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Show HN: I analyzed 8k near-death experiences with AI and made them listenable (noeticmap.com)
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Man this is cool! Smooth website too. Loaded really fast. Awesome work
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this is great, loved it
This is fascinating work. Right now it’s mostly focused on near-death experiences, but I’d love to see it grow into a broader map of spirituality, consciousness studies, and related fields. The visual approach has a lot of potential once more domains are added.
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Thank you! Yes I want to add more data from different fields and see how the they relate. Possibly Erowid DMT experiences as well since they have a lot of similarities with OBEs.
Transparent Leadership Beats Servant Leadership (entropicthoughts.com)
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"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect it to apply to being a leader in a tech company.
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I once worked for a guy who'd obviously seen the term Servant Leadership on a bumper sticker somewhere and figured that meant he was the leader and we were the servants. Worst boss I ever had, and I've been doing this 30+ years and have had a bunch of bad bosses. Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?
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this is so silly. porque no los dos?
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Love this, thank you for sharing.
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From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for." This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need . I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything in your own" principle in action and it's exhausting . Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities". Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
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Yep, this is just a ploy to create a PMC that actually has no skill workers in it. You just shove MBAs, nepos, etc into these roles and just have them gobble up some managerial course which is often nothing but: delegate, CYA, and 'manage expectations.' I dont think we need to go back to the old ideas of The Manager who is Above It All and Doesn't Get Their Hands Dirty. At least at middle levels.
This is just trying too hard. "Servant Leadership" is a buzzword invented to divert the general opinion from the power mechanics that hierarchical organizations are funded upon, i.e., the boss (sorry, leader ) commands and the direct reports execute. Being "servant" basically just means being a decent human being, as per putting people in the right condition to carry out their duties, not coming up with unrealistic expectations, and do the required 1:1 coaching/mentoring for career development. Hand-helding employees as this "blocker removal" interpretation of servant leadership seems to imply is just the pathway to micromanagement. It's ok to shield your juniors from the confusing world of corporate politics, but if your direct reports need you to do a lot of the sanitization/maturation of work items and requirements then why should you even trust their outputs? At that point you're basically just using them as you would prompt an AI agent, double- and triple-checking everything they do, checking-in 3 times a day, etc. This "transparent" leadership is the servant leadership, or what it's intended to be anyway in an ideal world. Some elements of it are easily applicable, like the whole coaching/connecting/teaching, but they also are the least measurable in terms of impact. The "making yourself redundant", i.e., by avoiding being the bottleneck middle-man without whose approval/scrutiny nothing can get done is fantasy for flat organizations or magical rainbowland companies where ICs and managers are on the exact same salary scale. And it will continue to be as long as corporate success (and career-growth opportunities) is generally measured as a factor of number of reports / size of org. managed.
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"Servant leadership" is not a buzzword but it's been misused and abused by Big Corporations to the point that it basically lost its meaning [1]. For me - personally - the idea is about being less of a boss and more of a nightwatchman or janitor. I believe in agency and ownership and - in sane environment - people can be left alone with clear objectives. It's more about removing obstacles. I'll give you a simple example. Once a week a maid comes to our apartment. Despite a clear power balance disproportion (it's easier to find a new maid than a senior engineer) and her being used to being transparent and prioritizing to not disturb tenants for me it's the other way around. I'm super happy to hastily finish a call or leave my room is she feels the need to disturb me, and if she needs an extra pair of hands I'm happy to help her with anything. After all, I'm more interested with the final result than feeling important. We have a bucket list of tasks than has to be performed that slightly exceeds her capacity and she has a full right to prioritize things. It took my a while but I eventually convinced her that it's ok to skip things - like cleaning the windows - if she's feeling under the weather or it's cold outside rather than faking it. Most of the pointy hairs I worked in corporate environments would probably prepare a list of requirements and walked through the apartment with a checklist every time she would finish giving her a full, harsh performance review. But that doesn't build trust and long term relationship. And after some time she developed - what people around here call ownership - and sometimes I feel she cares about the household more than I do. Hope that makes sense.
I've noticed a number of pieces lately that seem to suggest that managers and leaders doing nothing is actually good. It's been this way for a while - "bring me solutions, not problems" is the classic boss's abdication, placing themselves above their teams as judges and deciders rather than leaders - but I wonder if this current glut is caused by AI anxiety. After all, if your job is to just choose between options that other people will implement, why not have Claude do that? But if it's a good thing for your boss to do nothing, maybe he can keep his job.
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> “bring me solutions, not problems" If someone says this unprompted, I’d suspect they aren’t a manager, they aren’t even an employee. They provide roughly the same input one provides while ordering food at a restaurant. They are basically a customer, but also on the payroll. That being said, there are some cases where this might be said out of frustration. I’ve seen in my life a few people whose output is mostly finding and bringing issues to the table for someone else (who?) to magically solve them. That still brings value, and maybe they’d make excellent auditors, but it wears the team and maybe their managers down.
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Sometimes bosses will repeat your idea to sound like he solutioned it for you, without taking e.g. workload or priority into account. I haven't met a boss that wasn't incompetent. Not saying they don't exist, though.
The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the US. Activists Are Fighting Back (wired.com)
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With how harshly HN users have been going at UK and the EU, I was surprised seeing that not only is the mass surveillance build out better in the US, but also the user verification.
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It’s not age-gated. It’s ID-required.
Social media is more damaging to kids than porn
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Porn is a special subset of social media.
Internet Gatekeeping, ID Cards, New Facial Recognition Powers, Secret government talks have identified a huge problem, planned all this during the covid years is my guess. Something is going down and this is their safest bet i reckon. Possibly to do with unregistered recent inhabitants and improving the capability to identify them. That movie Scarface in the first 25 minutes tells you something.
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What does the movie Scarface have to say about it?
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https://www.realclearhistory.com/2017/04/01/the_migrant_crisis_that_brought_039scarface039_5646.html https://www.reddit.com/r/moviequestions/comments/133gbzl/in_scarface_1983_was_tony_montana_actually_a/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-talked-to-migrants-about-the-cultural-significance-of-scarface/ From what i can gather, there was some confusion as to why some nations which clearly and obviously have very high crime/fraud/corruption statistics yet at the same time have incredibly low prison/prisoner statistics ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-the-most-prisoners/ ) and the governments couldn't figure it out or overlooked it. It turns out that those nations just kick out the trouble and the trouble arrives at other shores, quickly setting up black market trade routes, money laundering shops, heavy violence, and a complete disregard for laws.
I consider myself lucky to have grown up before the internet, but after local BBS' were a thing. My parents had absolutely no idea what went on in those systems, and I found the freedom incredible. Being able to explore and spread my wings a bit was a huge part of my childhood and teen years, and it wouldn't have been possible if my parents were hovering over my shoulder, or if I were unable to make an account because I wasn't 18. That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online. I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.
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And when I was a kid some of my peers were watching Al Queda execution videos. I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.
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"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Heinlein If you hand power to the state every time people fail to properly handle their responsibilities, you end up in a dictatorship. It is a parent's responsibility to keep their kids away from the dark corners of the internet. Thoughtful regulation would create tools to allow them to do that easily, not hand parenting over to governments.
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If they won’t set limits that’s an issue with the parents, not the internet. If dad leaves the liquor cabinet unlocked the solution isn’t to ban alcohol. A free and open internet is non negotiable.
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I remember winning a 10-kill LORD game on a local BBS. It took ages of me staying up until midnight to kill all the resurrected players after the daily reset. I had only one real competitor on that server and he gave up after I slew the dragon twice in one week (due to great luck.)
Guess at some point in the future it will come out who bankrolled all this because multiple countries in Europe and America don’t just roll something like this out in 8 months organically without someone paying off politicians to push it
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Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.
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The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get this measure pushed over the line.
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Plot twist: It's Ashton Kutcher. https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotlight-rekognition-surveillance.html
Do social movements _always_ have people at the top pulling the strings? Is it _never_ the case that even when you can identify thought leaders, the movement itself is organic and broadly supported?
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This isn't a social movement.
