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US Supreme Court agrees to hear case challenging birthright citizenship (bbc.com)
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This is madness.
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The precursor to this case is Trump v. CASA[0], which arose from injunctions blocking the executive order banning birthright citizenship. The case made it to the supreme court on the emergency docket. The court did not address the merits of the case (i.e. is the ban on birthright citizenship constitutional), rather they heard an argument against universal injunctions and the authority of a judge to block executive order. The court judged against universal injunctions. Basically the EO stands. Subsequently, the plaintiffs forced a certified class and sought a class-wide injunction. This case is called Trump v. Barbara. SCOTUS has agreed to hear the case on the question of the constitutionality of a ban on birthright citizenship. [0] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/trump-v-casa-inc/ EDIT: The Trump v. CASA opinion handed a win to the executive to issues orders without universal injunctions blocking the order immediately. My hot take is that this was part of the original strategy. Not sure how the court will land on the current question at hand.
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Citizenship by birth is an obvious legal bug and democratic vulnerability.
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So obvious that you have to make a throwaway account just to say it?
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Exactly. America for native Americans and white Americans with European ancestry can go back to Europe. Like that?
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Lol I'd love to live in Ireland, it's beautiful there, but I don't think they'd let me.
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"For nearly 160 years, the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution has established the principle that anyone born in the country is a US citizen, with exceptions for children born to diplomats and foreign military forces." I was actually unaware of this. That does seem to be a wedge to maybe support the issue. I'm not arguing one way or another for or against, just an interesting opening I had not seen before.
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It's tricky - the 14th amendment was passed following reconstruction as a way of ensuring that freed slaves couldn't be denied citizenship. Much later, the Wong Kim Ark case argued that it should cover the children of immigrants, and the supreme court agreed. Quite a while after that, the Wong Kim Ark decision was interpreted to include children of non-citizens as well, and _that's_ what's never been tested in court until now.
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Haven't heard of this either, obviously not a topic I am up to date on. I'll look into it, appreciate the pointer.
SpaceX in Talks for Share Sale That Would Boost Valuation to $800B (wsj.com)
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Probably a good idea to do it now, because Trump has made sure SpaceX is about to have yet another European, a Chinese and an Indian competitor soon. 2 out of 3 have already demonstrated landing a rocket, as has Blue origin in the US with the New Glenn launch + landing. Plus a few countries are thinking about it, at least Switzerland, South Korea and Israel if you can believe it. Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor (by approving the feature on "old" satellites), and China is already doing launches and theirs should be at least partially operational. Russia claims to have a working Starlink competitor and India is building one. Oh and as for profitability ... not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium, but that was far from the only attempt+bankruptcy building Space internet. Well, the economics are discussed in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com "We lose on every sale but make it up on volume" style move. So yes, high time to sell the stock indeed. Oh, and Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars and will be the first private company getting a payload to Mars soon (the "ESCAPADE" mission). As in payload is on the way and there's no way SpaceX can catch up anymore. In fact it's pretty tough finding another rocket manufacturer that has not launched a mission to Mars. Boeing has launched payloads to Mars. Blue origin has. Arianespace has. Russia has. Not especially economically relevant* but worth mentioning. Economics are not what determines either rocket building or launches and hasn't ever done so. Which means rocket launches are cheaper than they can be in private hands. * what is economically relevant though is that SpaceX is not even saving the US government money. The US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program. Everyone always makes the point that SpaceX is cheaper than SLS. However ... this fails to correctly compare prices for the only options the US government has: Option 1: pay for SLS Option 2: pay for SLS and SpaceX. So really the price of SpaceX rocket launches doesn't even matter, not using SpaceX will be the cheapest option because math.
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> Plus Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars What about that Tesla that regularly crosses Mars orbit? Ok, it's not on Mars, but it was just about calculating an orbit. They could have smashed it on Mars as well.
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Would think that blue origin and project kuiper launching for amazon that would put downward pressure on SpaceX, as they are about to have a huge amount of competition for starlink, as Amazon has massive distribution advantages - wouldn't be surprised introductory bundling with Prime etc...
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What are you joking? Amazon is super far behind and unlikely to be able to launch its satellites in time to meet its FCC licensing requirements. They won't even be only for 24+ months. Meanwhile Starlink is growing very quickly. Amazon is not a competitor until they actually have a viable product which they may never achieve.
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> as they are about to have a huge amount of competition for starlink Don't forget about IRIS2!
Given Musk's pay package that requires getting Tesla's valuation to $8 trillion, isn't it obvious that he should absorb all of his holdings (SpaceX, X, xAI) into Tesla?
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That pay package was a reaction to the large problems he is having competing with ESG forces for control of the company. Keeping SpaceX private is another. He described it as trying to keep the robot army he is building out of enemy hands.
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What does "ESG forces" add to the discussion other than culture-war flaming?
If SpaceX doesn't get Starship operational soon, they're going to lose their advantage to Blue Origin and probably at least one of the several Chinese rocket companies.
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I don’t see how. SpaceX is still very agile and has the most reliable launch platform
Even without Starship Falcon Heavy is still competitive with New Glenn, and nobody is anywhere close to competing with Starlink (Amazon is still far behind, as is ASTS). And if Starship works SpaceX will still be in the lead for a long, long time. IMO the only remaining unanswered question for the Starship program is the reusability of the heat shield. There's no reason to believe any other part of it can't work.
