> As they say in security, "no one will burn a zero day on you!". For your small blog with one hundred visitors per month, it's probably the same: "no one will burn their DDoS capabilities on you!"
The last I saw you can hire DDoS as a service for like $5 for a short DDoS, and many hosts will terminate clients who get DDoSed.
You wouldn't ask a human to do that, why would you ask an LLM to? I guess it's a way to test them, but it feels like the world record for backwards running: interesting, maybe, but not a good way to measure, like, anything about the individual involved.
I’m starting to find it unreasonably funny how people always want language models to multiply numbers for some reason. Every god damn time. In every single HN thread. I think my sanity might be giving out.
Since grok 4 fast got this answer correct so quickly, I decided to test more.
Tested this on the new hidden model of ChatGPT called Polaris Alpha: Answer: $20,192,642.460942336$
Current gpt-5 medium reasoning says: After confirming my calculations, the final product (P) should be (20,192,642.460942336)
Claude Sonnet 4.5 says: “29,596,175.95
or roughly 29.6 million”
Claude haiku 4.5 says: ≈20,185,903
GLM 4.6 says: 20,171,523.725593136
I’m going to try out Grok 4 fast on some coding tasks at this point to see if it can create functions properly. Design help is still best on GPT-5 at this exact moment.
The vast majority of pirate stream sites are monetized in some way. If I was going to use one I'd probably prefer to pay some small amount rather than deal with the hellish ads the 'free' ones use.
A lot of the pirate stream sites I've run into break entirely if you have an adblocker enabled. I'd guess it's a combination of filter lists not being tested on them along with much more aggressive ads (from sketchier ad networks).
Use a good adblocker. I'd never do anything illegal, of course, but a friend of my friend has been successfully using all sorts of pirated content sites for years, and swears he barely sees any ads.
Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are, the longer they stay around.
Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc. All for $19.99.
In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything, anywhere, anytime.
Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed friction between me and my music.
No DRM issues (like same quality on every device, no extra privileges), one application for everything, runs everywhere, no UX issues (e.g., long scrolling to continue watching series, no autoplay and no spoilers in the thumbnail). It's worth paying for such an experience, which the first parties don't provide.
(Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)
DRM issues are why I cancelled and won't renew Paramount+. Their damn Google TV app running on a completely stock/factory Chromecast w/ Google TV, plugged in via HDMI to an unmodified TV, frequently (always on the same shows, especially newer Star Trek series) refuses to recognize the validity of my setup and reverts to an incredibly annoying color tint rotation that cycles between extremes. It took me quite a while to figure out what the hell was happening.
I'm personally not into piracy, but with paid pirate sports streaming websites, you often get a better user experience and way more choice for cheaper than with the legal options. You only need to pay once and you don't need to jump between apps.
I don't condone it but if you're in the UK and you want to legally watch every premier league game last season...
Sky Sports - £35/month
TNT Sports - £32/month
Amazon Prime - £9/month
And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot with about a third of the weekends games.
v.s. Paying someone on discord £8/month for all the games
You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer, but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no longer have the ability to time shift by having the main box record directly off the satellite feed.
You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite service.
IPTV in Western Europe is becoming more popular because it's decently priced for what you get. Say you want to watch football, but don't give a shit about anything else sports related. Well, you're probably still paying for everything else in a giant package for 50-100+ USD a month.
Especially for someone who only cares about their team, watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even more so if your local offer is burdened with bad commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that problem up to someone who watches a few different sports, but none are available as one single package, and the value for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as well, being you're now divided between several services. Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given they are functionally being punished for doing so.
Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the service is good, and you get everything under the sun, moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.
It's so funny how much that reminds me of working in a university acquired by a large for-profit corporation.
After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling shitty packages for students.
- The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a minimum, so people only needing one single class was still paying for 3.
- They would push high distance learning for anything they legally could, showing the same video of the same teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors" a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if not putting Masters students to do it for half the minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 + server costs. What a business.
- Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they would consolidate classes with another group and half would have to go to the other side of town for the one class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their tuition by one year.
But yeah, sure it makes more money.
When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's what happens.
I don't have cable or IPTV, but I do pirate other stuff that I paid for:
Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my computer.
If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the license, just for the stability alone.
For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not deal with things that magically stop working from time to time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).
I rented a movie recently on Amazon and it refused to play in high definition because they didn't like the device I was streaming it to. Bullshit like that.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that you dont have to deal with re-authentication just because you decided to watch it at a different location.
There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.
> Specifically, in multiple communications with MLB employees, STREIT claimed that he knew MLB reporters who were ‘interested in the story,’ and stated that it would be bad if the vulnerability were exposed and MLB was embarrassed.
Oh man, such a stupid thing to do. This turned a $150k bounty into extortion.
> Streit indicated his work was worth $150K but was also informed there was no ‘bug bounty’ program at the baseball league.
Sounds like a bug that would have been better off anonymously leaked for the other IPTV providers to pick up, after said bug was valued at 0 in greyhat dollars.
The bug couldn't have had less to do with streaming, and in the wrong hands would have been worth a significant amount of money—exponentially more than what the Shopify CVE calculator spit out and I replied with at the time. There's more here: https://prison.josh.mn/charges
There's a lot of nuance, and what was ultimately reported about the bug isn't how things played out—there's tons of context missing. I won't talk more of the bug, or the handling of situation. I realize it was the leading headline (more so than the "guy had streaming website") but it was, in my opinion, also the most far-fetched.
That is not what it says. They only said they had no bounty program to attract people to try and find bugs. That does not mean companies are not willing to compensate you if you find and report a bug in their system. I think 150k was well worth it, but the guy just worded it in the worst possible way.
The US is a major outlier in sentencing for violent crimes and sex crimes. It's not the absolute peak in terms of sentencing, but its somewhere between the Latin American mean and the Middle Eastern mean, which is unexpected given its other human development indicators.
The source for China's energy is more fragile than that of the US.
> Coal is by far China’s largest energy source, while the United States has a more balanced energy system, running on roughly one-third oil, one-third natural gas, and one-third other sources, including coal, nuclear, hydroelectricity, and other renewables.
Also, China's GDP is a bit less inefficient in terms of power used per unit of GDP. China relies on coal and imports.
> However, China uses roughly 20% more energy per unit of GDP than the United States.
Remember, China still suffers from blackouts due to manufacturing demand not matching supply. The fortune article seems like a fluff piece.
China has been adding something like a 1GW coal plant’s worth of solar generation every eight hours in the past year, and the rate is accelerating. The US is no longer a serious competitor for China when it comes to energy production.
The reason it happened in 2021, I think, might be that China took on the production capacity gap caused by COVID shutdowns in other parts of the world. The short-term surge in production led to a temporary imbalance in the supply and demand of electricity
This was very surprising to me, so I just fact-check this statement (using Kimi K2 thinking, natch), and it's presently is off by a factor of 2 - 4. In 2024 China installed 277 GW solar, so 0.25 GW / 8 hours. First half of 2025 they installed 210 GW, so 0.39 GW / 8 hours.
Not quite at 1 GW / 8 hrs, but approaching that figure rapidly!
(I'm not sure where the coal plant comes in - really, those numbers should be derated relative to a coal plant, which can run 24/7)
> (I'm not sure where the coal plant comes in - really, those numbers should be derated relative to a coal plant, which can run 24/7)
It works both ways: you have to derate the coal plant somewhat due to the transmission losses, whereas with a lot of solar power being generated and consumed on/in the same building the losses are practically nil.
Also, pricing for new solar with battery is below the price of building a new coal plant and dropping, it's approaching the point where it's economical to demolish existing coal plants and replace them with solar.