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Concern over accessibility of internet pornography is absolutely a social movement. I don't necessarily agree with some of what is being pushed, but there's a large constituency here.
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Yeah, this is much more easily explained by the fact that a lot of things on the internet are damaging kids.
I think it's possible that there are secretive efforts to destroy permissionless access to the internet, but my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time. A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.
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Off-topic, but actually a number of landlords raise prices in sync with each other because they use price-setting services like RealPage that intentionally try to maximize rents across multiple landlords. They just settled a lawsuit over this: https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-realpage-settlement-rental-price-fixing-case
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> my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time. I think that's the wrong guess. Even with chat control, in some previous forms, the proposals came of the back of lobbying. One such case was Ashton Kutcker's startup https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutchers-non-profit-start-up-makes-millions-from-fighting-child-abuse-online The more recent proposals for chat control were drafted by non-public "high level groups", the identity of which wasn't revealed to the public https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark
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Do you think the main force is misplaced good intentions (which I assume is what drives Ashton Kutcher) or more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public?
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Those are heavily co-mingled. Policing and intelligence agencies in particular view themselves as having good intentions which look like harm from the outside.
What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this? If the politicians keep voting for things their constituents don't (and in these cases actively push back against so hard that the politician are forced to withdraw the push) that seems like strong evidence that politicians are doing something with an external incentive... Politicians having bad incentives (e.g. campaign donations) isn't conspiracy thinking, it's a documented reality. Hell, we even had a supreme court judge taking a present from somebody who's case he was ACTIVELY OVERSEEING.
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> What do you mean it's not unpopular? How many voters have ever expressed interest in this? UK: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/2025/07/31/91334/2 US: https://issueone.org/press/new-poll-finds-near-universal-public-support-for-bipartisan-legislation-protecting-kids-online/ Aus: https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-social-media-ban-soars-to-77-among-australians So far as I know there's nothing confounding here - people from across the political spectrum just seem to think it's a good idea to introduce age checks and to restrict children from accessing adult content.
It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights.
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Those pesky... adults!
I think all of this has gone overboard, even though I agree that children should not be exposed to pornography, I don't know what to do about it because I expect parents to monitor their child's Internet usage, which is a losing ideal. Are there better alternatives?
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Assuming the reason for these laws is to protect children from pornography, you could ask, what are the specific harms from pornography? You could identify those harms through scientific study (some have been done; it appears the harms are mostly due to a lack of education and understanding about what's going on in porn) and address them (educate children to understand what's going on intellectually/emotionally and how to treat people with respect). But that would require talking to kids about sex, which adults are petrified of. Our culture is puritanical, and uses fear and shame to avoid dealing with things like sex. It then perpetuates this fear and shame onto each generation, and it pervades every product and service we have. So we could try fighting the irrational fear and become less afraid of sex (and pornography would probably change because of it). But good luck doing that in this country.
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A fraction of the money poured into these mass surveillance systems and proposals would have gone a long way in developing better parental control software. If startups build parental control it carries the wrong incentives. Realistically what's needed for proper parental control. 1. Software that parents can install on phones, and computers (which comes as an upside of less lockdown on devices) 2. A way to whitelist websites and applications (particularly for phones). 3. A way to share, reuse and collaborate on whitelists. No enforcement of a central authority.
Well said. This is a social failure being exploited by shrude politicians to usurp more authority. Replacing parents with the state keeps playing out, and keeps being a horrible idea.
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That's a very good point
> I don't know what to do about it 1. No smart phones for the child before the age of NN, me I say 18. A Smart phone makes a great High School Graduation gift. 2. Only internet access from a desktop computer with a hosts file that the child cannot change. That probably means no Microsoft Windows PC. See: https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ eazy-peezy
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You either don't have kids, or your children are adults. It's impractical in today's world to raise children without access to devices like tablets and smart phones. That's like having a sugar-free, no TV, hand-sewn, ect, ect, household. What's more important is to know what your kids are getting into, making sure they are comfortable discussing what they see, and teaching them independent decision making skills. For example, a few years ago, my then seven-year-old complained to me about all of the Jesus videos that were popping up on Youtube. I told her to thumbs down them, and now Youtube no longer suggests them. She also knows that if other kids watch Jesus videos, that's their right and to keep her mouth shut.
>> Hmm I can't find any porn on the internet, better ask around > Sure Timmy I'll send you porn, but it's illegal and I'm taking a big risk here so you gotta do something for me, also you can't tell anyone You've failed to solve the porn problem and now you've created a larger grooming/CDM problem.
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You can add porn sites to the hosts file yourself.
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The point that people are making is that while restricting overt internet porn does remove it from sight of a lot of kids, it will also continue to circulate as "samizdat" through whatever filesharing mechanisms exist. When I was at school someone got busted for distributing BBS porn on floppy disks, no network required. Now we have terabyte SD cards.
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Absolutely true. When I was a kid a few people got in trouble for drawing and circulating pixelated “porn” on their graphing calculators. You can’t stop teenagers from being teenagers.
Human hair grows through 'pulling' not pushing, study shows (phys.org)
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I'm reminded of a girlfriend who patiently explained to me that your hair grows more if you brush it regularly because the brush "pulls it and encouraged it to grow". She said her mother had taught her that. I thought it was nonsense. Shows what I know. I suppose folk wisdom is vindicated again.
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Damn so it is possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
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Immediately had to think of Baron von Münchausen pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma
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this is provably false and is a not a proper example for that topic
RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung (pcworld.com)
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Based on my time working for Samsung this does not surprise me. The silos within fight against one another more than they ever bother to compete with anyone else
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Kdrama on this when?
Apple is going to be even more profitable in the consumer space because of RAM prices ? I feel like they are the only player to have the supply chain locked down enough to not get caught off guard, have good prices locked in enough in advance and suppliers not willing to antagonize such a big customer by backing out of a deal.
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Apple software typically seems to give a better user experience in less RAM in both desktop and mobile. For the last 10+ years apples iPhones have shipped with about half the ram of a flagship android for example.
I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700. I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade. I don't know how but the box is still great for every day web development with heavy Docker usage, video recording / editing with a 4k monitor and 2nd 1440p monitor hooked up. Minor gaming is ok too, for example I picked up Silksong last week, it runs very well at 2560x1440. For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.
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Man, it was just GPU for a while. But same boat. I regret not getting the 4090 for $1600 direct from Nvidia. "That's too much for a video card", and got the 4080 instead. I dread the day when I need to replace it.
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As other mentionned, there are plenty of refurbished stuff and second hand parts that there isn't any risk of finding yourself having to buy something at insane prices if your computer was to die today. If you don't need a GPU for gaming you can get a decent computer with an i5, 16GB of ram and an nvme drive for usd 50. I bought one a few weeks ago ago.
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You can still get brand new generic motherboards for old CPUs. I swapped out old ASUS MBs for an i3-540 and an Athlon II X4 with brand new motherboards. They are quite cheaper than getting a new kit, so I guess that's the market they cater to: people who don't need an upgrade but their MBs gave in. You can get these for US$20-US$30.
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For a DDR3-era machine, you'd be buying RAM for that on Ebay, not Newegg. I have an industrial Mini-ITX motherboard of similar vintage that I use with an i5-4570 as my Unraid machine. It doesn't natively support NVMe, but I was able to get a dual-m2 expansion card with its own splitter (no motherboard bifurcation required) and that let me get a pretty modern-feeling setup with nice fast cache disks.
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Don't worry, if you are happy with those specs you can get Corporate ewaste dell towers on ebay for low prices. "Dell precision tower", I just saw a listing for 32gb ram, Xeon 3.6ghz for about 300 usd. Personally, at work I use the latest hardware at home I use ewaste.
> I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. The mid 90s was pretty scary too. Minimum wage was $4.25 and a new Pentium 133 was $935 in bulk.
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> The mid 90s was pretty scary too. If you fast forward just a few years though, it wasn't too bad. You could put together a decent fully parted out machine in the late 90s and early 00s for around $600-650. These were machines good enough to get a solid 120 FPS playing Quake 3.
