I don't know about OoT, but in the case of Super Metroid Map Rando (https://maprando.com/), the logic is also quite detailed – see e.g. https://github.com/vg-json-data/sm-json-data/blob/master/reg... for one room – and comes with information about the difficulty of the tricks necessary to get from one place to another with a given item loadout, health, runways from connecting rooms etc.; having that, it is possible for the user to specify a desired difficulty, and one of several game modes then effectively ensures that the "next" item is located in a particular location, access to which has only been made possible by the current loadout and doing tricks of the given difficulty, so that players sufficiently familiar with the logic (and the tricks) can quickly narrow down the set of possible locations. Other game modes will be less strict in how items are placed, which in practice can mean that the game becomes "easier" by giving you a more powerful item loadout but "harder" in that figuring out where to go becomes less straightforward; and as a result, you end up with games that feel completely different just by having a different focus on the exploration and execution aspects.
I've find that it becomes quite an interesting spectator sport too, since people will compete on completing a given random map as quickly as possible, effectively having to perform difficult platforming tricks while also having to solve a non-trivial constraint satisfaction problem to understand the map layout, and different speedrunners have evolved different probabilistic heuristics for how to do that.
And when you have an executive on one hand stating that only the president and the AG can interpret laws for the executive [0] and that you can't break laws if you're "saving the country" [1], that approach also just doesn't seem too promising.
Or, as JD Vance wrote, "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power." (https://x.com/JDVance/status/1888607143030391287). You really have to read it twice to understand just how far out that phrase is. So now it's the executive itself deciding what's "legitimate" (=conforming to the law), not the courts, whose role it is to interpret and enforce laws?
Yeah, if we (even in other countries) weren't all personally affected by it, I couldn't stop laughing. The way things are, I'd rather go with Max Liebermann, who reportedly commented on the previous wave of fascism with the words "I couldn't eat as much as I would like to throw up" ("Ich kann gar nicht soviel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte" - https://www.aphorismen.de/zitat/93763).
Agencies all have their own lawyers, and it’s frequently useful to have them hash out agreements for the same reason that it’s useful for scientists to get peer review. Beyond the basic efficiency argument, it’s good to have multiple people validate your reasoning.
> Currently, Grok Web is not accessible in the United Kingdom or the countries of the European Union. We are diligently working to extend our services to these regions, prioritizing compliance with local data protection and privacy laws to ensure your information remains safely secure.
I suppose you can take that to mean that people who do have access to the service should not expect much in terms of data protection.
There are just more regulations to comply with before a release. OpenAI's new Deep Research tool wasn't originally available in the EU either, but it was released less then a week after it came out in the US. Since the EU is a gigantic market with a lot of buying power and this release makes a strong case for people to switch over from competitors, I doubt it'll take long.
> There are just more regulations to comply with before a release.
If you do collect personal data and do funky stuff with it.
Another approach would be to not collect that personal data until you have the right process in place, and basically be regulation-compatible out-of-the-door on day one.
If your organization truly don't collect or process any personal data then no, you don't have to say anything as for example GDPR doesn't even apply to you in the first place. Or are you thinking about a different directive than GDPR perhaps?
The definition of "personal data" is so wide that it is impossible to provide any web service without collecting some form of "personal data".
If all you have is an apache web server with the default configuration serving fully static HTML / CSS page without any script tag, you already might need a DPO and complete some documents.
> The definition of "personal data" is so wide that it is impossible to provide any web service without collecting some form of "personal data".
Just because Apache by default collect and stores IPs doesn't mean it is impossible to provide a web service without collecting personal data? Disable the IP collecting, and even the default configuration wouldn't need to follow GDPR as it again doesn't even apply.
Is there something else in Apache that collects personal data by default? If you're unsure what "persona data" really means, https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/ has the definition.
Not sure how HTML/CSS is relevant, it shouldn't depend on what content you're serving.
