I've recently found myself unable to finish articles that take more than a paragraph to announce their point. But starting with "Your life’s goal should be" is a level of boldness I wasn't prepared for.

I had human teachers who did that in middle/high school. Took me many years to pick out all the hallucinated bits of "knowledge". I don't think the current models are any less reliable that what we currently have on average.

I'll always remember my middle school science teaching telling us that nuclear fusion violates conservation of mass because the 2 protons in a pair of hydrogen nuclei combine to make helium with 4 nucleons. It's not true, but that's not the point.

But he was a great teacher anyway. He was engaging and kept the kids in line and learning. I eventually learned the truth, and most of my classmates forgot about it. Teaching, like flying a plane or driving a train, might become more about keeping watch over a small group of people and ensuring that things don't go off the rails, and that's fine.

This one feels less sinister than some other things at least to me, personally. You can reasonably doubt that the conservation of mass is violated and find out the truth based on that. But understanding more complex biology or historical context for some things? Granted, many of these things seem to be low stakes, but I'm sure there are some there are not (sex ed comes to mind).

to be fair, fusion does violate conservation of mass, just not the way the teacher explained it. the loss of mass is where the energy comes from.

Yes, together with mass-energy equivalency it would form a coherent argument, and then also a correct one - but the thing is that if incomplete, it still might sound funky enough to you to research it if you care.

I think it helps that it's a very narrow field to look at, compared to fuzzy and big-picture view of social studies, for example. So much room to be confidently wrong... And sadly I can't think of a solution, LLMs or not.

Yes, there is no law of conservation for mass like there is for energy. Fusion is a good example for why it's not conserved. The teacher was right.

He was right that it violates conservation of mass. He was completely wrong that it violated it by adding 2 atomic mass units when hydrogen fuses.

In reality heavier isotopes of hydrogen fuse, conserving the total number of nucleons, but the resulting hydrogen has a lower rest mass than the parent particles. The extra mass is released as energy and the total energy is conserved.

By his logic the system either violated energy conservation (by creating nucleons while releasing energy) or was endothermic (creating nucleons from the surrounding energy).

Mass is not the same as energy. Mass can be converted to energy or has energy, but a photon, for example, is massless while carrying energy.

That is incorrect. Photons have mass. They have no rest mass. They also cannot rest, so you might wonder how relevant that is.

The concepts of rest mass and relativistic mass are considered outdated. In modern physics, "mass" means what they meant by "rest mass".

Here some indication I'm not making this up: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2465/when-and-why-di...

In any case, I never use those concepts, and I know no professional particle physicist that does. By "mass", I mean rest mass.

When you put a photon in a stationary box, the "relativistic mass" of the photon becomes part of the "rest mass" of the photon-box system. You can't ignore it.

I had a chemistry teacher who told us that hydrogen reacts violently with oxygen, and this is how the hydrogen bomb works.

I had a chemistry teacher who insisted that the fissile isotope of Uranium was U-238 not U-235. I challenged him on this multiple times and he refused to budge on this. I get that it's a simple mistake to make (it seems like U-238 is bigger so intuitively ought to be less stable) but he could have just looked it up and he didn't, I guess he was just so confident about it that he thought there was no way he could have been wrong about it.

Well you can make a hydrogen "bomb" that way. Just not the hydrogen bomb.

Hey it's a bomb made out of hydrogen! Also the deployment system for a thermonuclear bomb might involve that reaction in the rocket engine.

I had one that mentioned this too :(

I mean fusion and fission do violate conservation of mass and conservation of energy, they just don't violate conservation of mass and energy, right? We thought mass was strictly conserved until Einstein, and then we updated our understanding.

That's an American problem though. In most of Europe you need a masters degree to teach highschool and that involves at least an undergrad level of understanding the subjects you will teach.

E.g. in Hungary I had a university CS professor that originally wanted to be a highschool teacher and a highschool physics teacher that originally wanted to be researcher. Their choice of degree didn't determine which outcome they got. The researcher and teacher curriculum had an 80%+ overlap.

I think it’s pretty common for states to require a masters degree to maintain your teachers certification.

You also have to pass a standardized test specifically on subject matter in order to get your teaching certificate.

The undergrad degree I did was split into thirds, one for subject matter, one for teaching pedagogy, and one for teaching your subject matter.

I think they are less reliable. For factually verifiable facts LLMs are doing worse than 90% for me. I've been told some incorrect things by educators, but at a much lower rate.

The problem is that people seem to trust whatever AI hallucinated way more than if they heard same thing from human

I've tried switching from JetBrains IDEs just a few days ago. The speed and memory footprint are very impressive. I ended up badly missing refactorings and some other features and configuring a debugging session looked like something that needs more time than I had on my hands. So went back for now. I hope they add more IDE features eventually. There's not much a pure text editor can offer over Emacs after all. But this announcement sounds like they are prioritizing agents integration - the same thing that seemingly made JetBrains drop the ball on their core advantages.

JetBrains should really start investing into porting to Rust/C++ over their bootleg Java.

