The 36th annual Rottnest Channel Swim will be held on Saturday, 21 February 2026.
Mind you, that's largely Australians who grow up swimming more than many US Navy SEALs do.
Come on down, the waters fine, the sharks rarely nip.
I'm suprised to see a HN comment along the lines of "most people don't ...", after all, most people don't program computers, start million and billion dollar companies, build out datacentres, fly planes, ... etc. The site is littered with people confidently doing things most people do not.
Worth noting that the water in San Francisco can be up to ~20 degrees colder than the water off the coast of Australia. Which adds to the difficulty some.
Sure, there are also a number of cold water long distance swims - the English channel is famous, the Tasmanian ones less so .. but they're cold, long, and have some wicked currents depending which one you take.
The Rottnest swim is just a long warm bath for those that like to dip a toe in and start easy.
To the best of my knowledge few ever attempt the horizontal falls even at slack tide - the waters are warm but the salties and the sharks can be off putting .. come tide change the stoppers will eat people.
> than the water off the coast of Australia.
I should note that Australia is a large continent with an area equal to that of mainland contiguous USofA .. it's not all Gold Coast Qld, just as the US is not all Florida.
Eg: the current water tempreture in San Francisco ( 12.5°C / 54.5°F ) is on par with the September water tempreture when surfing offshore breaks in southern Western Australia (not Perth, the south coast where all the fun is).
If you're a regular to the Australian beaches and headlines I visit you'll see a shark every week .. sometimes daily - and after five decades of swimming once a week if not daily you might get brushed up against once or twice - but it's unlikely you'll be bitten.
You will, however, almost certainly know or meet someone that can flash the scars of a bite.
As far as sea misadventures go, easily the funniest thing I've seen (sorry, we're like that, laughing at danger) was a young kid surfing with a pod of dolphins getting fully pancaked by a breaching dolphin that cleared a wave top, made serious air, and landed smack centre on the kid and his board.
He (the kid) got winded pretty hard, did get his (damaged) board back, and was laughing about it afterwards.
If your job is gone forever, with what money are you going to buy the thing in the advert? If nobody can buy the thing in the advert, the value of the ad slot itself is zero.
who would pivot to selling ads if AGI was in reach? These orgs are burning a level of funding that is looking to fulfil dreams, ads is a pragmatic choice that implies a the moonshot isn't in range yet.
Because AGI is still some years away even if you are optimistic; and OpenAI must avoid going to the ground in the meantime due to lack of revenue. Selling ads and believing that AGI is reachable in the near future is not incompatible.
> For years now, proponents have insisted that AI would improve at an exponential rate.
Did they? The scaling "laws" seem at best logarithmic: double the training data or model size for each additional unit of... "intelligence?"
We're well past the point of believing in creating a Machine God and asking Him for money. LLMs are good at some easily verifiable tasks like coding to a test suite, and can also be used as a sort-of search engine. The former is a useful new product; the latter is just another surface for ads.
Yes, they did, or at least some of them did. The claim was that AI would become smarter than us, and therefore be able to improve itself into an even smarter AI, and that the improvement would happen at computer rather than human speeds.
That is, shall we say, not yet proven. But it's not yet disproven exactly, either, because the AIs we have are definitely not yet smart enough to meet the starting threshold. (Can you imagine trying to let an LLM implement an LLM, on its own? Would you get something smarter? No, it would definitely be dumber.)
Now the question is, has AI (such as we have it so far) given any hint that it will be able to exceed that threshold? It appears to me that the answer so far is no.
But even if the answer is yes, and even if we eventually exceed that threshold, the exponential claim is still unsupported by any evidence. It could be just making logarithmic improvements at machine speed, which is going to be considerably less dramatic.
Yes, I don't understand it either. I think the opposite is true. If AGI happens and it becomes immensely successful, it would be the best medium to deliver ads and at the same time our jobs wouldn't be safe.
Perhaps the people who like that quote can elaborate why that quote makes sense and why they like it?
AGI would be able to exponentially improve at much, much better money making schemes like high frequency trading. It would beat every online business. It would run 24/7/365.26 farming out tens of thousands of conversations at once, customized to the person it's talking to, for sales, supplier negotiations, marketing, press, etc.
Its costs would be frighteningly low compared to human employees, so it's margins could remain fine at lower prices.
If AGI was around the corner, they wouldn’t have to resort to what some consider a scummy way to make money. They’d would become the most valuable company on the planet, winning the whole game. Ads show you they don’t know what else to do but they desperately need money.
There are costs to doing ads (e.g. it burns social/political capital that could be used to defuse scandals or slow down hostile legislation, it consumes some fraction of your employees’ work hours, it may discourage some new talent from joining).
Yes. Infinite low cost intelligence labor to replace those pesky humans!
Really reminds me of the economics of slavery. Best way for line to go up is the ultimate suppression and subjugation of labor!
Hypothetically can lead to society free to not waste their life on work, but pursue their passions. Most likely it’ll lead to plantation-style hungry-hungry-hippo ruling class taking the economy away from the rest of us
If AGI or something truly amazingly novel and useful for the market was about to get here, that’d be an unbelievable about of cash on the horizon. The promises they’ve made, it even half met, would be revolutionary. Ad placement means the business likely needs ads to work because the product isn’t near what they have been promising and won’t generate the revenue (at least not on its own) that investors have been promised because the hype was way too big.
This also means two thirds of emissions are not due to vehicular emissions. Let’s tackle that first, more bang for the buck?