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New Glenn has an edge over Falcon Heavy and possibly over Starship when it comes to payload volume.
I always had the impression that the propellant transfer was the harder question than the heat shield. They have done a transfer demo from one internal tank to another, but they still need to test from one ship to another ship. I only casually follow the news from r/spacex, but prop transfer is what I see generate the most discussion. It’s a hard requirement for all deep space missions. Where the heat shield could be refurbished between launches.
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Deep space missions yes. But Starlink isn't deep space - and neither is the vast majority of commercial payloads. Propellant transfer is relevant because it's vital for sending entire Starships to Moon and Mars - which are the exciting Starship missions. This includes Artemis. But commercially? Artemis contract isn't even a large part of SpaceX's revenue.
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Propellant transfer isn’t necessary for starlink launches.
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The heat shield may be a "we don't know how to do the physics" problem, where propellant transfer is a "complex integration of well understood components" problem. If the heat shield requires per launch refurbishment it cripples the colonization dream.
Why we built Lightpanda in Zig (lightpanda.io)
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I'm starting to form an image of the zig community: people that like to write and reason, nice typography, videogame inspired visuals.
Years ago, when I initially picked up Rust, I loved it. It does a lot of things right. At the same time, though, I knew there was a possibility of it going wrong in two opposite directions: 1. Developers balked at being required to take on the cognitive load required to allow GC-less memory management 2. Developers wore their ability to take on that cognitive load as a badge of honor, despite it not being in their best interest I eventually came to the decision to stop developing in Rust, despite its popularity. It is really cool that its creators pulled it off. It was quite an achievement, given how different it was when it came out. I think that if I had to implement a critical library I would consider using Rust for it, but as a general programming language I want something that allows me to focus my mental facilities on the complexities of the actual problem domain, and I felt that it was too often too difficult to do that with Rust.
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What are you developing in?
has there ever been a project that became popular and/or successful because of its programming language? does it really matter to the end user what language it's in if it works well?
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Yes. I don't think Linux would have succeeded if written in a language other than C. Today is a different story. Yes it matters to me as an end user if my web browser is more or less likely to have vulnerabilities in it. Choice of programming language has an impact on that. It doesn't have to be Rust, I'd use a browser written in Pony. If I were making something that had to be low-level and not have security bugs, my statement would be: > I’m not smart enough to build a big multi-threaded project in a manual memory-managed language that doesn't have vulnerabilities. I want help from the language & compiler. The size and longevity of the team matters a lot too. The larger it gets the more problematic it is to keep the bugs out.
There's a big part of me that agrees with your implied conclusion, that it shouldn't matter. On the other hand, I've found that core decisions like language ecosystem choice can be a good leading indicator of other seemingly unrelated decisions. When I see someone choose a tool that I think is extremely well suited for a purpose, it makes me curious to see what else we agree on. The Oven team, the ones who created the Bun runtime, is a good example for me. I think Zig is probably the best compromise out there right now, for my sensibilities. The Oven folks, who chose to use Zig to implement Bun, _also_ made a lot of product decisions I really agree with.
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This is one of my assessments/red-flags when interviewing with a company. Their tech stack/choices is a reflection of their engineering culture. If they chose Zig or Rust, I'd want to hear why that was a better choice than using a gc'd language.
The language tends to affect everything, but to give a quick Developer example there’s Zed. Developers use it because it’s fast. Same with Sublime Text. Your criticism makes more sense with products targeting non-technical users though. But IMO tech choices have cascading effects. I won’t buy a vehicle if the infotainment software sucks, and that’s the 2nd largest purchase I’ll ever make.
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I hate all infotainment systems, so I’m still on a car from 22 years ago — with no screen and ratting me out on how I drive to unknown entities. If I had the optional GPS screen from 22yr ago, I think I would have ripped it out and replaced it a bunch of times or just bought a new car. I’m curious to try the new iDrive 10. We will see…
Just Zed (if AI features are a requirement) as far as I know. But to elaborate, they’ve found a niche simply by using Rust and rendering the GUI in a performant way on the GPU. I’m not saying performance is the only thing, but for a chunk of people it is something they care about.
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Good performance is a strong proxy for making other good software decisions. You generally don't get good performance if you haven't thought things through or planned for features in the long term.
Wall Street races to protect itself from AI bubble (rollingout.com)
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Is there a web that calculates implicit credit ratings of the hyperscaler companies?
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https://archive.ph/kwD1t > Banks are lending unprecedented sums to technology giants building artificial intelligence infrastructure while quietly using derivatives to shield themselves from potential losses. And who is their counterparty? Aliens? What a dumb click-bait article.
Don't worry, once the Wall Street tap runs dry, the U.S. government will be more than happy to step in and bail out the AI corps. at the taxpayer's expense.
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Make America Bankrupt Again!?
There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S. Some talk about how China has some strategic issues, such as do they have a reliable supply of food and energy? (Zeihan etc.) I guess the energy portion is being solved with renewables. And I guess if they solve the issue of demographic collapse with robots and AI, that's something. But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards? This question is also becoming a problem post-Trump immigration ban in the U.S. Who knows what the U.S.'s demographics are going to look like now? Trump inherited a U.S. with some of the best demographics of all nations on the planet, especially in the West. And he managed to throw that in the garbage.
