equipping your home with these outlets would be so many orders of magnitude safer than normal wiring, although you could not run devices like a vacuum cleaner or a large appliance.
> You're argument about "exposed contacts" is absurd. The entire design of the US plug is exposed contacts. Anyone can and will find a way to use them in an unsafe manner. We allow people to eat with steak knives, despite them being able to cut their own jugular vein with them.
This is an absurd argument re electrical safety. We spend enormous time and effort idiot-proofing consumer-facing electrics, and for good reason, consumers are idiots, but even then they don't deserve to be electrocuted by mains power. "You eat with stake knives so you may just as well run barefoot through razor blades" is not a good faith argument.
> Almost all devices you are going to be using are rated for 90 VAC-240 VAC.
For a narrow range of modern tech devices with adapters, sure. For the average electrical appliance that people grey import from Alibaba or buy roadside in Kuala Lumpur?
"Almost all" - how many percent, exactly? Are you just thinking of your iPhone charger? Or are you thinking about some cheap night light that some mum is going to plug in because her kid is scared to fall asleep without it, or some Soviet-grade portable hand heater that some elderly babushka carries around with her?
This is typical engineer blindness. "Well the elderly semi-literate Russian babushka should obviously have known that her GOST 7396 space heater from some souk in Dushanbe was not one of the devices I was imagining when I put together my utterly-non-compliant Frankenstein socket..." Really? Why? Is that going to be persuasive to anyone?
> Some of them work all the way up to 277 VAC as a rated voltage.
What's even your point here? That high voltage devices... exist? What does that have to do with anything?
> This socket would be explicitly legal to install in almost any jurisdiction in the US so long as it has the right engineering documents.
And murder is explicitly legal to commit! (Terms and conditions apply, must be wearing camo and be pointed vaguely in the direction of the Strait of Hormuz.)
Your argument is almost entirely just trivia, and not even categorical trivia at that. 'Well, almost all devices do this...', 'some even work all the way up to... ', 'so long as the right documents are provided...'. These are not acceptable standards when dealing with the public. Consider that 'almost all' people do not steal, and yet we fill public spaces with security cameras.
When dealing with risk, you don't just consider likelihood and call it a day, you consider severity too. An event with potentially catastrophic consequences is something one takes seriously, even if deeply unlikely. There are probably tens of thousands of unsophisticated people in the air every second of every day, wanting to plug in their vape chargers and portable hand fans and god-knows-what-else.
When your Frankenstein socket - which quite explicitly adheres to no safety standard whatsoever - inevitably fails and causes property or health damage, and you're trying to explain why you ever thought it was a good idea to some safety auditor or, God forbid, a judge, how far do you think your steak knife analogy is going to take you? Or the curio that 277 V devices exist? Or the fact that this is illegal to install in a home, but you think you could get a special permit to do so - well, y'know, not after this incident, your Honour, but sort of abstractly speaking...
So how do most European airlines have just that on their intercontinental flights?
I don't think I've flown intercontinental without universal power sockets (accepts EU & US plugs, sometimes others, voltage info hard to find) in the past 10 years.
In some cases it's sadly still a premium cabin thing. I refuse to fly economy at this point, premium eco tends to be good enough to get power sockets.
What are you going to plug into a power outlet on an airplane that isn't dual voltage? A kettle or a toaster? I assume they have a way of preventing people from using those.
Almost all the international flights I've flown have had power outlets, always between 220V and 110V countries (heck, only Japan is 110V besides the US as far as I know).
I it works for China because they use (as an option at least) similar outlets to the USA (just ungrounded, pop).
Central/South America has a lot of 100-130 V too, I believe, but I don't have direct personal experience.
I find the standard voltages pretty interesting. The 230 V standard, for example, is mostly a lie. In reality, Britain and former British colonies tend to run on 240 V, and continental Europe/Asia/Africa tends to run on 220 V. The 230 V standard includes wide enough tolerances so that no one needed to actually change anything. I've never actually seen 230 V, the supposed standard, in real life.
I think 'assuming that the airline has a way of preventing' people from plugging in dangerous items is doing a loooooot of heavy lifting in your argument.
How, exactly? The airlines have absolutely no way to know what shoddy electrical device you bought god-knows-where you're plugging into mains power in their airtight travel-coffin, packed with hundreds of people, hurtling across some ocean.
> Almost all the international flights I've flown have had power outlets
Seems deeply unusual to me, but I won't dispute your experiences. I've flown internationally fairly often, and in my experience power outlets are rather uncommon (at least in the eastern hemisphere, flights to/from the Americas may differ, I haven't flown around there for many years).
Every flight I've been on had outlets that just let you plug in almost any plug. They have 115 VAC nominally supplied to them, although most chargers work just fine down to 90 VAC. Unless you're trying to run your cement mixer I don't think the peak voltage matters much.
Europe has a lowest common denominator plug, there are universal outlets (jack of all trades, master of none) that you already often find in airports, and each airline has a home country anyway.
Yeah, no. In EU+CH alone, you've got Schuko, French, reversed French (Czech), British (Ireland, Malta, Cyprus), and more rarely Italian, Danish and Swiss plugs. And those are just the current national standards as of 2026, ignoring anything non-standard or historic or foreign.
You can't just slap some ungrounded 240V Frankenstein multi-socket on the back of a plane seat and call it a day. Hell, you can't even do that in your own house in most developed countries.
That's before you even get to passengers plugging in their own $2 socket converters off eBay, half-inserted and loosely hanging off your already-lethal socket. And then these passengers wrap themselves in a synthetic blanket and go to sleep. What could go wrong.
We're not talking about some CRUD web app here, where being held together by sticky tape and prayer is fine and expected. This would actually kill people. Not exactly easy to deal with a smouldering corpse in the middle seat at 30,000 feet.
I don't think they were trying to recreate the thing you were expecting, but it seems a little harsh to call it low effort. It's neat! A fun little nod to their history.
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