This reads like the most blatant attempt yet to strip away our freedoms in the name of mass surveillance! If you wanted to use a VPN to bypass age verification in the EU, you wouldn't use an EU VPN in the first place!
They can't ban non-EU VPNs without setting up a Great Firewall of Europe, but maybe that is the goal now? Looking at Spain blocking all of Cloudflare doing football games, it definitely sets a dark precedent.
We know it's simple to detect someone's heartbeat from just colour changes of ones skin in a regular video taken with a phone camera. Wouldn't this be trivial with military level IR tech? Sounds way more likely than some amazing new top secret technology that is somehow filtering out every other magnetic field and can detect a heartbeat through mountains.
Why is everyone debating some theoretical advanced heartbeat or otherwise people detection tech rather than the absolutely obvious answer - some kind of advanced, specialized transmitter that's designed to be hard to detect and simply transmits the encrypted GPS coordinates of the pilot?
"The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran, The Post has learned. The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic signal of a human heartbeat"
Note, I agree that it was probably some novel beacon technology. Just answering your question about why people are debating whether it was a device that could detect a human heartbeat from long range.
Almost all of those words could be true if the beacon is disguised as an implanted medical device that creates some EM "interference" on each heartbeat, or every X heartbeats. From the outside it would look like sloppy design or a minor malfunction, in reality the signal is designed to be highly trackable
Not that I believe any of those words are true beyond the code name. The incident is exactly the kind of thing you'd want to create false rumors about
I get the NY Post article, I'm just surprised that even people who assume the Post is full of shit still run after the "heatbeat" claim rather than ignoring it completely.
it just sounds like the submarine communication technology, very low baud rate, used to transmit the pilot's location and liveness, using quantum magnetometry to measure a magnetic field without huge coil areas.
I think the fear of being located isn't based on the fact that someone can decrypt an encrypted transmission, its simply because someone can trace that a particular location is transmitting some radio waves.
You encrypt it because encryption is cheap and gives you confidence that the message content won't be intercepted.
The transmission itself would need to be stealthy or separated (by distance and/or time) from the pilot. For example, the pilot might leave a transmitter to send a message "moving south, will hide on X hill" hours after the pilot leaves, or even toss a transmitter into a river. But most likely just very spread-spectrum/CDMA to make it indistinguishable from noise.
There were commercially available lidar/ladar sensors that can do basic spectroscopy at a great distance. Specifically, the public specification showed it was able to pinpoint C02 or nitrate levels over 14km away.
Keep in mind this was published over a decade ago, and I'm sure they have systems with better specs these days. Too bad these were too cost prohibitive for FSD automotive platforms.
There are magnetic sensors that could detect rusting-container currents over 3 meters away, but still unlikely possible outdoors. There is a point where the thermal noise floor means any signal is lost at a minimal threshold.
I am sure folks are extra cautious about detailing key technology these days. =3
There are also dirt cheap human presence sensors that use millimetre wave radar that can detect if a person is in the room even if they’re sitting still. If I can buy these for a couple dollars then what could the military do with a few billion dollars and reaper drone platforms? With a big enough array you might be able to pinpoint everything alive within the area under surveillance.
Just recently I've compiled my side-project Rust game engine to WASM and it runs beautifully in the browser, as well as SSH2 to have a fully featured SSH implementation in the browser over a websocket transport.
It can obviously do amazing things, but the expectation for it to do replace webdev frontend code was always a huge misconception. Though recent developments have made DOM access without a JavaScript translation layer possible, so that might change!
That's a hefty payday for a model that barely functions! Every time I run out of API credits and get kicked back to Composer 2 I feel like I'm better off just packing up for the rest of the month.
I feel like we're finally at a point where you don't have to constantly argue with and constantly babysit coding models, which makes it even more frustrating when you're suddenly forced to deal with one that ignores your instructions and gets stuck in thinking loops again.
I suspect it's the vast troves of training data rather than any tech that Cursor possesses that SpaceX is after...
Cursor is still the best coding environment and hardness. It's actually not really close. They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable.
The problem is they can't compete with Anthropic and OpenAI because they can't sell Opus and GPT at a discount to subscribers like OpenAI and Anthropic do with their subscriptions.
So they either need to build a competing model or slowly die.
I personally disagree on the first point. Claude code in a terminal with vim is much nicer. I just don’t see the need for the bloat of an IDE when the CLI versions work so damn well now.
> They are so good that they actually made Gemini usable
I think Gemini is best model out there, and it's not Cursor who you should praise. I use it with jetbrains junie. Vastly cheaper than claude, faster, produces better quality code, actually listens to your instructions, more accurate. I'm sure claude code cli has some cli magic that I'm missing out on, but having everything just work in a nice IDE (and llm to actually understand your symbol table) is like magic.