China’s breakneck development is difficult for many in the US to grasp (root causes - baselining on sluggish domestic growth, and possessing a condescending view of China). This article offers a far more accurate picture than of how China is doing right now: https://archive.is/wZes6
I don’t remeber much details about the situation in 2021. But China is in a period of technological explosion—many things are changing at an incredible speed. In just a few years, China may have completely transformed in various fields.
Western media still carry strong biases toward China’s political system, and they have done far too little to portray the country’s real situation. The narrative remains the same old one: “China succeeded because it’s capitalist,” or “China is doomed because it’s communist.”
But in reality, barely a few days go by without some new technological breakthrough or innovation happening in China. The pace of progress is so fast that even people inside the country don’t always keep up with it. For example, just since the start of November, we’ve seen China’s space station crew doing a barbecue in orbit, researchers in Hefei working on an artificial sun make some new progress, and a team discovering a safe and efficient method for preparing aromatic amines. Apart from the space station bit—which got some attention—the others barely made a ripple.Also, China's first electromagnetic catapult aircraft carrier has officially entered service
about a year ago, I started using Reddit intensively. what I read more on Reddit are reports related to electricity, because it involves environmental protection and hatred towards Trump, etc. There are too many leftists, so the discussions are somewhat biased. But the related news reports and nuclear data are real. China reach carbon peak in 2025, and this year it has truly become a powerhouse in electricity. National data centers are continuously being built, but residential electricity prices have never been and will never be affected.China still has a lot of coal-fired power, but it continues to carry out technological upgrades on them. At the same time, wind, solar, nuclear and other sources are all advancing steadily. China is the only country that is not controlled by ideology and is increasing its electricity capacity in a scientific way.
(maybe in AI field people like to talk about more. not only kimi release a new model, Xpeng has a new robot and brought some intension. these all happends in a few days )
> China is the only country that is not controlled by ideology and is increasing its electricity capacity in a scientific way.
Have recently noticed a lot of pro-CCP propaganda on social media (especially Instagram and TikTok), but strangely also on HN; kind of interesting. To anyone making the (trivially false) claim that China is not controlled by ideology, I'm not quite sure how you'd convince them of the opposite. I'm not a doomer, but as China ramps up their aggression towards Taiwan (and the US will inevitably have to intervene), this will likely not end well in the next 5-10 years.
I also think that one claim is dubious, but do you really have to focus on only that part to the exclusion of everything else? All the progress made is real, regardless of your opinion on the existance of ideology.
I mean only on this specific topic: electricity. Arguing with other things is pointless since HN has the same political leaning as reddit so I will pass
I don’t have one now. I used to post lots of comments on china stuff but I got banned once and every time I registered a new one it will be banned soon. I guess they banned all my ip. So I only go anonymous now
It's absolutely impressive to see China's development. I'm happy my country is slowly but surely moving to China's orbit of influence, especially economically.
"Not controlled by ideology" is a pretty bold statement to make about a self-declared Communist single-party country. There is always an ideology. You just happen to agree with whatever this one is (Controlled-market Communism? I don't know what the precise term is).
I cannot edit this now so I want to add some clarification, it just means on this specific topic: electricity, china dont act like us or german, abandoned wind or nuclear, its only based on science
> There are plenty of external citations, so rather than relying on a model to recall information internally, it’s likely effectively just summarizing external references.
And according to Tim Bray, it's doing that badly.
> All the references are just URLs and at least some of them entirely fail to support the text.
It’s the first release, so I expect it to get better over time. I didn’t care for ChatGPT when it was first released and thought it wouldn’t be trustworthy, but it’s much better now.
The Grokipedia article on Gamergate claims that Gjoni "revealed" that Quinn was sleeping with reviewers for good reviews, but he himself later admitted he had zero evidence for that and claimed it was a typo that made people believe he was accusing Quinn of it. Why is being outright wrong a good thing?
Apparently Grokipedia give you the option to highlight that section of the text and click "this is wrong" and it will update the text or tell you why not. I don't have a account but someone should try and report back what it does.
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