Funny how HN is usually ripe with folks crawling out of the woodwork to defend IP ownership as a fundamentally important principle, both on moral and economic grounds.
Yet, as of 08:37:36 MST Monday, 5 January 2026 there isn't a single comment on this thread complaining about Anna's IP theft.
Don't get me wrong, that makes me VERY happy, I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay.
But still, I can't help but wonder why the "this is IP theft" crowd is completely silent when it comes to the like of pirate bay and Anna.
> the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay
I agree with the disdain for IP, especially with what it had grown to become nowadays. But while I was also initially optimistic that AI companies may find a way to make IP go away as a byproduct of their activities, now it seems more like the big businesses will cut deals with one another and leave us commoners with nothing. Entertainment megacorps and AI companies rule the world, and I have no doubts that they'd find a way to become close allies. The AI companies get their near-endless stream of training data, the entertainment industry gets a cut of that juicy AI money and gives away their data willingly, while the IP remains locked away from ordinary people for eons more, just the way they like it. No one but us wants IP reform, or at least no one with real power, so it will probably never happen.
> I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay.
The leading AI labs are not killing IP. They are taking IP and reshaping/combining it to produce their own highly lucrative proprietary IP package which they sell to you.
The mirror image of IP defenders are AI boosters who argue against IP when it comes to slurping up media but squirm when you say "ok, then publish all of the inputs that go into making your frontier models, and publish the model weights too."
AA is not stealing every byte of data they can get in order to make billions of dollars, collect personal data about people, and then sell that for even more money.
1) Hugely enjoyable content - as usual - by Michael Stapelberg: relevant, detailed, organized, well written.
2) I am also an X11 + i3 user (and huge thanks to Michael for writing i3, I'm soooo fast with it), I also keep trying wayland on a regular basis because I don't want to get stuck using deprecated software.
I am very, very happy to read this article, if only because it proves I'm not the only one and probably not crazy.
Same experience he has: everytime I try wayland ... unending succession of weird glitches and things that plain old don't work.
Verdict: UNUSABLE.
I am going to re-iterate something I've said on HN many times: the fact that X11 has designs flaws is a well understood and acknowledged fact.
So is the fact that a new solution is needed.
BUT, because Wayland is calling themselves the new shite supposed to be that solution DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN they actually managed to solve the problem.
As a matter of fact, in my book, after so many years, they completely and utterly failed, and they should rethink the whole thing from scratch.
And certainly not claim they're the replacement until they have reached feature and ease of use parity.
Which they haven't as Michael's article clearly points out.
You are totally free to work on whatever you want to. You don't have to use the software that the Wayland devs (and other developers that like Wayland) produces. You can use and code whatever you want.
So you've managed to get redhat to commit to continue to package an X server, then? I'm impressed by this achievement and send my thanks for your efforts - they've been trying to drop it for a while now, it's only wayland's continuing status as unusable vapourware that stops them.
Manifold works on solid triangle meshes, OpenCascade is a true BREP kernel that represents solids as edges (straight and curved) and surfaces (not meshed) computed from those edges. There is no triangulation in the root model in OpenCascade.
I too love seeing code-based CAD and the general aspect of using LLM's using code as an expression-intermediary: SQL to data, Swift to CAD, SVG to images of pelicans.
I have not used Constructive Solid Geometry CAD MCPs myself (but I have used some of the AI model creators). Some of the videos I've seen look very cool.
But, I wonder how much longer the claim of "LLM's have strictly no sense of how 3D geometry" works will stand.
Last week I used Claude extensively to design the upgrade to my homemade pontoon boat. In addition to my textual descriptions, I uploaded pictures of hat channel cross-sections with dimensions and screenshots of my CAD drawings. I was asking questions about strength and stability and relationships between parts and evolved the design. It took some sort of world understanding of boats, relationships of parts, types of physical interconnects, materials properties. There's definitely some understanding going on.
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Actually, show rather than tell. I just took Cadova for a spin, using screenshots of my boat's CAD and the previous conversation. Then I vibe-coded my boat up with Cadova, in an agentic loop with Claude Desktop and VSCode and the Cadova Viewer and screen shots. Pretty wild. Certainly not perfect, and I don't think this is how I would actually go about it, but it was interesting!
There's nothing proprietary, so I'll made a quick GitHub project [1] since the Claude links don't show files.
I've started fresher and am now in an agentic loop in Claude Code, asking it to render the generated 3mf and look at the results and evolve the Swift code to have a model that matches the reference image. Not sure how it will go but it is doing it.... will eventually update the repo.