All that requires additional active effort to fight having access to any data. The more complex your infra the harder it becomes to not having to do paperwork. Include a reverse proxy, and a CDN to the above and the chance of you not having access to any "personal data" is really really close to 0 unless you spend significant engineering resources triple checking everything. Even then, if you wanna be safe you better have the paperwork ready in case you forgot something.
In the example above, I hope that you would not have stopped at checking the apache configuration as I am sure you are fully aware that there are multiple log levels at the OS level that need to be tweaked as well.
This is of course despite the fact that you clearly have 0 ill intent and that none of these "personal data" can really be used for anything bad.
The mention HTML/CSS is just to make it clear that no additional data collection can happen through javascript tags (Google analytics, or any other alternative), or useful third parties. It makes total sense that if you dare use a bug tracking software, you should definitely pay hundreds of euros per month to hire a proper DPO who will handle all the paperwork or risk being exposed as the mental lunatic that the EU commission believes you are.
> All that requires additional active effort to fight having access to any data
I agree that it requires additional active effort, I'm not arguing against that. I don't agree with your original point that it's "impossible to provide any web service without collecting personal data", and it would seem you no longer agree with that either.
> It makes total sense that if you dare use a bug tracking software, you should definitely pay hundreds of euros per month to hire a proper DPO who will handle all the paperwork or risk being exposed as the mental lunatic that the EU commission believes you are.
If you willy-willy use bug tracking software that is needlessly collect and/or process EU individuals personal data, then yeah, you need to follow the regulations in the region you operate in.
If the collecting/processing actually serves a higher purpose (for your business and otherwise) then again, makes sense you need to follow the regulations.
> it would seem you no longer agree with that either.
On the other hand, you pretended that fixing that apache configuration was somehow "all I needed to do" to be compliant with EU regulations. We proved that this was wrong, and despite your best effort you are still unable to give a proper list of everything I need to do. You are unable to do so because it is virtually impossible; no matter how thorough you believe you are, you might still be missing an element you don't know well enough. To be safe the only path is to accept the fact that you will need to access personal data, even if that's not your purpose, nor if you do anything with them. The additional paperwork and needless effort are mandatory.
This in turn explains that regardless of what the Grok3 team really does behind the scenes; they DO have additional work to complete to be able to release their product in Europe, and that might explain the delay.
> If you willy-willy use bug tracking software that is needlessly collect and/or process EU individuals personal data, then yeah, you need to follow the regulations in the region you operate in.
I am willing to use whatever error tracking software you suggest. My criteria are simple: I might have JS errors I don't know about, please give me enough information to fix the underlying issue when that happens, without requiring me to fill additional paperwork.
My whole point is that the definition of what constitutes "personal data" is so wide that such a tool does not exist.
That's possible in general but not for this application; a chat interface to an LLM isn't very useful unless you can tell it whatever you want—including GDPR personal data—and then pick up the thread of conversation later.
It is kinda possible to do store that in browser, but as I've been finding with my own browser-based front end for the API, the browsers seem to clear this data a bit more than one might expect.
When regulations become sufficiently burueacrafied it's extremely easy to accidentally violate them doing completely normal things. As a really random example, in California when you operate a foodcart it's not enough to just keep your area and wares in sanitary condition, instead you need a dish washing bin of a minimum of exactly 'x' inches 10.5 IIRC.
A guy who was just ensuring he was preparing clean healthy food, keeping everything sanitary and all that might assume he was naturally obeying all regulations. But that assumption can cost one a big fat fine (leading to fun scenarios like a food cart vendor needing a compliance legal team), and given Musk's relationship with the EU - they'd love to crucify him him on any possible technicality they can find.
Right, that's true I suppose. But also, if you don't have a car for example, you don't need to think about the laws of how to legally drive a car, since it doesn't apply to you.
Similarly, if you don't collect nor process any personal data whatsoever, directives like GDPR doesn't even apply to you, so there isn't really any way (easy or hard) to "crucify" someone on violating that.
Pretty good considering there are laws around data privacy and government institutions that enforce them. Are they perfect? Of course not, but it sure is better than no laws to protect my personal data.