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> I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China What kind of sources are you looking for? The Five Year Plans are the best source of truth for what they are planning on doing nationwide. The annual Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development and China Statistical Yearbook from the NBS contain statistics on how that implementation is going. Then every year the NDRC delivers the Report on the Implementation of the Plan for National Economic and Social Development and on the Draft Plan to the National People’s Congress which packages up the statistics on how the plan is progressing.
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> contain statistics on how that implementation is going Are those statistics reliable? In the US there are often good alternative sources for data: the discussions about unemployment numbers have been interesting (e.g. after private ADP numbers released). https://seekingalpha.com/article/4850656-jobs-data-from-alternative-sources-may-drive-feds-next-move The lies in the Soviet 5 year production stats were relentlessly mocked in 1984.
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There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S. I've always assumed that there is such a source of truth, but that I had never heard of it, wouldn't have access to it, and couldn't afford it if I did. Reading a few tweets from Musk was all it took to correct that misapprehension. It's increasingly clear that nobody at any level of play knows jack shit about anything.
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> There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S. Isn't this simply the answer? That what's going on is gaslighting of the public and that there are people behind the scenes and they don't want hoi polloi to know what they're up to? This geo-politics (or politics) talk is 'intellectual' men's astrology. When a woman asks me my astrological sign, I know she's a deeply unserious person. When a man says 'do they have a reliable supply of food and energy'...
Shingles vaccination prevented or delayed dementia (cell.com)
this is nice side benefit. but when you hit 50 you want the shingrex (two shots) vax ASAP. you def do NOT want shingles.
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My PCP told me to hold off until late 50s on the argument that there's no indication for boosters, and if I were to live a long, full life that the protection would be waning as I enter my more vulnerable years. I understand the argument and it makes sense on paper, but this doesn't seem to be a general sentiment.
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My PCP made the same argument (which I wrote much less clearly than you did in another comment). My sister-in-law had it last year (at 43) and she was miserable. Rolling the dice on this scares the willies out of me.
> We should be vaccinating kids against all of them rather than sending them to Chickenpox parties. This has been the standard of care ever since the vaccine became available in the 90s (US). The origin of the "parties" was that first-time chickenpox was perceived to be less harmful in children than adults prior to the vaccine, so you wanted to make sure people's first exposure wasn't in adulthood.
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Unfortunately that is not the case for me in the Netherlands. No Chickenpox vaccination is offered and making sure kids get it early is still considered the right way to do immunization. The idea being that it's better for people to get it as kids, because if you give them vaccines as kids you'll have to give them boosters as adults. Whereas a latent disease will provide a lifetime of immunity.
We vaccinate for many of those already. The vast majority of seniors have the shingles virus already. Only a small percentage would likely have dementia not linked to another likely cause. Just as HPV only causes cancer in some individuals. It wouldn't surprise me if it turns out all these tie back to immune dysregulation and are just triggered by different viruses in different people.
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For Multiple Sclerosis multiple studies have shown it is strongly correlated with an EBV infection and only an EBV infection. After the infection it just becomes a genetic lottery with a really shitty prize.
I've speculated for a while that what he does is so over the top and frequently self-destructive that I wonder if he's actually trying to get kicked out. But while I agree that there's a chance, I think it's vanishingly small. I do hope that the dems can take the house in the midterms and put the brakes on the massive expansion in executive power.
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The cynic in me things the Dems take the legislative branch next year, curtail executive power but are unable to undo anything and then win a massively nerfed executive position in 2028.
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I'm with you. I also think it would not take long before we all found out that the Supreme Court only embraces limitless executive power when the office is held by their party. We've already seen evidence of that, Trump has succeeded using arguments that Biden failed with just a couple years ago. Right about the time 2028 rolls around, the Supreme Court will suddenly decide that they've gone too far and need to reel in an out-of-control executive branch.
I looked into a chickenpox vaccine a while back, but it turns out the current varicella vaccine uses a live virus. So if you're fortunate enough not to have been exposed to chickenpox, taking the vaccine could put it into your body. The Shingles vaccine, on the other hand, has no live virus at all. But you can't get that til 50. ETA: Since someone downvoted this: I'm not criticizing vaccination, and you should absolutely get your kids vaccinated! But for someone (like me) at the age where you've seen friends with Shingles (ugh), adding live chickenpox virus to your body feels like a risky idea, even before this news.
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I don't understand this kind of reasoning. You don't think that the 100s of PhDs that worked on this would have accounted for the riskiness of adding a live chickenpox virus vs not adding it? People need to start trusting experts more and do less of "common sense" over-thinking imo.
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The age gating of needing to be 50 years old to get the shingles vaccine is really obnoxious. I had shingles outbreaks twice in my life, one in my early 30's and once at 48. Obviously, both before 50 years old. I had to argue with my doctor to prescribe the Shingles vaccine at 49. And when I had it in my 30s, nobody even bothered to give me any antivirals, which did exist at the time, or nerve pain relief. After I had the shingles vaccine, nerve pain that I'd been suffering with every time I got the slightest little allergy or cold suddenly disappeared, and I haven't had it since more than a year later. If you are under 50 years old, and had chickenpox, and especially if you've had one outbreak of shingles, force your doctors to prescribe the vaccine. It costs $100-$200 without insurance coverage, and it is worth it.