Also - does that per capita figure include cargo? If so, how much? Does it matter if random individual takes personal
Responsibility and stops driving when all those long haul trucks will still be on the road?
My point is that in terms of personal responsibility nothing comes remotely close to driving but a vanishingly small proportion of people are willing to consider this.
I would say it's often because people see individual examples in action. Some people follow those examples. Then more do. You are more influential than you think.
True. Those who think they are being unfair just now, this is actually the fairest they've been since forever. Fairest in terms of arm twisting and other tactics being applied to everyone equally instead of being selective. Previously it was on the lines of the west and the rest, but now its just America and the rest.
Try continuing this line of thought instead of stopping at one novel half-thought. Perhaps there is something to the western world order that's worth defending?
As an American I will argue against my government's unilateral global adventurism all day long. That certainly doesn't mean that expanding the behavior is progress.
> As an American I will argue against my government's unilateral global adventurism all day long
I'm sure there are many Americans who would oppose this adventurism. I'm not sure whether that's because they believe its just a bad strategy to continue the status quo or because its just plainly a wrong way to treat other nations by force.
> That certainly doesn't mean that expanding the behavior is progress.
I don't mean it as progress. Its a regression but I hope there's a silver-lining at the end of all this for everyone.
You ascribed the label "fairest" as if the current state is closer to a desired ideal. This is a standard pattern of fascist propaganda - pointing out the longstanding normalized hypocrisy in the system in support of going backwards to where we didn't even try to live up to something better.
If you'd focused on what you see as the positive path forward, in spite of current events, then I wouldn't have written my comment.
In what twisted imaginary world is saying that a serial killer was fair to all his victims by being equally brutal with all of them means killing was the desired ideal. I'm not sure who proposed going backwards or what it even means.
Everyone is acknowledging the hypocrisy because it is hitting their bottom line this time.
I would like to see links to your opinions where you pointed to the "longstanding normalized hypocrisy in the systen" as a problem before the tariff nonsense.
> In what twisted imaginary world is saying that a serial killer was fair
Exactly this. One doesn't use the word "fair" to begin with. Being killed is decidedly not fair, period.
> I would like to see links to your opinions where you pointed to the "longstanding normalized hypocrisy in the systen" as a problem before the tariff nonsense.
Write a script go to back through my HN comments as far as you'd like? I don't have a blog or anything.
Off the top of my head - I was against the Iraq War, against Obama's drone assassinations, against intervention in Libya, against Israel's apartheid and genocide except for maybe two weeks after Oct 7 (they burned through their credibility that fast).
The main US international military action I've ever been in support of is helping Ukraine - it seems like a just defensive war of people who earnestly want liberalization and closer ties to the western sphere of influence. But even on that subject, the covert US meddling that set that stage for that conflict is still condemnable.
On a different but related topic, I've been against the surveillance industry ("big tech") from around when the term AJAX was coined.
Is there anything else you'd like my opinion on to show I'm not new to the subject?
you are hung up on the usage of the word "fair" with no room for alternate interpretation but want others to let bygones be bygones because it is normalized and maintains the status quo.
Not letting bygones be bygones, but rather addressing them in a constructive context - where they might even be able to be concretely addressed rather than simply used as fuel for the fire and then dumped in the dustbin of history.
Yes, that is maintaining the status quo. And yes, that is awfully convenient as an American. I'll admit those biases. But even as a critic of US foreign policy for basically my entire life, I do feel there is still something independently-valuable in the post-WWII international order where we at least tried to move beyond overt large-scale aggression.
Defining it as "west vs the rest" is too binary, even if you're coming from a place of being content to see the rest of the west get their comeuppance. Don't you think Gaza is worse off with this new more fair approach? Venezuela?
As a heavily sarcastic and often irreverent person myself, I think sarcasm translates very poorly to online communication in public forums. The main problem is the complete lack of context where you don't know where a commenter is actually coming from, so you lack the ability to interpret them making a particular statement as a deliberate absurdity.
So sure, maybe talking to friends I would find myself using the word "fair" that way as a punchline to a joke. But they'd know I'm not looking to normalize the new dynamic, rather than highlighting its perversity.
Then specifically here, OP doubled down on the argument rather than repudiating it. So I don't think it's really correct to call it sarcasm.
Thanks. It took 6 levels of comments to point the obvious sarcasm. May be I give too much credit to average HN'er skills at recognizing sarcasm without an explicit /s :)
It's not resources (this time), it's the US' sinking relative standing in the world that is causing this. Any self-respecting empire facing the end of its global domination wants to self-destruct violently instead of slowly disappearing. Hence WW1&2 and now whatever will this be.
Pulling the power cord on a laptop won't shut it down, it will just start using the battery.
Some desktop PCs have a physical power switch on the power supply, usually next to where the power cord plugs in. But it is becoming more rare. Every $0.50 they can save in costs is added to the bottom line.
Maybe EU requires it? Most (all?) newer Dell desktops here have only the "soft" pushbutton power switch on the front of the case. Of course you can just pull out the power cord itself.
Get a console in your sprite. Run “screen”. Run a loop in there : while date; do sleep 1; done. Detach screen and exit the session. Wait a few minutes and go back into the sprite. Reattach screen. You’ll see a gap in the timestamps.
They do suspend even when they say they are “running”.
It’s not that insincere if all the other attendees are just meeting-taking robots the end result of which will be an automated “summary of the meeting I attended for you” :)
How many people join meetings these days just to zone out and wait for the AI-produced summary at the end?
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