So I'm curious, what's the deal with the thread at hand? It looks like the "[flagged]" tag on the post title is now gone, but, as far as I can tell, the post itself still does not show up on the main page at all, so effectively it's still hidden?
It's probably a lot to ask for, but the context for a flag could be helpful. I came across this one since I just posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43059077 which I thought was on-topic (maths are, and we have had plenty of useful conversations on how science is done too), but that post was flagged.
I turned off the flags on it yesterday, but that wasn't enough to make it go back onto the front page. Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.
Why did I not restore this particular thread to the front page? The short answer is repetition. There have been many other recent major discussions on this topic—not about this specific detail about a paper on category theory, of course, but that alone is not enough information to constitute a new topic that can support a substantive new conversation. In HN jargon this is called SNI (Significant New Information), and it was lacking here.
Here are two other recent posts that explain this in more depth:
That a paper on category theory got caught in the ongoing funding purge is absurd, of course, but it's not a different topic in the sense that there's a substantively new discussion to be had about it, relative to the other recent threads about the funding purge.
Internet discussion has the tendency, as the same divisive topic gets worked over and over, to become more repetitive, more snarky, more shallow. All that is what we're trying to avoid here. It also gets a lot more meta, meaning you get comments about other comments, other users, the site, the community, the process, the mods, etc., rather than about the actual topic. It is a sure sign of a deteriorating discussion when even the people who most want to have the discussion can't find anything new to say.
When the juice has all been squeezed out of the lemon, nothing but rind is left. Making up for a lack of new information with a surplus of indignation is the opposite of what we want on HN.
Threads like this are a variant of the old joke about a group of people who know all the jokes by heart so they can just mention them by number and everybody laughs—except in this case the response is not laughter but anger, the list is not of jokes but outrages, and what gets mentioned is not numbers but catchphrases and talking points.
That showed up in the current thread very clearly, so this is actually a good example for people who want to understand this aspect of how we moderate HN.
> Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.
I checked the first 10 or so pages of 30, until reaching the point where all posts were much older, and there were enough of a similar age with fewer points that it seemed unlikely that all of them had been up-weighted.
It spent half an hour on the front page and 90 minutes in the top 10 pages. You can call that 'hidden', but everything falls off the front page(s) after a while, so everything ends up 'hidden' that way.
The more important question is how much time on the front page(s) a story had, and whether it was too much time or too little. I think I've answered that in the GP comment and the other links there, but if not, let me know.
You demo the result in GIMP (with a Wasm runtime linked(?)) and in the font viewer FontGoogles, and there's someone else who is playing around with it in gedit. There's no way to make use of this in, say, Firefox, yet, even though it ships with Harfbuzz, right?
I could not get it to work when I looked into it last, for Gimp I actually installed it globally, I think neither Chrome or Firefox uses the system Harfbuzz. Going by the dependants of Harfbuzz on Arch [0] it might be possible that it works in Chromium with a custom Harfbuzz, but it is not something I have tried. And since it is still experimental it is not built by default in any distribution I know of.
One of the reasons people have studied FQHE has been to create (non-abelian) anyons and thereby a framework for topological quantum computing. Is that also the story here?
> [Scott Aaronson, Computer Science professor and director of the University of Texas Quantum Information Center,] doesn't understand [Quantum Mechanics] and shouldn't act like they do.
This conspiracy theory is so weird and detailed. I don’t take it particularly seriously, but I would be less shocked if aspects of it turn out to be true than some other conspiracy theories.
I've find that it becomes quite an interesting spectator sport too, since people will compete on completing a given random map as quickly as possible, effectively having to perform difficult platforming tricks while also having to solve a non-trivial constraint satisfaction problem to understand the map layout, and different speedrunners have evolved different probabilistic heuristics for how to do that.
Some good showcases:
- The AGDQ 2025 finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it_xbTZHan8
- The grand finals of a recent tournament: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2485240928