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I'm 48, in the US, and had chicken pox as a child. After my 43 y/o sister-in-law had a debilitating shingles outbreak last year I asked my PCP about the vaccine. He stated that he was wary to prescribe it to be. His reasoning was something like: There was a previous shingles vaccine that didn't work very well. It was found that it didn't offer long-term protection and the protection could not be improved with a booster. The current vaccine is still new and the long-term protection and ability to be extended by a booster are unknown. Since most of the worst outcomes of shingles correlate to old age it makes sense to defer the vaccination hedging against the failure of the vaccine to provide long-term protection and to allow more time to elapse to learn more about how the vaccine works long-term. I haven't looked into the veracity of any of his reasoning, but I am willing defer to his expertise and bide my time. My sister-in-law had a really bad experience, and I remember my grandfather having a terrible experience when I was a child. I'm definitely fearful and would like to prevent it.
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That's your reasoned choice. I wasn't given that opportunity to make that choice. Most people aren't given that choice. That's my complaint. Especially when the delta is less than one year. That's just quibbling.
More specifically, it's highly doctor-dependent. The FDA hasn't approved shingrix for people under 50; some doctors are willing to prescribe it without FDA approval, others are not. I personally had shingles in my early thirties and have thus far been unable to have my doctor prescribe shingrix. Also, I would like to point out that having shingles was possibly the single most physically unpleasant experience of my life and boy it sure would have been fantastic to have been able to get the shingles vaccine before I got shingles, as opposed to sometime after! because wow, having shingles sucks.
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> some doctors are willing to prescribe it without FDA approval But the pharmacies are still reluctant to administer it. My doctor prescribed it for me but when I got to the pharmacy they made me fill out some forms... because I checked the box that said I had no serious health issues and I was under 50, the pharmacist absolutely refused to administer it even with a prescription.
We didn't have this new-fangled chickenpox vaccine during my Gen-X childhood.
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Or a lot of millenials. My parents were annoyed we had to go through it while Japan had been vaccinating since the 80s.
The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Public Patience with Tech Giants Is Running Out (newsweek.com)
It’s not a backlash on the AI it’s a backlash on the society that is utilizing it Go and read all of the anti-AI articles and they will eventually boil down to something to the effect of: “the problems we have are more foundational and fundamental and AI looks like a distraction” However this is a directionless complaint that falls under the “complaining about technology“ trope As a result there is no real coherent conversation about what AI is how do we define it what are people actually complaining about what are we rallying against because people are overwhelmingly utilizing it in every part of life
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Disagree. The people meaningfully controlling the direction of AI are the foundational problem. They are funding the politicians that control the system leaving society vulnerable. And we are well past the point of getting them out of power. Our ability to affect change on them is about numbers. The backlash to how AI is forced on us is an easy rallying point because it's a widely experienced negative. If you own a computer or phone, chances are good AI has annoyed you at some point. People hated Clippy. I don't think it would've been helpful to say "It's not Clippy you're mad at, but the societal foundation that enabled Clippy." That's not a good slogan.
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So you’re agreeing? You just want the slogan version? You’re doing exactly what I’m saying, which is being mad at the social structure.
You write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?
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>write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad? I naturally wrote "it's not just X, it's Y" long before November 2022 ChatGPT. Probably because I picked up on it from many people. It's a common rhetorical template of a parallel form where the "X" is re-stating the obvious surface-level thing and then adding the "Y" that's not as obvious. E.g. examples of regular people writing that rhetorical device on HN for 15+ years that wasn't in the context of advertising gadgets: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22it%27s%20not%20just%22%20%22it%27s%20the%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story So AI-slop writes like that because a lot of us humans wrote like that and it copies the style. Today is the first time I've learned that the "It's not X, it's Y" really irritates many readers. Personally, I've always found it helpful when it reveals a "Y" that's non-obvious.
On the plus side, I guess we can thank AI for bringing back the humble em-dash.
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> On the plus side, I guess we can thank AI for bringing back the humble em-dash. It was always there, and used. It was just typically restricted to pretty formal, polished writing (I should know, I have coworkers who fuss over em and en spaces ). I bet if you looked, you'd find regular use of em-dashes in Newsweek articles, going back decades . The things LLMs did was inject it into unsophisticated writing. It's really only an LLM tell if it's overused or used in an unexpected context (e.g. an 8th-grader's essay, an email message).
Neither companies nor individuals owe you "damages" because they merely did something you don't like.
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> Neither companies nor individuals owe you "damages" because they merely did something you don't like. As a matter of present law, maybe not. Doesn't mean it has to stay that way. And this thing isn't merely "[doing] something you don't like."
Jony Ive's OpenAI Device Barred from Using 'Io' Name (macrumors.com)
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That photo of Ive and Altman is weird as hell. It looks like a promo shot for a bad early 90s made for TV movie.
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"narcissistic dance off"
What even is this mysterious device? A device trying to duplicate a part of smartphone/smartwatch functionality is doomed to fail, as those can easily just be an app on said devices. So the computation part is likely out of the question. Input/output remains, and there is really not much you can innovate here. Smartglasses? EarPod clones?
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I'm beginning to believe that the picture of Sam and Jony is the product
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It is a device that justifies a $40T market cap. /s (Please don't look at our $60B a year burn rate financials.)
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given the vagueness of the available information, i'm guessing they haven't actually defined its capabilities yet. They can accept that building a smartphone is doomed to fail, and they want to build some hardware, so they're experimenting with all the "not a smartphone" form factors they can think of to see what sticks.
is yo taken?