Seriously. I love the IDE but given that my idle workload of Electron apps and Docker Desktop VM brings my discretionary allotment of RAM down from 32GB to 8GB, I have absolutely no headroom when running JetBrains IDEs so I keep them closed unless there's a specific feature I want.

What OS are you running? I currently have three Jetbrains IDEs open on my MacBook (M3 Max/36GB) and don’t notice any issue (although I don’t have any electron apps running which probably helps).

MacOS. I have Slack, Teams (different clients use different chat apps), Notion, Docker Desktop VM, several browser tabs, some corporate machine management stuff, and probably some things I'm forgetting about, all open all the time.

I think teams is the big memory killer there

You might find OrbStack useful here as a replacement for Docker Desktop. So much faster and uses way less resources: https://orbstack.dev/

Was in the same boat. I ended up not using Zed because it had a bunch of minor quirks that annoyed me but I moved to vscode. I primarily write Typescript and C# these days. I was a JetBrains fanboy for years and it feels way too bloated now, stuff notoriously hangs or takes too long on my M3 Pro. I also love Claude Code integration with vscode just a bit too much to give it up for CLI.

Zed's CC integration is really good now.

no emacs key bindings??? Makes me taking this is another hipster text editor that isn’t “an ide” (vscode)

Satoshi is a paper billionaire - he can't use a small fraction of his "wealth" to hire proper security. Simultaneously his "assets" are much more attractive to criminals. Imagine holding a regular billionaire hostage and demanding they give you a billion dollars. They'd probably have to sell 1B worth of stock, then convert it to cash (or crypto), etc. all of that requiring multiple interactions with different people and institutions.

Heisting multiple billions worth of crypto would have the same issues, just to a smaller degree. If that much illicit money is on the line, `mJurisdiction` which normally looks the other way might be tempted to investigate and confiscate it for their own benefit.

They also can't easily sell that amount quickly without repercussions (and without another institution like an exchange).

You're right, but only to a limited degree.

The real winner in this war is Israel. Iran's military might is now a shadow of its former self while all the costs have been paid by someone else: American taxpayers, gas consumers around the world, Arab states. Even the political costs are on Trump.

Certainly economically. NIS-USD exchange is now 3.09 and continuing to drop, reflecting optimism.

Strategically, it remains to be seen what will happen to the nuclear material in the peace talks. If Iran emerges from the war with an intact nuclear program due to a lack of American stamina to carry through and achieve its war goals, that would be an enormous strategic defeat for Israel.

I am working on a P2P VPN app that lets you route your traffic through a friend's Internet connection easily. It has a few distinct uses, but right now I am testing whether emigrants from authoritarian countries will be interested in providing censorship-free connectivity to their family/friends at home.

It's called Spora: https://spora.to/

The current MVP is about 90% vibe-coded while being a fairly sophisticated piece of software.

It's not the extension developer who should decide this, but the browser user.

On what would the browser user base their decision?

If an extension injects an icon into the DOM of the page, then the resulting `img` tag needs to put something in its `src`.

The extension author may choose to use the `data:` scheme, but that's a development-time decision.

Not a mental health crisis like the guy in TFA had, but I've definitely experienced states I would characterize as overexcitement while calibrating my expectations of these new tools to their abilities.

That could explain the glut of AI hype on HN. Some people think it's magic, when it's just creating a lot of barely-functional slop. If they actually looked at the code it creates, they probably wouldn't be shouting about it from the rooftops. It almost seems like AI has its own "reality distortion field".

I often give the AI a task to produce some code for a specific thing. Then I also code to solve the same problem in parallel with the AI. My solution is always 1/4 the code, and is likely far easier for another real human to read through.

I also either match or beat the AI in speed, Claude seems to take forever sometimes. With all the coddling and revisions I have to do with the AI, I'm usually done before the AI is. It takes a non-negligible amount of time to think through and write down instructions so the AI can make a try at not fucking it up - and that's time I could have used for coding a straight-forward solution that I already knew how to produce without needing to write down step-by-step instructions.

In my experience, it's definitely faster to do manually if it's something that you know well. What LLMs enable is to skip research and learning by producing usable code immediately.

There is a long way between "usable code" and "the code I actually want". And each change I ask for piles on the slop. I don't get the slop when I just spend the same amount of time to write it out myself.

Most of what I find AI useful for is analyzing large volumes of data and summarizing, like looking in log files for a problem, or compiling reports from tons of JSON data. But even for those use cases, a simple CTRL-F is way way faster.

It was close enough for me and I do acknowledge the cruelty and abstain from many kinds of meat. I was super excited when I tried it first. But after about a year of being part of my regular diet it started being disgusting unfortunately. Now I can only eat it once a in a while.

It may indeed be the case that the candidate promised one thing and the voters acting irrationally (or correctly assuming he's a liar) voted with an expectation of him doing the exact opposite. The GP, however didn't say anything about voting. He was talking specifically about the mismatch between campaign promises and actions taken once in office.