Monday, 15th July 2024
Hacker News homepage with links to comments ordered by most recent first (via) Conversations on Hacker News are displayed as a tree, which can make it difficult to spot new comments added since the last time you viewed the thread.
There's a workaround for this using the Hacker News Algolia Search interface: search for story:STORYID, select "comments" and the result will be a list of comments sorted by most recent first.
I got fed up of doing this manually so I built a quick tool in an Observable Notebook that documents the hack, provides a UI for pasting in a Hacker News URL to get back that search interface link and also shows the most recent items on the homepage with links to their most recently added comments.
See also my How to read Hacker News threads with most recent comments first TIL from last year.
Facebook Is the ’Zombie Internet’. Ever since Facebook started to become infested with weird AI-generated images of shrimp Jesus - with thousands of comments and likes - I've been wondering how much of that activity is real humans as opposed to yet more bots.
Jason Koebler has been on the Facebook AI slop beat for a while. In this superb piece of online investigative reporting he dives deep into an attempt to answer that question, using multiple Facebook burner accounts and contacting more than 300 users who have commented on that kind of image.
I endlessly tried to talk to people who commented on these images, but I had no luck at all. Over the course of several months, I messaged 300 people who commented on bizarre AI-generated images, which I could only do 20 or so at a time before Facebook stopped letting me send messages for several hours. I also commented on dozens of images myself, asking for any human who had also commented on the image to respond to me. Across those hundreds of messages, I got four total responses.
Jacob also talked to Khan Schoolcraft, a moderator of the Um, isn’t that AI? group, who said:
In my experience, the supermajority of engagement on viral AI Facebook pages is just as artificially-generated as the content they publish. When exploring their comment sections, one will often see hundreds of bot-like comments interspersed with a few ‘real’ people sounding the alarm to no avail. [...]
Whether it's a child transforming into a water bottle cyborg, a three-armed flight attendant rescuing Tiger Jesus from a muddy plane crash, or a hybrid human-monkey baby being stung to death by giant hornets, all tend to have copy+pasted captions, reactions & comments which usually make no sense in the observed context.
We've doubled the max output token limit for Claude 3.5 Sonnet from 4096 to 8192 in the Anthropic API.
Just add the header
"anthropic-beta": "max-tokens-3-5-sonnet-2024-07-15"to your API calls.
Follow the Crypto (via) Very smart new site from Molly White tracking the huge increase in activity from Cryptocurrency-focused PACs this year. These PACs have already raised $203 million and spent $38 million influencing US elections in 2024.
Right now Molly's rankings show that the "Fairshake" cryptocurrency PAC is second only to the Trump-supporting "Make America Great Again Inc" in money raised by Super PACs this year - though it's 9th in the list that includes other types of PAC.
Molly's data comes from the FEC, and the code behind the site is all open source.
There's lots more about the project in the latest edition of Molly's newsletter:
Did you know that the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections in the United States than the oil industry? More than the pharmaceutical industry?
In fact, the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections than the entire energy sector and the entire health sector. Those industries, both worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, are being outspent by an industry that, even by generous estimates, is worth less than $20 billion.