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Boyhood did it the same year: https://x.com/hitRECordJoe/status/1378933672687067140
Oi mate, you got a loicense for that trademark?
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Not just trademarks! I can also picture Jason Statham getting pretty bent out of shape about GPL violations.
Synadia and TigerBeetle Pledge $512,000 to the Zig Software Foundation (tigerbeetle.com)
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The Zig Foundation is funded by donations from everyone from individuals to businesses such as TigerBeetle. At least you can donate directly to them. The Rust Foundation on the otherhand…
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News from October; Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45703926
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can someone explain why zig is often compared to rust? i understand zig as a better C, but in what world is another memory unsafe language a good idea? i mean i kinda get if the thing you are writing would require LOTS of unsafe, then zig provides better ergonomics however most programs can definitely be written without unsafe and in that case i dont get why wed do this to ourselves in 2025 why not take advantage of memory safe, and data race safety?
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because rust is more than just memory safety, it's not obvious that "the rust way" is the only way to go. fil-c is a good? example of a alternative strategy. sel4 is a radically different strategy that is as much of a pain in the ass as it's powerful. (disclaimer, i'm working on compile time memory safety for zig)
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Memory safety is a gradient. Zig is "memory safe-er" than C just because its arrays store length. Of course, RCE vulnerability is not a gradient.
Oh, interesting. Is NATS moving to Zig??
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Synadia's announcement, https://www.synadia.com/blog/synadia-tigerbeetle-zig-foundation-pledge , says: > There are no plans to move the NATS server to Zig. > Zig will become a Tier 1 NATS client, and Synadia will utilize Zig in resource constrained environments to bridge OT/IT for manufacturing, IIOT, connected cars, robotics and embodied AI.
I recommend having instant recognition of all the powers up to 2^24, this has proven very useful over the years e.g. when skimming quickly through a log searching for anomalies, flag patterns etc. If you recite them in sequence twice a day for a couple of weeks, then they’ll stick in your mind for decades. I can say from experience this method also works for the NATO phonetic alphabet, Hamlet’s soliloquies, ASCII, and mum’s lemon drizzle cake recipe. It fails however for the periodic table, ruined forever by Tom Lehrer.
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can confirm it is very useful, same for common constants in crypto algorithms
Can I hop in here and ask: As someone who hasn't done any systems programming in a decade, what would be more interesting to learn on the side, Zig or Rust? I've been in the Python world and seeing tools like uv and ruff, makes me biased towards Rust but Zig seems to be attracting a lot of hype recently?
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Zig is not done yet. They make breaking changes with each minor version.
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I feel like Zig is closer to "better C" and Rust is closer to "better C++". So I'd pick based on whether you are more in a C mood or a C++ mood.
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Increasingly I feel like these two have very different audiences. Disappointingly as a Rust dev, I don't actually see a lot of Rust being used for "systems" development (OS, driver, DB internals, embedded, etc), but increasingly for network services/web services/web stack work, heavily biased towards tokio async driven applications. It's a lot of engineers living further up the stack, leaning on frameworks, and in applications with very large dependency tree footprints. As a % anyways. There's a lot more Rust code out there than Zig. I think Zig has a far more minimalistic thing going on and I like that. I find its type system a lot more primitive, and would miss ADTs/enums, and the borrow checker etc. but I like its overall philosophy better.
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Zig has closed enums, so you can recover some of Rust's sum type safety.
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My world sounds exactly like yours and I love the astral packages - thanks for asking this
I'm in a similar position, I want to learn both eventually but chose to start with Rust because it has several really strong-seeming (like the intro book, or Rust Atomics and Locks), while Zig doesn't have many books yet.
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The need for book-length expositions is much greater for Rust.
Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust (corrode.dev)
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I'm not reading a solid argument as to not use "..Defaults()" because doing so suggests that you may introduce a bug and therefore should be explicit about EVERYTHING instead? Ugh. Hard disagree.
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Indexing into arrays and vectors is really wise to avoid. The same day Cloudflare had its unwrap fiasco, I found a bug in my code because of a slice that in certain cases went past the end of a vector. Switched it to use iterators and will definitely be more careful with slices and array indexes in the future.
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This was posted with a (mostly) healthy discussion on lobste.rs, here's the link https://lobste.rs/s/ouy4dq/patterns_for_defensive_programming_rust
There are. All the big tech companies have them. It’s just difficult to accomplish when you have millions of lines of code.
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Is there an industry standard name for these teams that I somehow missed then?
Zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries included (zellij.dev)
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2025 and actual devs are still recommending to type "bash <(curl -L ...)" into a terminal...
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I'm a terminal person and would love to try new things. But I just spent a few minutes on their page and have no idea why I would try to use it. Can anyone help me learn why this over, say, kitty?
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I don't understand the idea to make everything terminal-centric. It should be one component of all the tools available to the programmer. All text editors worth using have a way to open a terminal for that one time you need it, everything else should be a GUI (with all the advantages that come with it).
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I don't even use a terminal to run shell commands.
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Is there improved guidance on migrating from tmux to zellij? I've attempted to move over a few times, and while this is certainly user skill, it just felt too different from screen/tmux. Perhaps I should bite the bullet and force myself to get used to a new paradigm...
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i've switched over and really enjoy it. i feel like it's largely self documenting, what are your biggest hurdles?