Tried 3.1 pro preview today a little bit, definitely blowing thru credits quicker, not sure about being better quality, but achieved all tasks perfectly.
IDK how Junie does it, but I spend less than $50 USD per month and I'm on it 30 hours per week.
That's why I'm so puzzled to why Composer doesn't work better when they have the ability to train it from scratch for their agent harness! Yet it still fails to apply edits, gets confused why it can't call some commands in its sandbox, the list goes on...
I doubt they're buying it for Composer, I imagine they're buying it for the agent harness. It's arguably the best non-Anthropic agentic coding harness, and you get _all the models_ for one subscription price.
I've subscribed to Jetbrains all product for years. If the agent coding is going to be the next wave. Jetbrains is really behind. Even Microsoft offer better agent coding with VScode and Github copilot cli.
They’re definitely playing catch up, but the IDE integration makes interactive development really nice. Claude is good for one-shotting things, but I find JetBrains AI integration really useful for working with large codebases where I may be unfamiliar with things.
I think they’ve been caught in a bad spot. They’re a profitable company, but nowhere on the scale of Microsoft. And they don’t have billions of VC to effectively price dump. Other tools that can focus on one thing and burn cash are advancing quickly and some of them don’t really need an IDE at all.
The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.
I honestly can’t believe how poorly JetBrains has done. I used to love PyCharm but now it’s so far behind. I still use DataGrip but it is absolute dogshit when it comes to agentic coding.
I use JetBrain's all you can eat subscription that comes with their Junie coding agent which includes some free tokens to cover my coding needs. I then top up tokens on on-need basis. Costs me about $100 / month in AI tokens (well I bill my clients for that separately so do not really care bout the price). All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.
Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings
I use both (not IntelliJ but other IDEs) and quite frankly I fund VS Code and derivatives very much inferior. For C++ development for example CLion vs VS Code (needed plugins installed) is night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code.
I know JetBrain product could be sluggish on "normal" computers however all 4 of my development machines run on 16 cores AMD with 128GB RAM. It flies in environments like that
Unless you do Jakarta EE development, where Cursor with their simple LSP support is far, far behind. Cool for generating a bean, but when you got to debugging deployment descriptors you wish you were in IntelliJ.
Yeah, and it seems to be completely self-inflicted. I created a small personal skillset that explains to the agent how to use the JetBrains MCP tools for refactorings/find-usage/navigation, and it improved its performance by a lot.
Yet JetBrains tried to do everything themselves and failed :(
I was a massive jetbrains fan - still believe it's the best IDE even with it's massive performance issues.
But I just... barely use an IDE anymore. I think I have the lowest possible subscription price for "all products" you can have (at least as an outsider) and I think I'm going to cancel this year. I've been paying for a decade+
I am subscribed to their all you can eat plan and use their Junie coding agent which is included with subscription with some free tokens. I then pay for extra tokens on on-need basis and all works like a charm. So far I pay (well my clients do as I bill separately for that) about $100 a month to cover my current coding needs. All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.
Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings
Once you work somewhere that gives you unlimited opus 4.6 and learn how to use it properly, your perspective of what you should be doing day to day shifts.
Honestly unlimited codex with 5.4 high has a similar effect.
SOTA models + harnesses used together is very different than it was 6 months ago. People that have significant software engineering experience can get so much done it's scary.
I have what you call "significant engineering experience", decades of it to be precise and have designed and developed many complex products successfully used in various industries.
I do not need to "shift my perspective" since I do use agents to the degree that I need and it helps help me very much. I am way more productive with them.
Generated code is still not perfect disregarding of any particular model (I have access to all). I have to watch and fix, sometimes by supplying more precise specs, sometimes asking to rewrite piece of code in such and such manner using this and that structures.
Cursor is great. I was using it up until recently. Then I switched oh my pi, and honestly I haven't looked back. I've also heard great things about open code.
I actually really like Composer 2. For my use case, between the planning tool, and getting it to ask a lot of clarifying questions, I regularly get very good results. I'm not doing anything complex though; mostly staying in the lane of very common web app type code.
It definitely feels sufficient for questions and planning, but it is surprisingly lacking in the actual coding department once you go for edits that need changes in multiple files. Which is surprising considering they should have been able to train it on their own harness!
I don’t think this is the case. With “accidentally” collecting an individual’s data, the company’s risk is that somebody cares enough to sue them based on vague and poorly defined damages. With “accidentally” collecting source code, you’ve not only violated your contract with 98% of your enterprise customers (many of which have dedicated legal departments) providing a very real and obvious path to lawsuits, you’ve also gained a strong reputation as a vendor never to be trusted. My employer uses cursor, and I strongly suspect we would cut ties and blacklist them at the first sign of them inappropriately retaining data.