Funny that you say that. Just yesterday I was playing with the thought of using SDFs. I asked ChatGPT how, given a SDF, I could implement erosion followed by dilation (by the same amount), and ChatGPT said that the entire operation is the identity. Here the LLM failed to see that the erosion step could delete parts of the design. Anyway, it was interesting to see an area where LLMs clearly have no idea what they're talking about.
I've had very poor results trying to reason about geometry with chatgpt (to the point where it hallucinated that a line can intersect a sphere 3 times...) but it would be interesting to have a feedback loop from code to image. I just found out about build123d as a newer variety of cadquery and looking forward to trying an LLM out with it.
I wish Jürgen Schmidhuber would switch back to actually doing AI research instead of having become completely obsessed with "who invented what" because he feels like he has somehow been academically "robbed" at some point in his career.
He's now officially become a full-blown pariah in the AI world, most relevant people in the space running away at the first sight of his goatee at conferences, knowing exactly the kind of complete and utter crank he's become.
In fact I am generally ignorant on the topic of who invented the transistor, nor do I in general particularly care about who invented what.
The quest for academic fame is something I've always utterly failed to understand.
And, if it the author was anyone but JS I'd not have said anything.
What honks me off about this guy though is to see a someone who did in fact do early impactful work on recurrent neural networks believe that:
a) that automatically gives him some sort of special status wrt the rest of humanity
b) because he didn't get the recognition he believes he is due, has completely stopped doing anything useful in the field, turning instead into an absolute crank that every one in the AI field makes fun of, and with a holy mission to rewrite history to assign credit where credit is due everywhere he believes there was an injustice.
c) every time I see someone with an exceptionally well-working brain waste their time because of ego or sheer stubbornness on shite like this instead of using it to do more interesting work, it makes me very sad.
Schmidhuber is a textbook example of this, and the other perfect example of this is Chomsky, a very smart man, who basically - because of his oversized ego and profound stubbornness - ended up wasting his entire life energy working on a linguistic dead-end AND a political philosophy dead-end.
I have a real hard time understanding how the brain of that kind of folks operates, being so bright on certain axes and totally and utterly dumb on others, especially the total lack of self-awareness.
Wow that is super vitriolic, more if from a colleague. Sure the hehe debate is about if he is to be considered more or less accomplished, but going from non-success to pariah, what is the need?
> but going from non-success to pariah, what is the need?
Not sure "need" is the appropriate word here.
Grab anyone in who has worked on AI in the last 30 years, and pronounce the word "Schmidhuber" and watch the face of you interlocutor: you'll either get an eyroll or a smirk, but rarely a lively discussion on what he's "invented".
I'll just leave this here https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gLnCTgIAAAAJ&hl=en so maybe you realize that's a bit of a tall claim from a random about one of the top researchers in AI, no matter what their opinions are. Perhaps you should look up what a "crank" actually is before labeling researchers, just because they don't match your religion.
Nope. The contrary as a matter of fact. But the facts are:
1) nothing worth talking about since the LSTMs
2) most of the reasons why he's been visible in the last 20 years is because of shit like this (JS harassing Ian Goodfellow about attribution in the middle of a technical presentation. Watch the face of Ian, pretty symptomatic of when AI folks have to interact with JS these days).
He is usually insufferable (and misleading) when he talks about AI innovation priorities. This article is different, though. It really does seem like Lilienfeld invented the transistor first and should be given credit for that. It also really does look like the official inventors knew that and were somewhat dishonest.
Funny, btw, that nobody here has mentioned that Lilienfeld also invented the electrolytic capacitor.
How would you distinguish the article from an honest write up about transistors? That is, you know about his crusade in ML, but if you didn't, how would you decide that this article is written in bad faith or not?
I agree that context matters, and I had the same thought as you. But does that mean that anything he writes on the topic of "who was first" is inherently tainted?
OpenAI is exactly what happens when a company finds itself in such a far, far away blue ocean strategy that there are no more traditional "economic anchors" (to call it that) to reason with.
It usually ends in blood and tears, for both employees and investors.
BUT: the SOTA has been greatly advanced, which matters a great deal more than the destiny of a particular corporation or the social status of sam-i-am.
I like this viewpoint - it basically casts VC-backed AI startups as privately-subsidized applied R&D projects, which largely seems to be the case for foundational model companies.
The hashing rate is not directly relevant. That's roughly proportional to the daily dollar value of the reward times the efficiency of the leading mining hardware. The latter has gone up many orders of magnitude over the years.