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My dream workspace is a real browser (with all dev tools), with integrated terminal emulator and integrated editor. Editor plugins could be prototyped with web technology and debugged on the fly (like Obsidian plugins). Is there anything like this?
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I built a project to add a terminal emulator to the browser (using a chrome extension): https://github.com/pomdtr/tweety . I'm working on a `tweety edit` command which open arbitrary files in your $EDITOR of choice in a new tab.
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Fwiw lots of submissions over the years. I thought there was one a couple weeks ago but not seeing it. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zellij
Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI (blog.google)
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So we’re going to use this to make the maid from the Jetsons finally. Right?
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I'm really fascinate by the opportunities to analyze videos. The amount of tokens it compresses down to, and what you can reason across those tokens, is incredible.
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The actual token calculations with input videos for Gemini 3 Pro is...confusing. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/media-resolution
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Audio described Youtube please? That'd be so amazing! Even if I couldn't play Zelda yet, I could listen to a playthrough with Gemini describing it.
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I do some electrical drafting work for construction and throw basic tasks at LLMs. I gave it a shitty harness and it almost 1 shotted laying out outlets in a room based on a shitty pdf. I think if I gave it better control it could do a huge portion of my coworkers jobs very soon
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"Gemini 3 Pro represents a generational leap from simple recognition to true visual and spatial reasoning." Prompt: "wine glass full to the brim" Image generated: 2/3 full wine glass. True visual and spatial reasoning denied.
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I actually did this prompt and found that it worked with a single nudge on a followup prompt. My first shot got me a wine glass that was almost full but not quite. I told it I wanted it full to the top - another drop would overflow. The second shot was perfectly full.
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The correction I expect to give to an intern, not a junior person.
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Gemini 3 Pro is not Nano Banana Pro, and the image generation/model that decodes the generated image tokens may not be as robust. The thinking step of Nano Banana Pro can refine some lateral steps (i.e. the errors in the homework correction and where they are spatially in the image) but it isn't perfect and can encounter some of the typical pitfalls. It's a lot better than Nano Banana base, though.
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As a consumer I typed this into "Gemini". The behind the scenes model selection just adds confusion. If "AI" trust is the big barrier for widespread adoption to these products, Alphabet soup isn't the solution (pun intended).
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What’s new here? I believe this is just gemini 3 which was released last month (the model id hasn’t changed AFAICT)
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Nothing new, it's just highlighting practical vision use cases.
The document is paints a super impressive picture, but the core constraint of “network connection to Google required so we can harvest your data” is still a big showstopper for me (and all cloud-based AI tooling, really). I’d be curious to see how well something like this can be distilled down for isolated acceleration on SBCs or consumer kit, because that’s where the billions to be made reside (factories, remote sites, dangerous or sensitive facilities, etc).
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People with your concerns probably make up 1% of the market if that. Also I don’t upload stuff I’m worried about Google seeing. I wonder if they will allows special plans for corporations
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Arpanet was supposed to be decentralized. Now everyone wants to centralize everything so in a war it is sufficient to strike 100 data centers and the whole tethered economy collapses. That is called progress.
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Ah, the fond memories of telnetting to NCSA to upload the raw HTML of my first website, written on an OG Macintosh computer and ported via floppy to a PowerMac for network connectivity. Simple, elegant. I do miss those days.
That's more of an issue with Nano Banana Pro than with Gemini 3 Pro.
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What's the difference? I thought the vision ai component of gemini 3 is called nano banana?
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i assumed nano banana was just a tool that gemini 3 used though i don't know
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Gemini 3 Pro's text encoder powers Nano Banana Pro, but it has its own image decoding model that decodes the generated image tokens into an actual image, which appears to be the more pertinent issue in this case.
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That’s about generating images, the other side is about understanding images.
Interesting "ScreenSpot Pro" results: 72.7% Gemini 3 Pro 11.4% Gemini 2.5 Pro 49.9% Claude Opus 4.5 3.50% GPT-5.1 ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07981
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That is... astronomically different. Is GPT-5.1 downscaling and losing critical information or something? How could it be so different?
In case the article author sees this, the "HTML transcription" link is broken - it goes to https://aistudio-preprod.corp.google.com/prompts/1GUEWbLIlpXrE_ams-GBg3e7ZG7AcYgbr which is a Google-employee-only URL.
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Same with "See prompt in Google AI Studio" which links to an unpublished prompt in AI Studio.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The Forgotten Roman Ruins of the ‘Pompeii of the Middle East’ (news.artnet.com)
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Jordan is well worth a visit to see Jerash, Petra, Wadi Rum and other sites. You can also eat hummus 3 meals a day, which is a definite bonus. I went a few years ago with my family and it felt a lot more friendly, relaxed and safe than you might expect, given its location.
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I wonder how many other "Pompeii of ___" exist. I also know of the "Pompeii of Central America" (Joya de Cerén in El Salvador).
When holidaying in Italy I had the luck to pick the day trip one day. Really glad I found Paestum (an ancient Greek city): it is every bit as captivating as Pompeii imo.
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Went to Italy for the first time a few years ago and picked paestum randomly when we needed a break from Naples. Went back last year and will probably go again.
I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
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How has the Section 174 elimination of 5-year amortization for domestic SWE salaries impacted decisionmaking on whether to hire overseas? Since overseas workers are still subject to 15-year amortizations I'm wondering if people are getting pulled in from Canada.