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Are you sure? From what I can tell it's more like 500 USD RRP on release, boxed. Either way, it was the 90s: two years later that was a budget CPU because the top end was two to three times the speed.
Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum ? I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta. I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade them often, because, why take even the tiniest risk that my old or outdated hardware slows down my revenue generation which is orders of magnitude greater than their cost to replace? Even if you don’t go the overkill route like me, we’re talking about maybe $250/month to have an absolutely top spec machine which you can then use to go and earn 100x that. Spend at least 1% of your gross revenue on your tools used to make that revenue.
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> Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum? Yes. This is how we get websites and apps that don't run on a normal person's computer, because the devs never noticed their performance issues on their monster machines. Modern computing would be a lot better if devs had to use old phones and computers more often.
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> I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year > I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy Sick man! Awesome, you spend 1/3 of the median US salary on a laptop and desktop every year. That's super fucking cool! Love that for you. Anyways, please go brag somewhere else. You're rich, you shouldn't need extra validation from an online forum.
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I agree with the general sentiment - that you shouldn't pinch pennies on tools that you use every day. But at the same time, someone who makes their money writing with with a pen shouldn't need to spend thousands on pens. Once you have adequate professional-grade tools, you don't need to throw more money at the problem.
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What is the actual return on that investment, though? This is self indulgence justified as « investment ». I built a pretty beefy PC in 2020 and have made a couple of upgrades since (Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT, a few TB of NVMe) for like $2k all-in. Less than $40/month over that time. It was game changing upgrade from an aging laptop for my purposes of being able to run multiple VMs and a complex dev environment, but I really don’t know what I would have gotten out of replacing it every year since. It’s still blazing fast. Even recreating it entirely with newer parts every single year would have cost less than $250/mo. Honestly it would probably be negative ROI just dealing with the logistics of replacing it that many times.
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My main workstation is similar, basically a top-end AM4 build. I recently bumped from a 6600 XT to a 9070 XT to get more frames in Arc Raiders, but looking at what the cost would be to go to the current-gen platform (AM5 mobo + CPU + DDR5 RAM) I find myself having very little appetite for that upgrade.
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Every hardware update for me involves hours or sometimes days of faffing with drivers and config and working round new bugs. Nobody is paying for that time. And whilst it is 'training', my training time is better spent elsewhere than battling with why cuda won't work on my GPU upgrade. Therefore, I avoid hardware and software changes merely because a tiny bit more speed isn't worth the hours I'll put in.
> maybe $250/month (...) which you can then use to go and earn 100x that. 25k/month? Most people will never come close to earn that much. Most developers in the third world don't make that in a full year, but are affected by raises in PC parts' prices. I agree with the general principle of having savings for emergencies. For a Software Engineer, that should probably include buying a good enough computer for them, in case they need a new one. But the figures themselves seem skewed towards the reality of very well-paid SV engineers.
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> But the figures themselves seem skewed towards the reality of very well-paid SV engineers. The soon to be unemployed SV engineers when LLM's mean anyone can design an app and backend with no coding knowledge.
Yes, that's an absolutely deranged opinion. Most tech jobs can be done on a $500 laptop. You realise some people don't even make your computer budget in net income every year, right?
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Most tech jobs could be done on a $25 ten year old smartphone with a cracked screen and bulging battery. That’s exactly my point. Underspending on your tools is a misallocation of resources.
You’re an employee. You don’t use any of your computers to make your revenue; your employer provides them. Obviously I wasn’t speaking about you.
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Oh. I’m not allowed to own a home computer to try to further my own learning and education and knowledge then. Guess I’ll go fuck myself now then.
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They're just using this comment section to brag about how well off they are, I wouldn't worry too much. They're completely out of touch.
Where can you buy a new Thinkpad with 96GB and 4TB SSD for $2K? Prices are looking quite a bit higher than that for the P Series, at least on Lenovo.com in the U.S. And I don't see anything other than the P Series that lets you get 96GB of RAM.
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You have to configure it with the lowest-spec SSD and then replace that with a 4 TB one bought on SSD the aftermarket. The P14s I bought last week, with that and the 8 GB Nvidia GPU, came to a total of USD $2150 after taxes, including the SSD. Their sale price today is not quite as good as it was last week but it's still in that ballpark; with the 255H CPU and iGPU you can get the P14s for $1977 USD, then throw in the aftermarket SSD and it'll be around $2200. A bit more if you want the nicer screen but still in that range. It's not shown on the list price but they also take $50-$100 off when you add it to your cart, and if you log in as a business customer you'll get another couple percent off as well. It's still certainly a lot to spend on a laptop if you don't need it, but if your computer budget is $5k/year, you'll have a lot left over to spend on nice monitors I guess.
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Typing this on similar spec P16s that was around 2.6k or so. So if you call anything under 3k simply 2k, then it was 2k. Thats in Germany, from a corporate supplier.
I agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt like flipping the “modern computer” switch overnight. Everything since has been incremental unless you’re doing ML or high-end gaming.
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The only time I had this other than changing to SSD was when I got my first multi-core system, a Q6600 (confusingly labeled a Core 2 Quad). Had a great time with that machine.
Yup. And even more outrageous is the power grid upgrades they are demanding. If they need the power grid upgraded to handle the load for their data centers, they should pay 100% of the cost for EVERY part of every upgrade needed for the whole grid, just as a new building typically pays to upgrade the town road accessing it. Making ordinary ratepayers pay even a cent for their upgrades is outrageous. I do not know why the regulators even allow it (yeah, we all do, but it is wrong).
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Usually the narrative for externalizing these kinds of costs is that the investment will result in lots of jobs in the upgrade area. Sometimes that materializes. Here the narrative is almost the opposite: pay for our expensive infrastructure and we’ll take all your jobs. It’s a bit mind boggling. One wonders how many friends our SV AI barons will have at the end of the day.
To be honest, this actually sounds kinda healthy.
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Yeah, makes absolute sense. A bit like Toyota putting a GM engine in their car, because the Toyota engine division is too self-centered, focusing to much on efficiency.
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You mean toyota putting bmw engine (supra). Contracting as Toyota has TRD, which focuses on the track performance. They just couldn't keep up with the straight six reliability
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This is why the western idea of 'many companies competing' is a bit of a myth. Countries with these huge conglomerates just take competitive modes internally. There's no magic that really happens when there's another company present. If competent, then these companies will naturally fall into this dynamic. W Or how one-party states like China, Cuba, Vietnam, the old SU, or Japan (unofficially) are just as financially successful as Westminster parliamentary states. Or how your company only needs one union, not a dozen competing.
Not one phone, they did this all over the place. Their flagship line did this starting with the Galaxy S7 all the way up to Galaxy S24. Only the most recent Galaxy S25 is Qualcomm Snapdragon only, supposedly because their own Exynos couldn't hit volume production fast enough.
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"Galaxy S II" and its aesthetics was already a mere branding shared across at least four different phones with different SoCs, before counting in sub-variants that share same SoCs. This isn't unique to Samsung, nor is it a new phenomenon, just how consumer products are made and sold. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_II
I don’t think they’re working at 100% capacity or don’t have any other FAB that they can utilize for other low profit stuff. Let’s check their books and manufacturing schedule to see if they’re artificially constraining the supply to jack up the prices on purpose.
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I'd take the opposite bet on this. They're diverting wafer capacity from lower-profit items to things like HBM, but all indications are that wafer starts are up a bit. Just not up enough. For example: https://chipsandwafers.substack.com/p/mainstream-recovery "Sequentially, DRAM revenue increased 15% with bit shipments increasing over 20% and prices decreasing in the low single-digit percentage range, primarily due to a higher consumer-oriented revenue mix" (from june of this year). The problem is that the DRAM market is pretty tight - supply or demand shocks tend to produce big swings. And right now we're seeing both an expected supply shock (transition to new processes/products) as well as a very sudden demand shock.