> block rewards have been diminishing regularly
That's exactly what the poster you're replying to argued; the BTC denominated block subsidy halves every 4 years, and so without a corresponding doubling in price, the bitcoin security budget keeps diminishing, at least until tx fees start to dominate the subsidy.
Highly unpopular opinion here and I'm going to get downvoted into the ground (who cares), but ... this has been a very long time coming and has very much been a self-inflicted change.
My bet is that it will end up being a very good thing for the world at large.
China has recently started to buy Arabian oil and paying with yuan.
Major countries (India, China) are starting to buy Russian raw materials and paying directly using rubles.
In both cases, trade is happening and completely bypassing the once unavoidable USD.
The US choosing to weaponize the USD for geopolitical purposes has finally made the world realize the immense loss of sovereignty they had allowed themselves to be subjected to by making the USD the global trading currency.
This change will also force the US to finally get fiscally responsible and get the bloody USD printing machine under control, something they never had to do because of the USD reserve currency status.
The golden triangle of Russia (raw materials), India (highly educated workforce, strong demography), China (industrial powerhouse, stole the bulk of Western IP, is now producing more cutting-edge research than the west) finally free of the shackles of the USD and establishing direct overland trade routes that 100% avoid the seas (thereby 100% avoiding potential US embargoes, both financially and militarily enforced) ... the world is going to change in a rather profound way, finally relegating the US to being a simple country instead of the has-been empire it currently is.
Every time I hear people claiming India and China now not using dollar and the end of dollar’s dominance, I feel it’s coming from mostly clickbait headlines, not data. From a global payments share, dollar is still the single largest currency from a percentage standpoint, and is at historically highest share of global trade. Any changes to currency share are coming from lower volume from the Euro. On top of that, if you look at foreign reserves, yes there has been a recent selloff from the peak, but we are still at 60% of global reserves and its still kind of around the same historical average for the last 30+ years.
Edit: I also want to add, that while having the international trade entirely in dollar sounds very appealing, it can actually destroy US exports and damage the trade balance. This can have massive impact on domestic as well as global economies. What you want is a strong enough dollar.
I think youre conflating 2 different things, share as a payment currency and share as reserve.
Share as a payment/trade currency is not going away though it will be greatly reduced especially with CIPS that bypasses SWIFT.Andmost data showing no change is usually from SWIFT - with zero visibility to the volumes in CIPS.
Share as reserve is more visibly viz central banks stacking gold and hedging on treasuries , with most tresurie bids coming in from offshore financial hubs likethe Caymans.So could be a whole shellgame there to inflate the volumes.
So yeah the $ isnt going away anytime soon (cross border trade still requires it in many places),the exorbitant privilege it enjoyed is.
> Every time I hear people claiming India and China now not using dollar and the end of dollar’s dominance, I feel it’s coming from mostly clickbait headlines
I would encourage you to actually take a gander at the history of reserve currencies, how long they last, how they lose their reserve status, and what the current state of thinking around where the dollar is headed.
Unless you would classify the IMF as a clickbait farm, of course.
Start with the brit. pound and what led its downfall to the niche financial instrument it is today.
But the pound is just the latest, and by no mean the only one.
> get the bloody USD printing machine under control
The amount the US government spends on debt service is already unreasonable. If the US dollar lost reserve status, the first thing that would happen is that the Fed would have to buy the debt with newly created money to prevent bond rates from causing interest payments to explode. Meanwhile the act of other countries unloading US dollar reserves would cause significant inflation in itself.
Basically, loss of reserve status = hyperinflation. At least at the outset.
On the plus side, that would pretty much wipe out the excessive amount of US consumer debt as long as wages stay consistent with the value of the dollar.
Russia is a joke, India is somewhat irrelevant and doesn't seem like that will change soon, China is a different story, although they also have their share of demographic and economic issues.
And Putin and Xi are 73 & 72, and I doubt they will give up power as long as they're living which may result in significant turnmoil for both countries.
> US to being a simple country instead of the has-been empire it currently is.
The US isn't going anywhere for now, although it is trending in the wrong direction, but it's not yet a lost cause, not to mention that its still basically a fortress with endless natural resources and relatively good climate.
And then you also have the AI race which might be a dud or might be a winner takes all scenario. So gonna be an interesting next decade.
> My bet is that it will end up being a very good thing for the world at large.
I generally agree with pretty much all your points other than this one.
While it will be good for other countries to regain sovereignty - and the weaponization of the US dollar for trivial reasons will be the biggest self-own perhaps in history - I do not think the world is going to be a better more peaceful place in 50 years.
It might be more free in a certain sense though, which may or may not end up long-term (over multiple generations) being better overall for humanity. Time will tell.
