It's literally in their FAQ: https://www.getmonero.org/get-started/faq/

Anyone curious about how Monero is implemented would immediately understand why it's a bad idea to use remote nodes.

>What is the difference between a lightweight and a normal wallet?

>For a lightweight wallet, you give your view key to a node, who scans the blockchain and looks for incoming transactions to your account on your behalf. This node will know when you receive money, but it will not know how much you receive, who you received it from, or who you are sending money to. Depending on your wallet software, you may be able to use a node you control to avoid privacy leaks. For more privacy, use a normal wallet, which can be used with your own node.

Most people don't know nor use Monero at all.

Most monero users are on the desktop where the common practice is to download and run their own nodes and/or use monero from Android on apps like CakeWallet, where their node is used and assumed as trustworthy.

To give background info: most users are on desktops because monero mining happens using CPU and instead of GPU, so they install the wallet which comes with a miner included and installs the node as well. They basically make some little income every single day and accumulate that profit.

The other miners like GuPax also install a node on the local computer as well, so a large majority of users simply runs nodes locally because they don't want to send their hashes to remote nodes which might fool them.

Thanks for explaining. I'm still confused: CakeWallet (and similar) were a reason to doubt the original claim. Are these "popular" wallets rarely used, or are you considering the nodes that they trust as equivalent to your own node?

People using monero tend to be well informed, or at least better informed than average crypto users. What I see happening is that most users have at minimum three different wallets: One for mining on the desktop, one "cold" wallet for storing the bulk of their money and then one wallet on cakewallet with pocket money for the convenience of small and fast transactions (e.g. donations, small payments).

From that sense in regards to CakeWallet: Android isn't anywhere secure and there is a real danger that key credentials are stolen by rogue apps. In the end doesn't really matter much about whichever nodes are trusted by cakewallet because the monetary values hosted on those Android wallets don't tend to have much value much to begin with.

I've been a long time user and never saw reports of cake wallet being insecure or people losing their wallet money from there. In either case most people using monero tend to be extra cautious from the start.

I don't know what asking AI adds to the discussion.

No, reading comprehension tells us that Claude Opus output the "unable to find supporting information" claim, which abecedarius faithfully relayed to us. There's no evidence in the text that suggests abecedarius attempted to find supporting information.

It was a form of "huh, interesting. I tried to quickly find some more evidence for this but failed."

If Claude as search engine were able to link to some backing (maybe like "we estimate around n nodes regularly joining the network, which roughly matches the order of magnitude of estimated users" ) -- that'd be great! I'd have said I was surprised but look what I found.

Instead:

- it couldn't dig up anything supporting, except that Monero sites encourage users to run their own node;

- one point it raised against was confirmed by another reply to my comment ("apps like CakeWallet, where their node is used and assumed as trustworthy"). (Claude listed the same and a couple more wallets it called "popular" with similar trust dependence.)

I agree with GP that just relaying a chatbot is rude. That's why I didn't do that.

Okay and if they had said Google we wouldn't be doing this dance, people just hate AI and its obnoxious to see comments about it on HN all the time. On a crypto post no less.

We get it you guys don't like AI, next!

It is equally obnoxious to people who talk about AI for everything as if it is a savior, it's a tool use it or don't.

When they changed it is also when they misspelled his name. Opus got it right. I was surprised Stephenson took the misspelling as an AI tell.

The UCSD system was indeed astonishingly, unusably slow. When I got to try it in high school computer lab, in the 80s, I was like "Did whoever ported it to this particular computer just totally fuck it up? WTF?!"

An Infocom adventure on a machine with 16k RAM also had frequent pauses to fetch from floppy, but it was much more tolerable.

Re verb lookups in Basic: you could use DATA statements and READ in a FOR loop for lookup. I don't know what was typical but that's what I recall from some examples.

Interesting -- you can keep mitochondria alive outside of cells? Are there papers on what they need for that?

Maybe it's better now, but what I ran into in trying twice is that if you're not into installing by "curl | sh", then trying to build from source was an awful experience. It had out of date instructions for installing a whole lot of dependencies. I'd figure out one problem only to run into another, and another. Gave up both times, a few years in between.

There are a few really good ways to install Nix, including ones that people often invoke via `curl | sh`. If you prefer, you can download the exact same installers, and verify the checksums, read their code, etc. You don't have to actually use a different installer just to avoid `curl | sh`.

There are distro packages out there, but those can also come with gotchas; e.g. IIRC Ubuntu's package was configured not to allow `/bin/sh` in sandboxes, which caused some things to break in obscure ways :-(

That doesn't sound small?

It helps to prevent scams because you know who the money is going to (not foolproof, of course). CPF in Brazil is not as fragile or sensitive as the SSN in the US. You can't easily wreck someone's life just because you know their name and CPF. CPF numbers are shared pretty much everywhere since it's a unique identification code for a single person. All businesses ask for it when they're generating invoices/receipts etc. You basically use your CPF everywhere and there's virtually no risk in sharing it. That's not to say that identity theft is not a thing in Brazil. It definitely is, however the damage is usually not as bad as the stories you hear in the US and the blame is usually put on the banks / service providers for not doing the proper KYC to verify the documents. It'll be a headache for the person, but usually something that is quickly fixed.

Before Pix, people already needed to put the full number, the CPF, and Bank agency number, so it's an improvement compared to old Brazilian transfers.

IME both ChatGPT and Claude had a sycophancy problem, but I'm surprised by the claim it's more of a Claude thing. Is that the general opinion of people who keep up with both?

(I unsubbed from OpenAI after Altman's coup. ChatGPT was annoyingly sycophantic up to then at least.)

Good question. I tried to phrase a concrete-enough prediction 3.5 years ago, for 5 years out at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29020401

It was surpassed around the beginning of this year, so you'll need to come up with a new one for 2027. Note that the other opinions in that older HN thread almost all expected less.

Yeah, the headline is misleading for just that reason. But rotation in 3d does have an unambiguous orientation which we call right-handed or left-handed (the "right hand rule" if you're unfamiliar with this). I don't know which orientation our galaxy's rotation has, the article only says it's opposite the majority in this sample.

They're doing natural science on a thing full of complex purposive undesigned machinery. There used to be Artificial Life conferences -- the proceedings were pretty interesting. Now the objects of study are getting past a "gosh that's cute" level but I doubt anyone here's misled by the title.