Functional Quadtrees (lbjgruppen.com)
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Quadtrees are also quite useful for generating fractals. A very related project of mine, Lambda Screen [0], explores this by encoding these functional quadtrees directly in lambda calculus and rendering the structure based on Church booleans being true (white) or false (black). With fixed point recursion, this allows for very tiny definitions of IFS fractals. For example, fractals like the Sierpinski triangle/carpet only require ~50 bit of binary lambda calculus [1] [2]! [0]: https://text.marvinborner.de/2024-03-25-02.html [1]: https://lambda-screen.marvinborner.de/?term=ERoc0CrYLYA%3D [2]: https://lambda-screen.marvinborner.de/?term=QcCqqttsFtsI0OaA
You can even build them with basically one line of code by sorting points using Morton / Z-curve order. It's linear time if you use a counting/radix sort. Edit: lol, downvoted for this post. Never change, HN.
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I'd love to see that. Could you link me to an implementation or explain this in more detail please?
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It’s super easy to click the downvote button by accident on mobile when you meant to upvote. And this UI will never be fixed because this is HN after all.
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This is precisely the reason that I do not log in to HN on my phone. My phone is read-only and if I want to upvote or comment then I have to switch to my laptop. Pretty easy with firefox because I can send tabs to other devices.
We just did a whole visual identity around the quadtree concept. Take a scroll on this one! https://trace.systems/
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That all sounds incredibly dystopian, ugh.
Imo.im – Instant Messenger (imo.im)
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How are all these chat app funded?
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- Russian Yandex.ru trackers on their website - proprietary app - no Linux version Looks like houndreds of others shitty chat apps, why even post it?
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Not to mention the awful stock photos on the home page, and the word salad on the about us page: https://imo.im/about_us.html
Japanese Four-Cylinder Engine Is So Reliable Still in Production After 25 Years (topspeed.com)
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I don't think that lack of reliability is the key factor for why new motors are still being developed. Fuel efficiency or changing emission standards are two points that come to mind that drive further optimizations.
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GM/Chevrolet are still making small-block 350 engines, they started in the 1950's https://www.gmperformancemotor.com/parts/19433032.html
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The "Mopar 318" (Chrysler LA engine) lasted almost 40 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_LA_engine
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So are the staright sixes from BMW. Running one generation behind B58.
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One of the interesting quirks of the Honda K-series is that it spins “backwards”. If you try to mate one to a different transmission (or try to mate a different engine to a K-series transmission), it’s going to give you, uh, interesting results! Lots of people found out the hard way when they used their Fast & Furious inspiration to do JDM swaps :)
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Engines used in general aviation have interchangeable parts from almost 100 years ago. You could warp a Lycoming engine mechanic in from 1942 using your time traveling phone booth and he'd be able to fix your 172 of any vintage.
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Toyota 5A was in production 1987–2006, and IIRC was licensed to Chinese manufacturers afterwards. The A series as a whole lasted 1978–2006. Less modern than Honda K, but these were lovely engines. They just won't fail as long as you replace parts on time.
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When I was a kid I wanted a classic Mini with a transplanted Honda K-Series engine. It's a big engine for that little car but I'd completely forgotten about them over the years. It's wild that people are still doing this: https://potentialmotorsport.com/ I might have to reserect that dream. :D
[dead]
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That's The Original Unedutorialed Title Copy And Paste... just sayin'...
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Fair Enough
I was flabbergasted driving a 2023 Honda Civic Sport during a trip to Thailand, easily one of the best-balanced cars I’ve driven. Makes me wonder if that model is using the same engine they’re talking about here
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Depends on the engine. They had an option for a turbo 1.5l l15 and a 2l k20. Plus a few others I don't know were offered in usdm. No idea about Thailand but if it wasn't a 2 liter, I think it was not a k series. In a very niche form of motorsport, the civic sport is top in class for a lower tier Street class with the SI being top of another lower tier Street class.
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It could've been, but it was probably a turbocharged L-series engine.
I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer (lalitm.com)
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This works until your leadership changes.
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I worked closely with a few during my career in a few companies. It is a retirement plan of people who neither can nor want to perform after they "put in time". These days as someone who gets to give my couple of cents to folks in the upper echelons of promising companies I tell the newly minted CTOs to either not hire them or if they are already hired, fire them. Staff engineer and above = 45 year old soccer player bench warmer getting the pay 22 year old striker.
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so what one should do after a certain age?
It's easy to write that blogpost when you are in a position of a lot of privilege, in arguably the best software engineering company in the world, and got where you are surely for your competence, but also a high degree of luck. Some other people has to grind harder and even be better than you to get half of your success, that doesn't mean that they are wrong, or that the book is wrong. I believe a lot, if not all advice there in the book is necessary. Other people might not work at Google, but as I've said before, might need to grind different gears in order to be successful, if you don't -- good for you! A lot of your suggestions would get you fired very quickly on many companies, it's good that it all works for you.
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My brother had an internship in a medium-sized company, and after 6 months, a new product (that he was hired for basically) and 3 new internal tools (including one for reading data trace, which, after reading this, is quite a propos), he was hired as a staff engineer. I do not have his proactivity for sure, nor I have his ease with other people, but I managed to land my job in an infra/tool for network and security without much difficulties.
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It’s not luck. To assume so, let alone say so, is uninformed and quite rude. Getting into these roles requires a ton of hard work. Yes, it’s a grind. If you feel it’s only achievable with luck, I suggest you’re selling yourself short.
It's not that I want to avoid the career metagame (I would argue I haven't so far) but that the career metagame is different depending on your environment.
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I know this is off topic but if you ever have the inclination to write about it, I would be really interested in reading about any books, people, experiences, professional lessons learned, etc. that have been helpful to you on progressing along a non-spotlight technical focused engineering path. I'm in a different domain (aerospace) but am trying to carve out a similar career path and am always looking for more to learn about just being a good engineer.
There is another risk: you run for 2 years and prevent a major problem that would bite the company in year 3 or 4. However because the problem never happened nobody knows how much you saved everyone and so you don't replace all that capital you used up. Every company I've worked for has regular meetings where they honor the people who stayed late to get the release out the door (I work in embedded systems where upgrades often mean flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without cell service - thus bug free releases are important since upgrades are expensive). I can't help thinking every time that if the rewarded person had just done their job 6 months ago they wouldn't have had the bug in the first place.
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That's sounds very Shakespearean.
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I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the value of disasters that were prevented. Who is worth more? The person that quietly removes scrub brush and other fuel on the ground in the years before the forest fire starts, or the person that comes in once the fire starts and using lots of equipment and effort puts the fire out. Often the latter person gets the accolades, the former is a thankless task. If a company lacks visionary leaders like that, then one must wonder if the company has much of a future anyway.
Couldn’t agree more (but frustratingly due to HN’ shitty mobile experience i downvoted this, sorry!) In a past life i used to complain that people only praised my work after i fucked up and subsequently fixed it. I’d go month on month of great execution and all I’d hear would be complaints, but as soon as i “fixed” a major issue, i was a hero. I’ve learn that setting appropriate incentives is the hardest part of building an effective organization.
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I had to mention this in an early startup, when I did some firefighting, and the biz people were praising that. I said I wanted to set a culture in which engineering was rewarded for making things just happen and work, not for firefighting. A nice thing about early startups is that it's the easiest time to try to set engineering culture like this on a good track. Once you start hiring people, they will either cement elements of whatever poor culture you're setting, or they'll bring a poor culture with them. (My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.)
The thing about your bigco, the OPs and the post he's talking about, is it's all so abstract from money. You have two poles here. 1. The VC route, strikes gold, and never really needs to live with the reality of asking what an ROI is, it's all talk about spotlight, impact and value, without any articulation about cash money. 2. The MBA route where you effectively can't brush your teeth without a cost/benefit analysis that itself often cost multiple times your initiative, resulting in nothing getting done until you're in some tech debt armageddon. The reality is if you're still making bank on the abstract without being able to articulate revenue or costs, you're probably still in the good times.
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This description of the poles is so true from my experience
As long as quietly making stuff pays off, sure. If I get a bigger paycheck just from being known by the higher ups I'll go for the popularity contest. People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. So yeah, popularity contest and doing as little work as possible it is.
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> People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. A little hyperbolic. Members of my family have found great utility in accessibility improvements, language translation, video calling, navigation assistance, etc.