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Can a US citizen with a foreign spouse bring the spouse to the US on a tourist VISA and adjust status? What if they already filed the i-130 with consular processing?
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Hi Peter, thanks for the AMA! I'm currently living in the US on TN status and am married to an American. Have you heard of anyone on TN status having difficulty applying for a green card? And do you have any sense of what the wait times currently are, particularly how long until you can get a travel authorization?
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Thank you for all your questions and comments. I'll be taking take a short break.
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You can always relax with some videos from [0] in your break. [0]: https://elblogdelnarco.com/
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What if I am selected in YC but i don't have us visa?
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That's a question for YC because if I understand you correctly, you are asking if you can participate in YC without being in the U.S.
How easily can one get E1 treaty trader visa and what volume and quantity of trade are recommended? If I have a company registered in my home country (eligible country) and have payouts from a US provider like an advertising network, affiliate provider or some marketplace etc. and my clients are all US companies, can I apply for that visa? Would a low six figure yearly revenue with monthly payout be sufficient for that?
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There's no minimum amount of trade specified in the regulations and the answer depends in part on other factors (such as how active the foreign and U.S. companies are and whether they employees and funding) but the minimum annual trade is generally understood to be at least $100K/$150K.
You say people born in other countries do not deserve american pay in America? It's like saying you are white male and it justifies higher salary. Also if you struggle to compete with immigrants who usually have no network, English is not their native language, have many other disadvantages - you are doing something wrong or are not competitive in the first place. The fact is you should not fight against imigration, you should fight for decent payment for it and same rights
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Why would someone immigrate to the USA without first ensuring that they had a high level of mastery of the English language in both writing and speech? Of course, if the goal is to contribute to making videos that end up on [0][1], a high level of mastery of the English language might not be required. [0]: https://elblogdelnarco.com/ [1]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/ms-13-gang-member-sentenced-55-years-prison-murders-four-young-men-central-islip-park
What do you consider the probability that there will ever be free elections in the US again? Please answer with a value between 0 and 1.
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I'll get back to you after the midterms.
Are you noticing any contraction (or increase) of immigration?
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Early on in this administration, yes, but now, it seems as busy as ever although this latest suspension of immigration processes for those from 19 countries has definitely sent a chill.
I moved to the USA in 2016 thanks to Peters help and every successful interaction I have had with USCIS since then has been because of his sage advice. You will not find a more knowledgeable or kind adviser than Peter.
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That's good to hear. Thanks!
Have you handled cases/seen outcomes of self employed founders' H1B applications under the new rule?
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Yes. The forms only require disclosure of ownership if it is above 50% so this has made it much easier for international founders (with cofounders) to obtain H-1B status. The challenge comes when ownership exceeds 50%.
While I'm inside the US, can I perform work for non-US entities? For example, remotely teaching a music lesson do someone in a different country or writing a book and publishing it abroad but not in the US.
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The short answer is no.
In October, the state department introduced a new policy: > Applicants for U.S. nonimmigrant visas (NIV) should schedule their visa interview appointments at the U.S. Embassy or Consulate in their country of nationality or residence > Applicants must be able to demonstrate residence in the country where they are applying, if the place of application is based on their residency. What sort of proof is required to demonstrate residence? What about cases where an applicant legally has residency in a particular country (e.g. PR card or work visa) but in practice lives in the US as an H-1B/TN/L-1/O-1/etc. worker or H-4/TD/L-2/O-3/etc. dependant? Especially for the dual intent visas?
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There's a lot of uncertainty here and the outcome will depend in part on the interpretation by the particular Consulate but my general understanding is that applying in a country where you hold permanent status but where you are not currently living would be risky.
Can they deny you admission when you are a US citizen?
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They can not. Neither US Citizens or Green Card Holders can be denied entry. Sources: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-when-encountering-law-enforcement-airports-and-other-ports-entry-us https://www.aclunc.org/our-work/know-your-rights/know-your-rights-us-airports-and-ports-entry
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A country can not deny entry to its own citizens. They can immediately arrest you, however.
I love how we ostensibly have rights but the exercising of rights is used by Law Enforcement as justification to do whatever the hell they wanted anyway. Land of the free indeed.
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There is a solution to this. You can become a US citizen.
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Another option is that we can treat our guests better.
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* terms and conditions may apply
Wait people who are not US citizens/residents have a right to enter the US? Wow that's crazy. I knew y'all were liberal but I don't know you are that liberal. No other country I know of gives non citizens/residents a right to enter.
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Who said anything about a “right to enter”? This is just about not massively invading visitors’ privacy for no good reason. Of course, if you just don’t want anyone with intelligence or dignity to visit the country, this is great policy.
Foreign countries have no obligation to admit you within their borders. There’s many points you could make about the United States and immigration, but I don’t think this is one of them.
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Whataboutism with respect to other nations’ immigration rules is so lazy. As Americans we have ideals and standards that we all grew up being taught and believing, we shouldn’t be participating in a race to the bottom. There’s absolutely no reason why foreign nationals should be made to divulge the contents of their personal devices carte Blanche. Any search should be targeted based on a reasonable suspicion of that specific individual. This is the American tradition, these are American ideals. Asserting otherwise is unpatriotic.
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He's not talking about other nations, he's talking about the US and saying if you are not a citizen of a nation, its a foreign nation to you and they have no obligation to let you in.