Certainly though, the average quality of life in the US is about to plummet.
Agree it will land more stable for most parties but it will be turbulent getting there. Global free trade under the USD has created many structural fragilities. Principally that we have global overproduction outside the USA.
Frankly, this will be good for the world if it happens. The U.S. War Industry will for the first time after Bretton-Woods be deprived of a bottomless piggy-bank.
Lot of emotion in this comment; not a lot of substance. I think you're misunderstanding how some of these systems work.
> This change will also force the US to finally get fiscally responsible and get the bloody USD printing machine under control, something they never had to do because of the USD reserve currency status.
It is not the case that the US didn't "need" to get the USD printing machine under control because of the reserve status; it is the case that the US
"could not" get the USD printing machine under control, because of the reserve status. When there is demand for US dollars, domestic or foreign, US dollars sometimes needed to be printed to satisfy that demand. If the US decides to not print those dollars; this is literally "defaulting on the debt", and would be bad-bad.
This gets at where you're misunderstanding how these systems work, because I think you're imagining that US debt is, like, an account in your Chase app that goes up, then you pay it down. US debt are, obviously, bonds. The USG says "we've got bonds to sell, they're at N year M% interest". Buyers say "we want those bonds we'll buy them". The USG is now in debt, and is obligated to repay those bonds; and sometimes has to print money to do so. This gets at the previous paragraph; money, broadly, is printed to satisfy debt obligations, not directly to service the deficit (proceeds from the initial bond sale are what could be said to directly service the deficit, but that's pennies compared to the size of the overall market).
Extending the Chase app analogy, you have it internalized that if we just get the deficit under control, then we could start "paying down the debt". In fact, probably, even our President understands it like this. But this isn't how it works. To "pay down the debt" would require two things to happen: We stop issuing new treasury bonds, and we pay off the already issued ones over 20/30/etc years as they mature.
The general professional sentiment on what would happen if the US even communicated it wanted to, in totally good faith, begin doing this at some point in the future, is basically armageddon. You have it in your head that, because Dave Ramsey says debt bad, the US should have no debt; but the world wants our debt; it has an insatiable (though, decreasing) appetite for it. Depriving the world of this debt would leave trillions of dollar-equivalents without anywhere to park safe from inflation, which would descend global financial markets into chaos. Tens of millions of people would starve in the first three months, among other undesirable outcomes. Some actively make the argument that the USG refusing to take on new debt would be net-worse for the world than the US defaulting on their existing debt, though its an interesting space to game out; a little game of global-cataclysm worst-thing-to-ever-happen-to-humanity olympics you can play.
But, debt servicing is becoming unmanageable for the US budget; so the best case for the United States is that USG debt demand from the rest of the world drops slowly and naturally, so we can naturally slow the issuance of new debt; and over 100 or so more years let managed inflation catch us up to recover from the utter shitshows that was 2001, 2008, and 2020. Everything I've seen, and I do mean everything, suggests that this is what is happening; but we'll know for sure in 90 more years.
Your entire wall of text has conveniently and completely omitted the hard fact that the U.S. Treasury has borrowed to pay for its defense (oops, sorry, I meant "war") budget for many, many years now. The war budget (~$850B) has been larger than the deficit in many years.
No other nation except the U.S. can sustain this without running into hyperinflation and consequent national rioting.
Ooooh that must've struck a nerve. Seems we can't post that here without massive loss of reputation. Progressivism != liberalism. That stuff just doesn't fare well, even as sarcasm.
Dude is giving what many have wanted for years, the largest of which is a massive reduction in US hegemony. Restarted militarization of Europe, accelerated the expansion of China into Africa. Causing Five Eyes to curtail the flow of intel.
But at the same time, utterly burning US soft power with the shuttering of USAID and most likely causing 14M excess child deaths world wide. Shutting down USAID was a bigger "mistake" than the invasion of Iraq and the blowback will be even larger.
Bro just drove the US empire off a cliff. Manufacturing will have to come back if they succeed in burning US currency. Good thing the rich have so much of it, Elon at 1/10th is still 40-70B.
In the process of burning down democracy, Trump has brought about changes that progressives have wanted for decades, namely a vast reduction in US hegemony. He has also caused massive suffering, inflation and will lead to the deaths of millions of people.
Yet, as of 08:37:36 MST Monday, 5 January 2026 there isn't a single comment on this thread complaining about Anna's IP theft.
Don't get me wrong, that makes me VERY happy, I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay.
But still, I can't help but wonder why the "this is IP theft" crowd is completely silent when it comes to the like of pirate bay and Anna.
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