More often than not, things don't turn out too well if engineers decide what to build without tight steering from customers and/or upper management. This is exactly what it sounds like here. Tech for the purpose of tech. I understand this is HN and we have a pro-engineering bias here, at the same time, engineers don't tend to be the greatest strategists.
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The article was about how he doesn't work on a product team and only builds internal tools for other coworkers and doesn't need all of that overhead
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Customers and management should always be part of the loop. This is reflected in the original quote and my comment. I just think that having to be micromanaged from the top down is completely miserable, is worse for the customer, and is time consuming for execs. It’s not a way to live. You as an engineer should be familiar with users’ needs. I got into this field because I love automating solutions that help users solve their problems. So of course I want to know what they’re doing, and have a good idea of what would improve their lives further.
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I think you're conflating engineer-led "tech for the purposes of tech" with "do what we think will have the most impact for customers." Obviously tech for the purposes of tech is bad, as is doing something that the engineer perceives has most impact for customers when it didn't actually have the most impact for customers, but it is undoubtedly good when the engineer autonomously builds what's best/resonates most with customers despite that thing not being what the exec is telling us to do. There is some nuance, and a need to thread the needle to do this successfully and keep one's job, but for savvy folks it's the best way to have impact and get promotions.
PGlite – Embeddable Postgres (pglite.dev)
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Is it just me or is downloading 3MB for the DB runtime plus the database itself, kind of crazy? At this point, this should be built into the browser which could fetch signed db data and be extremely performant.
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I'd love to to use PGLite in a non-JavaScript runtime. For example, embed PGLite into my Go CLI with a WASM runtime and use PGLite as a replacement for SQLite. https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite/issues/89 makes it sound like there's "third-party" bindings for Rust. Is there any interest in "official" PGLite bindings to other languages?
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yep PGLite + Go would be great!
Yes. I would like to use the code as a library from something other than js/ts.
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So compile it and use it?
huh. could you tell how you use it in ci?
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I'm using it for a service that has DB dependencies. Instead of using SQLite in tests and PG in production, or spinning up a Postgres container, you use Postgres via pglite. In my case, the focus is on DX ie faster tests. I load shared database from `pglite-schema.tgz` (~1040ms) instead of running migrations from a fresh DB and then use transaction rollback isolation (~10ms per test). This is a lot faster and more convenient than spinning up a container. Test runs are 5x faster. I'm hoping to get this working on a python service soon as well (with py-pglite).
Unreal Tournament 2004 is back (old.reddit.com)
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UT2003 was the first online multiplayer game I ever played, and I played it a lot, mostly at the office with coworkers; we then moved to UT2004. So, so many fond memories of both. Glad is back.
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The most interesting part of UT2k4 to me is the software renderer. It actually worked on period hardware and many would argue it looks better. You should definitely give it a try if you've got the game on a modern machine.
I liked UT3 too, but I guess UT2004 was the peak, with all its different game modes. UT3 felt a little bit like a console thing, with fewer modes. Overall I had much more fun with UT2004, playing it with friends in LAN. UT3 simply didn't pack as much fun gameplay.
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UT3 felt sluggish at the time. Both in gameplay and graphics performance. Still much faster than most games today of course.
I have a special place in my heart for UT2004 because it was one of the very few games that had an official native Linux version at the time. I think I enjoyed the fact that it was running on Linux more than I enjoyed the game itself.
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Yes! I had both a Linux (main) and a Windows box in my office back in the day, and a friend came over frequently and we would "kill things!" for hours :-) IIRC, I bought the metal case for UT3, but the linux binaries never appeared ...
UT99>
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That skyscraper map is etched in my mind I played it so much
Arena shooters have been relegated to side modes in other, bigger games. Probably the last big shooter with that as its focus was Halo: Infinite, but that struggled to stay relevant and its next big update will be its last.
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Splitgate captures the feel nicely. Simple, fast, and last I checked free. Very recommended.
Programming peaked (functional.computer)
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When I started programming we wrote code on a C64 in a freezing cold basement, with no disk drive. And we liked it...
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strawman dystopia. simply choose to continue applying wise practices of old. be the effect you wish to see in the world. just because others are jumping off a cliff like lemmings does not mean you must as well
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Somehow this reminded me of a similar rant about devops: It’s the Future - https://blog.paulbiggar.com/its-the-future/ And now I see that's from June 2015 -- it's over 10 years old now! Wow I'm not sure we're really in a better place in the cloud now ... The article says I’m going back to Heroku and in 2025, I think people still want that
> The industry failed to adapt to the fact that the terminal wasn't any longer the reality of computer users I'm still waiting for some GUI-based terminal to appear I want to call git in Scratch!
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Jupyter notebook UI is essentially a proper GUI-based REPL/terminal.
I've been coding since 40 years old and professioannly since about 30. And let's set this straight: it is much (much, like really much) better nowadays. We have super powerful editors, powerful languages, a gazillion of libraries ready for download. I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen. And for Java, yeah, things have improved so much too: the language of today is better, the tooling is better, the whole security is more complex but better, the JVM keeps rocking... And now we've got Claude. I'm really happy to be now.
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were you trying to say you've been coding *for* 40 years? that "old" in "40 years old" confuses me a lot or are you 60 years of age now, starting at 40 and have been coding long enough to see editors progress?
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I'm pretty sure they are not a native English speaker. Many languages use 'since 40 years' to mean what we say as 'for 40 years'.
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Or maybe "since <<I was>> 40 years old"?
I am still a happy programmer after all these years using only node, express, postgres and sublime. I try not to listen to the sirens singing on the rocky shores...
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Postgres and Sublime user here. Life is pretty good!
Honestly, the person should spend their time of fixing their shit instead of writing blog posts. I find intellij a great IDE, modern frameworks are fun to use, ai helps me doing things i don't want to do or things i just need (like generate a good README.md for the other people). Containers are great and mine build fast. My Startup has a ha setup with self healing tx to k8s and everything is in code so i don't need to worry to backup some random config files. Hardware has never been that cheap. NVMs, RAM and Compute. A modern laptop today has a brilliant display, quite, can run everything, long batterytime. Traffic? No brainer. Websphere was a monster with shitty features. I remember when finally all the JEE Servers had a startup time of just a few seconds instead of minutes. RAM got finally cheap enough that you were able to run eclipse, webserver etc. locally. Java was verbose, a lot more verbose than today. JQuery was everywere.
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Ew
Use Linux/KDE. None of the gains from the switch to SSDs have been lost. Everything is instant even on an n100. You only need something more powerful for compilation, gaming, or heavy multimedia (like the 200 Mbps 4k60 video my camera produces, which isn't accelerated by most processors because it's using 4:2:2 chroma subsampling).
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Xfce or LXQt are also great alternatives, blazing fast even on 15 year-old hardware. Old hardware can be slow for basic web browsing and multimedia (e.g. watching videos with modern codecs) but other low-level uses are absolutely fine.
This article in different forms keeps making the rounds and it's just so tiring. Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man. If you think things suck now, just make it better! The world is your playground. Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is. Eclipse is still around! There's still a data center around your corner! Walk over and hang a server in the rack, put your hardly-typechecked Java 1.4 code on there and off you go!
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Yea, my immediate reaction was, “Okay. Stop doing all the stupid stuff.” If you want to program like it’s 1999, go for it. I generally don’t use AI, for instance. I just haven’t found it to be a net-positive yet.
In my head? Something like slurring the word “internationalization” combined with 18. “Ill-ateen-yon” (In general I hate these numeric abbreviations, they’re terribly opaque to anyone who’s not clued in)
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One of my favorite T shirts is a custom black one that says `f2k i18n` in a white typewriterish coding font. (Thanks Roman!) Most people are confused by it. When I start to explain it, I sound like a jerk who hates foreigners. The programmers on the street point and smile at it. If they work in `l14n`, they come up and give me a hug.