Is Composer 2 a bad model because Cursor are bad at training models, or because they are compute constrained? This deal will provide the answer to that question.
Crypto has been an awful development in many ways, but I happily welcome it when it has made malware so much more benign to me. The last malware that affected me personally was a crypto miner worm, and the one before that was a crypto wallet stealer, neither of which affects me at all as I don't meddle with crypto.
I don't know the statistics, but it seems like it's way more profitable for the grifters to target other grifters instead of taking over my machines and extorting me. Or maybe I just got lucky.
> when it has has made malware so much more benign to me.
Eh?
Cryptocurrencies have enabled ransomware. Possibly the most nasty malware to hit the internet in terms of damage caused...
This damage has affected services you use (including hospitals, schools, research institutions and local government) even if it hasn't infected one of your boxen directly.
It’s been going on for a while. Search YouTube or the web for 48gb 4090 (this is one of the most popular modded Nvidia cards), Nvidia of course never officially made a 4090 with this much memory.
There are some on sale via eBay right now. The memory controllers on some Nvidia gpus support well beyond the 16-24gb they shipped with as standard, and enterprising folks in China desolder the original memory chips and fit higher capacity ones.
Give that most of mine, and probably yours, and probably most of the world's computers are in fact made in China one way or another, some higher percentage than others, I'm guessing most of us trust our hardware enough to continue using it.
True. I was specifically referring to "modded Chinese hardware" from some unknown, unvetted third party versus say through a well-known brand that hopefully has its own rigorous QA and security processes in place.
I wouldn't say that's true or even likely. It's completely possible to be in a pit of vipers where every single snake is venomous, and that is pretty much what we are seeing: With technological advances, there is a certain subset of people that will use them primarily to solidify their power and control over others. There is no utopian society right now whose government doesn't look to spy through technology, which of course is best set up at time of manufacture.
Agreed. Unless you have full control over the production chain to fully produce a device, you are subject to the whims and desires of those who preside over such technological feats that we take for granted in our daily lives.
To the original point, it's safe to say that highlighting a nationality with regards to trust is baseless and without merit, as would be for any other topic (men/women from x are y, z food is better here, etc..). Real life is much more complicated and nuanced past nationalities. Some might call it FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but there's always a deeper rationale at the individual level as well.
Rather than people being wary of Chinese in general, it's more that there is a high degree of government control exercised in China and they are known to be very strategic with long-term planning in regards to technology control both for spying and actual remote control of devices. We are all just looking for the least bad option. It's not like devices from other countries are immune, but they are often less organized so there is a better chance of avoiding the Chinese level of planned access.
It does seem like pretty low risk in this specific case so I agree OP's comment was bit over the top, but I would have no way to make anything resembling even an educated guess as to how far their programs go.
Yes, this is really what I was referring to. And the fact that the original comment I was replying to mentioned "modded Chinese hardware" from some unspecified, unvetted 3rd party which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
I went on to install this, but it seems very US centric, which isn't apparent in anything else than the domain name. The maps only cover the US, you can only download English dumps of Wikipedia, etc.
It's not the biggest deal if you're proficient in English, but I wasn't even able to download the full dump of English Wikipedia as their hardcoded link to it just seems to return 404.
The Docker setup leaves much to be desired, as network names are hardcoded, and extension services are expected to be reachable over hardcoded port numbers, making it impossible to run behind a reverse proxy.
Going to give this another go in a couple of years when it has had some more time in the oven, but it still looks very promising!
That is the way of the internet unfortunately. Instead of simply appreciating something, it's important to find a criticism and voice it. That way you're 'adding' to the conversation.
I mean look back at HN classic posts like the initial Dropbox announcement and the classic: this is nothing more than a wrapper over rsync, etc.
Thinking that you are operating in the UK because a UK user can theoretically send packets to you, is similar to thinking a corner store in Japan is operating in the UK because a brit can theoretically get on a plane and fly there to shop.
I run a site in the US and have zero intention of implementing GDPR or geoblocking anyone. If the feckless EU bureaucrats don’t want me serving Europeans, they can either block me or convince their citizens to stop requesting things from my servers. Beyond that, they can fuck off.
I travel internationally all the time, including to Europe. These clowns don’t even have the ability to connect me to my site. They can’t subpoena anyone, they have no control or visibility. Why does anyone outside of the EU give a shit about this? It baffles me.
You can declare that “it doesn’t work like this” all you want, and I’ll just keep ignoring it. GDPR is totally irrelevant to me, and no one who disagrees has the power to actually do anything about it.
They can't ban non-EU VPNs without setting up a Great Firewall of Europe, but maybe that is the goal now? Looking at Spain blocking all of Cloudflare doing football games, it definitely sets a dark precedent.
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