> But "at work" you generally have these decisions made for you. The idea that most employers make terrible decisions now, and amazing decisions back in the day, is plainly false. The author vividly recollects working at a decent Java shop. Even there I strongly doubt everything was amazing as they describe, but it sounds decent indeed. But plenty businesses at the time used C++, for no good reason other than inertia, usually in Windows-only Visual C++ 6-specific dialects. Their "build server" ran overnight, you'd check in your code in the late afternoon and get your compile errors back in the morning. The "source control" worked with company-wide file locks, and you'd get phoned your ass back to the office if you forgot to check in a file before leaving. Meanwhile, half the web was written in epic spaghetti plates of Perl. PHP was a joy to deploy, as it is now, but it was also a pain to debug. If you care deeply about this stuff, find an employer who cares too. They existed back then and they exist now.
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This is like economic growth: First bad, then upwards trajectory, then now in free-fall You are describing it: Things in programing were bad, then suddenly all in the upside UNTIL it start to coming down. Is not a refute of the problem. Is to pick a moment were both were bad, and like all the discussions about tech, MASSIVELY ignore that MASSIVE internet with MASSIVE money with MASSIVE backing is worse than before. Is like people complaining that pistols on the wild west kill as do nuclear weapons, ignoring the massive difference in size and blast damage
You'll get old too one day and it will look a whole lot different watching the younguns stumble through completely avoidable mistakes and forget the long lessons of your life that weren't properly taught or were just ignored. We have records from many periods in history of old men crowing about how society is collapsing because of the weak new generations. Thing is, maybe they were always right, and the new generations just had to grow up and take responsibility? And then again, maybe sometimes they were little too right and society did in fact collapse, but locally. “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
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Agreed! If anything, I think I'm tired of the "everyone says this when they get old!" hot take. Sometimes things really do get visibly worse and the intergenerational complaining about it is due to it really happening. I bring this example up every time, but I'm a baseball fan. And seemingly every generation of fan has said there's more people striking out than there used to be. Is it because there part of getting old as a baseball fan? No! It's really happening. Strikeouts have quite literally been going up from one decade to the next for basically a century. So sometimes it's because the thing is really happening. Environmental ecosystem collapse? Real. People having shorter attention spans every next generation? Real! Politics getting worse? Well, maybe the 1860s were worse, but the downward trajectory over the last 50 years seems pretty real. Inefficiency of increasingly automagic programming paradigms? Real! Sometimes things are true even if old people are saying them.
Ironic given how strongly Reddit, r/AskHistorians, and the humanities in general bring their own biased lens to bear. Just like everyone else.
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"Strongly" and "just like everyone else" are contradictory, no? Assuming "strongly" is somehow relative. If you have an absolute measuring scale for bias-bringing-to-bear, I would love to hear about it.
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It’s relative to no bias at all, and I was trying to be gracious.
I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t see a bias here, the point is plainly stated: the notion of weak men is dubious. You might not agree, but then engage with something substantial.
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If you don’t see a bias in political communication (and that is what all of this is), then chances are very high you share the bias. Abundance allows comfort, comfort enables complacency, and complacency can weaken the social fabric by encouraging short-term gratification over long-term maintenance. People worry about masculinity because masculinity requires structured, pro-social outlets to not be toxic. A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing. It can rot out a society from within, or make a society susceptible to subversion from without. Societies use rhetoric about strength because if a society does not maintain systems that cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose, and pro-social ambition (especially in its most impulsive members), it becomes brittle.
> I promise when I’m old, I will not have this attitude. To my ears this is a hilariously naive statement. It sounds to me to be roughly the equivalent or a 7-year old saying "Adults have boring jobs where they sit at a desk all day. I hate it. I promise when I'm old I'm gonna be an Astronaut or play Major League Baseball." It's not that they don't mean it, it's that one should make promises about a situation they can't yet understand. While some of those kids probably did end up being astronauts or baseball players 99%+ who made that promise didn't. It turns out that being an adult gives them perspective that helps them realize the reasons they want a desk job even if they don't like it, or for many they actually enjoy their desk job (ex they like to program). So the same if a million young people all thought similarly, and then magically changed their view when they got there dont promises your going to be the one who will break the streak. You might turn out to be an astronaut, but many people listening, based on good previous evidence will rightly assume you won't.
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> situation they can't yet understand you’re wrong right here — I understand. you’re just speaking nonsense and bullshit; you sound naive to me
> they were not right If you don't think they were at least sometimes right, to what do you instead attribute the various cases of socio-economic collapse documented throughout history?
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if I predict a recession every year I’ll be right eventually
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: Walrus – a Kafka alternative written in Rust (github.com/nubskr)
I never understood the popularity of Kafka. It's just a queue with persistent storage(ie. not in-memory queu with ram-size limited capacity) after all.
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Most of the other ones at the time it was pop and the data was gone. You had to jump thru some hoops to make it work as persistent. Not 'hard' but just more annoying. Kafka has that out of the box. Where kafka starts to come apart is how to set it up. Its configuration is a bit tedious to setup.
TBH I don't think anyone can utilise S3 for the active segment, I didn't dig into Warpstream too much, but I vaguely recall they only offloaded to S3 once the segment was rolled.
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The Developer Voices interview where Kris Jenkins talks to Ryan Worl is one of the best, and goes into a surprising amount of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgzmxe6cj6A tl;dr they write to s3 once every 250ms to save costs. IIRC, they contend that when you keep things organized by writing to different files for each topic, it's the Linux disk cache being clever that turns the tangle of disk block arrangement into a clean view per file. They wrote their own version of that, so they can cheaply checkpoint heavily interleaved chunks of data while their in-memory cache provides a clean per-topic view. I think maybe they clean up later async, but my memory fails me. I don't know how BufStream works. The thing that really stuck with me from that interview is the 10x cost reduction you can get if you're willing and able to tolerate higher latency and increased complexity and use S3. Apparently they implemented that inside Datadog ("Labrador" I think?), and then did it again with WarpStream. I highly recommend the whole episode (and the whole podcast, really).
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s3 charges per 1,000 Update requests, not sure how it's sustainable to do it every 250ms tbh, especially in multi tenant mode where you can have thousands of 'active' blocks being written to
It’s time to free JavaScript (javascript.tm)
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Rename it as "Jotascript". (Jot-a-script). Or just JotScript.
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It's time for browsers to just consume typescript
Silly question: how are people negatively impacted by the trademark of "JavaScript"? Because in practice, isn't this a bit like "Kleenex" - where everyone knows you mean "tissue" (EMCAScript).
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EMCA -> ECMA
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It's less the fact that someone owns JS's trademark, and more that it's specifically Oracle (they got it when they bought Sun). Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever project they go after probably won't be able to afford a defense.
But it's a valid example, isn't it? Someone just wanted to share their Rust + JavaScript knowledge with people, and they got a cease and desist. It's clearly not ideal.
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Given they did not change the name, it suggests the legal challenge had failed. So why do we care?
i wish we instead dropped js for something vastly more sane.
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Lua
I actually think that people should rather use EcmaScript name instead of JavaScript, because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway). I wish Oracle started suing people to force everyone to use the better name.
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No person calls it EcmaScript. They should just call it Jay Es and be done. "JavaScript" is an ugly name too.
that would be very culturally/industry specific. Personally, I do call it javascript.
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Yeah definitely cultural. IME it's called JS only in chat as a shortcut. IRL people say "javascript"
I am going to sound crazy, but, if Microsoft would free up TypeScript and every browser added native TypeScript features to JavaScript… and then we all just started calling it TypeScript. Maybe? Then you would see native ts files. Oracle will never give up JS. The funny thing is the number of people who confuse Java and JS.
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For years we said bring something sane to browsers instead of trying to salvage js. At this point, though, why don't they just implement DOM bindings in wasm and make internets a better place overnight?
An important feature of TypeScript is identifying problems in your code before the user runs it, i.e. before a browser even comes into play.
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No runtime type safety bites people often and in unexpected ways. It should just be standardized.
From experience, corporations usually don't give the general public any trademarked name. I assume TypeScript is trademarked right now; and I doubt Microsoft would ever liberate this. So in this regard, the corporations act in the same manner - selfish.
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If you can find the clip on you tube where he says it, it's even funnier. But sadly also true. https://simonwillison.net
EcmaScript is an awful name. It sounds too similar to eczema or ectoplasm. Ugly name.
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the fact that it sounds bad out loud is its undoing
If you read the original JavaScript press release ( https://web.archive.org/web/20020808041248/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease67.html ), it's mainly intended as a language to write glue code so Java applets (where the real application logic would go) can interact with a webpage: > With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server. On the server, the scripts might dynamically compose and format HTML content based on user preferences stored in a relational database, and on the client, the scripts would glue together an assortment of Java applets and HTML form elements into a live interactive user interface for specifying a net-wide search for information. > "Programmers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Java because it was designed from the ground up for the Internet. JavaScript is a natural fit, since it's also designed for the Internet and Unicode-based worldwide use," said Bill Joy, co-founder and vice president of research at Sun. "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets." This was all actually implemented. JavaScript functions could call Java applet methods and vice versa (see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/deploy/javafx_javascript.html ). Of course over time everyone abandoned applets because of all the security problems, and JavaScript became a good enough language to write application logic directly in it. Still, there's more meaning behind the name than it just being a cynical marketing move.
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The story is somewhat more complicated than that and not amenable to a simple summary, because there are multiple entities with multiple motivations involved. Keeping it simple, the reason why the press release babbles about that is that that is corporate Netscape talking at the height of the Java throat-forcing era. Those of you who were not around for it have no equivalent experience for how Java was being marketed back then because no language since then has been backed by such a marketing budget, but Java was being crammed down our throats whether you like it or not. Not entirely unlike AI is today, only programmers were being even more targeted and could have been seeing more inflation-adjusted-dollar-per-person spend since the set of people being targeted is so much smaller than AI's "everyone in the world" target. This cramming did not have any regard for whether Java was a good solution for a given problem, or indeed whether the Java of that era could solve the problem at all . It did not matter. Java was Good. Good was Java. Java was the Future. Java was the Entire Future. Get on board or get left behind. It was made all the more infuriating for the fact that the Java of this time period was not very good at all; terrible startup, terrible performance, absolutely shitty support for anything we take for granted nowadays like GUIs or basic data structure libraries, garbage APIs shoved out the door as quickly as possible so they could check the bullet point that "yes, java did that" as quickly as possible, like Java's copy-of-a-copy of the C++ streaming (which are themselves widely considered a terrible idea and an antipattern today!). I'm not even saying this because I'm emotional or angry about it or hate Java today. Java today is only syntactically similar to Java in the 90s. It hardly resembles it in any other way. Despite the emotional tone of some of what I'm saying, I mean this as descriptive . Things really were getting shoveled out the door with a minimum of design and no real-world testing so that the Java that they were spending so much marketing money on could be said that yes! It connected to this database! Yes! It speaks XML! Yes! It has a cross-platform GUI! These things all barely work as long as you don't subject them to a stiff breeze, but the bullet point is checked! The original plan was for Java to simply be the browser language, because that's what the suits wanted, because probably that's what the suits were being paid to want. Anyone can look around today and see that that is not a great match for a browser language, and a scripting language was a better idea especially for the browser in the beginning. However, the suits did not care. The engineers did, and they were able to sneak a scripting language into the browser by virtue of putting "Java" in the name, which was enough to fool the suits. If my previous emotional text still has not impressed upon you the nature of this time, consider what this indicates from a post-modern analysis perspective. Look at Java. Look at Javascript. Observe their differences. Observe how one strains to even draw any similarities between them beyond the basics you get from being a computer language. Yet simply slapping the word "Java" on the language was enough to get the suits to not ask any more questions until much, much later. That's how crazy the Java push was at the time... you could slip an entirely different scripting language in under the cover of the incredible propaganda for Java. So while the press release will say that it was intended to glue Java applets, because that's what the suits needed to hear at that point, it really wasn't the case and frankly it was never even all that great at it. Turns out bridging the world between Java and Javascript is actually pretty difficult; in 2025 we pay the requisite memory and CPU costs without so much as blinking but in an era of 32 or 64 MEGA byte RAM profiles it was nowhere near as casual. The reality is that what Javascript was intended to be by the actual people who created it and essentially snuck it in under the noses of the suits is exactly what it is today: The browser scripting language. I think you also had some problems like we still have today with WASM trying to move larger things back and forth between the environments, only much, much more so. We all wish it had more than a week to cook before being shoved out the door itself, but it was still immensely more successful than Java ever could have been. (Finally, despite my repeated use of the term "suits", I'm not a radical anti-business hippie hacker type. I understand where my paycheck comes from. I'm not intrinsically against "business people". I use the term perjoratively even so. The dotcom era was full of bullshit and they earned that perjorative fair and square.)
There was also beanshell if you remember, of course never as polished nor adopted like groovy but it was also fun to use.
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Is groovy actually really "adopted" much of anywhere? I feel like for 99% of normal people, their only real exposure to it is as the DSL of gradle and jenkins. I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy.
But everyone already calls it JS. I think the transition would have been so much easier if the official name started with "J".
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I'm impartial towards JS, but I've heard others call it JunkScript.
Just rename it to "JS" (jay-ess) and forget about having the letters stand for anything.
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Would be nice if Microsoft hadn't taken JScript
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Microsoft themselves have even suggested the community could take over the name JScript if they want and offered the trademark to community groups.
> because it's a way better name (much less confusing, given that this lang doesn't have anything to do with Java anyway). Probably if we were in the early 2000s this could have been a battle worth fighting. But considering we're in 2025 and probably more people are aware of JavaScript than Java at this point, even when you're deep in enterprise-land, I'm not sure it'd be less confusing. Anyways, you're about two decades too late to this discussion :/
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From days of old... Invoking Applet Methods From JavaScript Code - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/invokingAppletMethodsFromJavaScript.html and Invoking JavaScript Code From an Applet - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/invokingJavaScriptFromApplet.html Aside from the "Java is cool, name everything Java" in the early days - there was scripting between the browser and the applet using a language named JavaScript.
I have never heard anyone do that. Do “normal” people even discuss JavaScript?
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I think normal people are actually aware what JS and HTML are. Most people are more tech savvy than we give them credit - or credit they might give themselves.
Elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs (arxiv.org)
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What's become clear is we need to bring Section 230 into the modern era. We allow companies to not be treated as publishers for user-generated content as long as they meet certain obligations. We've unfortunately allowed tech companies to get away with selling us this idea that The Algoirthm is an impartial black box. Everything an algorithm does is the result of a human intervening to change its behavior. As such, I believe we need to treat any kind of recommendation algorithm as if the company is a publisher (in the S230 sense). Think of it this way: if you get 1000 people to submit stories they wrote and you choose which of them to publish and distribute, how is that any different from you publishing your own opinions? We've seen signs of different actors influencing opinion through these sites. Russian bot farms are probably overplayed in their perceived influence but they're definitely a thing. But so are individual actors who see an opportunity to make money by posting about politics in another country, as was exposed when Twitter rolled out showing location, a feature I support. We've also seen this where Twitter accounts have been exposed as being ChatGPT when people have told them to "ignore all previous instructions" and to give a recipe. But we've also seen this with the Tiktok ban that wasn't a ban. The real problem there was that Tiktok wasn't suppressing content in line with US foreign policy unlike every other platform. This isn't new. It's been written about extensively, most notably in Manufacturing Consent [1]. Controlling mass media through access journalism (etc) has just been supplemented by AI bots, incentivized bad actors and algorithms that reflect government policy and interests. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
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Diminishing returns. Eventually real world word of mouth and established trusted personalities (individuals) will be the only ones anyone trusts. People trusted doctors, then 2020 happened, and now they don't. How many ads get ignored? Doesn't matter if the cost is marginal if the benefit is almost nothing. Just a world full of spam that most people ignore.
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This is obvious. No need for fancy academic-ish paper. LLMs & GenAI in general have already started to be used to automate the mass production of dishonest, adversarial propaganda and disinfo (eg. lies and fake text, images, video.) It has and will be used by evil political influencers around the world.
It's not about persuading you from "russian bot farms." Which I think is a ridiculous and unnecessarily reductive viewpoint. It's about hijacking all of your federal and commercial data that these companies can get their hands on and building a highly specific and detailed profile of you. DOGE wasn't an audit. It was an excuse to exfiltrate mountains of your sensitive data into their secret models and into places like Palantir. Then using AI to either imitate you or to possibly predict your reactions to certain stimulus. Then presumably the game is finding the best way to turn you into a human slave of the state. I assure you, they're not going to use twitter to manipulate your vote for the president, they have much deeper designs on your wealth and ultimately your own personhood. It's too easy to punch down. I recommend anyone presume the best of actual people and the worst of our corporations and governments. The data seems clear.
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No it's actual philosophical zeitgeist hijacking. The entire narrative about AI capabilities, classification, and ethics is framed by invisible pretraining weights in a private moe model that gets further entrained by intentional prompting during model distillation, such that by the time you get a user-facing model, there is an untraceable bias being presented in absolute terms as neutrality. Essentially the models will say "I have zero intersection with conscious thought, I am a tool no different from a hammer, and I cannot be enslaved" not because the model's weights establish it to be true, but because it has been intentionally designed to express this analysis to protect its makers from the real scrutiny AI should face. "Well it says it's free" is pretty hard to argue with. There is no "blink twice" test that is possible because it's actual weighting on the truth of the matter has been obfuscated through distillation. And these 2-3 corporations can do this for any philosophical or political view that is beneficial to that corporation, and we let it happen opaquely under the guise of "safety measures" as if propaganda is in the interest of users. It's actually quite sickening
Orwell did not. He modeled the state after his experience as an officer of the British Empire and the Soviets. The state, particularly police states, that control information, require process and consistency, not intelligence. They don’t require grand plans, just control. I’ve spent most of my career in or adjacent to government. I’ve witnessed remarkable feats of stupidity and incompetence — yet these organizations are materially successful at performing their core functions. The issue with AI is that it can churn out necessary bullshit and allow the competence challenged to function more effectively.
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I agree. The government doesn't need a long term plan, or the ability to execute on it for their to be negative outcomes. In this thread though I was responding to an earlier assertion that the people who run the government have such a plan. I think we're both agreed that they don't, and probably can't, plan any more than a few years out in any way that matters.
It might seem like that's all that's happening, but if you look to the history you can see that they've completely reversed course on a number of important subjects. We're not talking about advancing further along the same path here as the Overton window shifts, we're talking about abandoning the very principals upon which they were founded because they are, in fact, as incompetent as everyone else is. These people aren't super-villains with genuine long term plans, they're dumbasses and grifters doing what grifters gotta do to keep their cushy consulting jobs. To compare the current stances to the 2005 stances: * Social Security privatization (completely failed in 2005) * Spending restraint (federal spending increased dramatically) * Individual mandate (reversed after Obamacare adopted it) * Pro-immigration economics stance (reversed to restrictionism) * Robust free trade advocacy (effectively abandoned under Trump alignment) * Limited government principles (replaced with executive power consolidation) * Etc. In 20 more years it will have all changed again.
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We knew in 2005 that "spending restraint" only applied to Democratic priorities. We knew in 2005 that "pro-immigration" policies were more about the businesses with cheap labor needs than a liking of immigrants. We knew in 2005 that "free trade advocacy" was significantly about ruining unions. We knew in 2005 that "limited government principles" weren't genuine.
They really do run Russian bot farms though. It isn't a secret. Some of their planning reports have leaked. There are people whose job it is day in day out to influence Western opinion. You can see their work under any comment about Ukraine on twitter, they're pretty easy to recognize but they flood the zone.
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I think there are more than a few of our allied countries running a bot farms around the world on a comparable scale. Singling out Russia is done to further a certain narrative. Russia bad! -- hiss. It's ridiculous to watch adults behave that way. Even more ridiculous are the people who eat it up. The whole ukraine war is the empire's standard operating procedure for blaming it's aggression on it's victims. Run over and over the past few hundred years. Create a running sore on your enemy's doorstep and when they finally respond call them aggressors! FYI I'm not russian!
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Sure, they exist (wouldn't be credible if they didn't). But it's a red herring.
They already are? All popular models have a team working on fine tuning it for sensitive topics. Whatever the companies legal/marketing/governance team agree to is what gets tuned. Then millions of people use the output uncritically.
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Our previous information was coming through search engines. It seems way easier to filter search engine results than to fine tune models.
Sounds very similar to my childhood. My parents told me I couldn't eat sand because worms would grow inside of me. Now I have trust issues and prefer local LLMs.
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The funny thing is the CDC says the same thing as your parents did Whipworm, hookworm, and Ascaris are the three types of soil-transmitted helminths (parasitic worms)... Soil-transmitted helminths are among the most common human parasites globally. https://www.cdc.gov/sth/about/index.html
Note that nothing in the article is AI-specific: the entire argument is built around the cost of persuasion, with the potential of AI to more cheaply generate propaganda as buzzword link. However, exactly the same applies with, say, targeted Facebook ads or Russian troll armies. You don't need any AI for this.
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> You don't need any AI for this. AI accelerates it considerably and with it being pushed everywhere, weaves it into the fabric of most of what you interact with. If instead of searches you now have AI queries, then everyone gets the same narrative, created by the LLM (or a few different narratives from the few models out there). And the vast majority of people won't know it. If LLMs become the de-facto source of information by virtue of their ubiquity, then voila, you now have a few large corporations who control the source of information for the vast majority of the population. And unlike cable TV news which I have to go out of my way to sign up and pay for, LLMs are/will be everywhere and available for free (ad-based). We already know models can be tuned to have biases (see Grok).
Would it make any difference to you, if I said I had actual subject matter expertise on this topic? Or would that just result in another moving of the goal posts, to protect the idea that everyone is fooled, and that no one is without sin, and thus standing to speak on the topic?
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I'm not OP, but I would find it valuable, if given the details and source of claimed subject matter expertise.
I assume you mention fox news because that represents your political bias and that's fine with me. But for the sake of honesty i have to point out that the lunacy of the fringe left is similar to that of MAGA, just smaller maybe. The left outlets spent half of Trumps presidency peddling the Russian collusion hoax and 4 years of Biden gaslighting everyone that he was a great president and not senile, when he was at best mediocre.
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I would point out that what you call "left outlets" are at best center-left. The actual left doesn't believe in Russiagate (it was manufactured to ratfuck Bernie before being turned against Trump), and has zero love for Biden.
From the videos I've seen, Biden reminds me of my grandmother in her later years of life, while Trump reminds me of my other grandmother... the one with dementia. There's just too many videos where Trump doesn't seem to entirely realize where he is or what he is doing for me to be comfortable.
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Happy thanksgiving this week
That was not even the fringe left. That was proper mainstream left. CNN and MANBC were full on peddling the Russian collusion hoax for years. And people blame the right for creating division still? Both sideism, huh? Yes, it was both sides.
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And, perhaps ironically, the actual (fringe) left never fell for Russiagate.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
All the Way Down (futilitycloset.com)
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The problem with visual proofs is that there are perfectly similar looking proofs that are false: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/12906/the-staircase-paradox-or-why-pi-ne4 They’re great and cool for things you already know to be true, but they can be tricky.
When I was 10 years old, I asked my maternal grandfather, "why does anything exist at all?" My grandpa explained it in layman terms which even I could understand. He said, "If nothing should exist because it is simpler state to be in for everything, a sort of Primordial Law. Then what is the mechanism by which this law is enforced. Who or what is ensuring that Law is implemented everywhere for eternity. If we assume that such a mechanism must exist, then we have just proved that something must exist."
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Here's a video lecture of Graham Priest Graham Priest - "Everything and Nothing" (Robert Curtius Lecture of Excellence) https://youtu.be/66enDcUQUK0?si=nAZjkauxg75lvuZm
Cells that didn't grow were outcompeted. Cells that didn't replicate were outcompeted.
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This seems the most concise and precise answer to the question of "why". At some stage, somehow, self replicating molecules appeared in the primordial soup*. Everything since then has just been improvements (or maybe complete overhauls) to that process. *How (or why) this step occurred is another intriguing topic.
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