That's right, both before US Consulates when applying for visas, before CBP when applying for admission, and before USCIS when applying for a benefit (H-1B, O-1, green card, etc.), social media is being reviewed, not across-the-board but more and more. And there's really no option to keep social media as private if asked to turn to public by a Consular Officer or CBP Officer. The review is broad and not limited to social media that is critical of US policy but extends to a review of an individual's entire background to make sure there were no violations of US immigration law, including unauthorized employment.
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What are the most common reasons for failing the social media check?
"I don't use social media" is probably a good answer, it just has to be true. If they ask you "well, do you use any social media?" You'd presumably have to answer with HN, which maybe doesn't sound all that great :)
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HN isn't social media, any more than a bus is a car.
Framework Laptop 13 gets ARM processor with 12 cores via upgrade kit (notebookcheck.net)
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Windows 11 ARM64 is the best operating system I've ever used for a laptop. Really excited to see this, although I wish this was a Snapdragon X CPU.
Correct, it's not sold by Framework, but is a replacement mainboard sold by a 3rd party. I think that is one of the big appeals of a modular laptop like Framework, though. You can create an ecosystem around it, customize, and not be locked in to just what the primary manufacturer makes.
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Yeah it’s a good feature. Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t misreading the situation.
This is astonishingly bad power usage for a laptop, a complete dealbreaker: "...early tests show that the SoC already draws about 16 watts at idle..."
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Maybe it's a typo and it's 1.6W.
Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025 (blog.cloudflare.com)
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Today, after the Cloudflare outage, I noticed that almost all upload routes for my applications were being blocked. After some investigation, I realized that none of these routes passed through Cloudflare OWASP. The reported anomalies total 50, exceeding the pre-configured maximum of 40 (Medium). Despite being simple image or video uploads, the WAF is generating anomalies that make no sense, such as the following: Cloudflare OWASP Core Ruleset Score (+5) 933100: PHP Injection Attack: PHP Open Tag Found Cloudflare OWASP Core Ruleset Score (+5) 933180: PHP Injection Attack: Variable Function Call Found For now, I’ve had to raise the OWASP Anomaly Score Threshold to 60 and enable the JS Challenge, but I believe something is wrong with the WAF after today’s outage. This issue was still not solved to this moment.
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The problem that irks me isn’t that Cloudflare is having outages (everyone does and will at some point, no matter how many 9’s your SLA states), it’s that the internet is so damn centralized that a Cloudflare issue can take out a continent-sized chunk of the internet. Kudos to them on their success story, but oh my god that’s way too many eggs in one basket in general.
twice in a month _so far_
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Those AI agents are coding fast, or am I missing some obvious concept here?
They will remember, because it'll have been measured and documented, rigorously.
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I've found that the real trick with documentation isn't creation, it's discovery. I wonder how that information is easily found afterwards.
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By reading the documentation thoroughly as a compulsory first step to designing the next system that depends on it. I realise this may probably boggle the mind of the modern software developer.
>You call it extortion of the AI companies, but isn’t stealing/crawling/hammering a site to scrape their content to resell just as nefarious? You can easily block ChatGPT and most other AI scrapers if you want: https://habeasdata.neocities.org/ai-bots
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I'm guessing you don't manage any production web servers? robots.txt isn't even respected by all of the American companies. Chinese ones (which often also use what are essentially botnets in Latin American and the rest of the world to evade detection) certainly don't care about anything short of dropping their packets.
What I'm missing here is a test environment. Gradual or not; why are they deploying straight to prod? At Cloudflare's scale, there should be a dedicated room in Cloudflare HQ with a full isolated model-scale deployment of their entire system. All changes should go there first, with tests run for every possible scenario. Only after that do you use gradual deployment, with a big red oopsie button which immediately rolls the changes back. Languages with strong type systems won't save you, good procedure will.
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> Languages with strong type systems won't save you Neither will seatbelts if you drive into the ocean, or helmets if you drink poison. I'm not sure what your point is.
Cloudflare is now below 99.9% uptime, for anyone keeping track. I reckon my home PC is at least 99.9%.
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Do they include uptime guarantees in any contracts?
Indeed. AWS too. I feel like the cloud hosting companies have lost the plot. "They can provide better uptime than us" is the entire rationale that a lot of small companies have when choosing to run everything in the cloud. If they cost more AND they're less reliable, what exactly is the reason to not self host?
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Plus, when you self-host, you can likely fix the issue yourself in a couple of hours max, instead of waiting indefinitely for a fix or support that might never come.
yet my dedicated server has been up since 2015 with zero downtimes i dont think this is an entropy issue its human error bubbling up and cloudflare charges a premium for it my faith in cloudflare is shoook for sure two major outages weeks apart ad this wont be the last
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With all due respect, your dedicated server is not quite as complex as Cloudflare...
The coolest part of Cloudflare’s architecture is that every server is the same… which presumably makes deployment a straightforward task.
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The bad change wasn't even a deployment as such, just an entry in the global KV store https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-quicksilver-configuration-distribution-at-internet-scale/ Actual deployments take hours to propagate worldwide. (Disclosure: former Cloudflare SRE)
> However, the company is so big that there’s so many different products all shipping at the same time it can be hard to correlate it to your release This kind of thing would be more understandable for a company without hundreds of billions of dollars, and for one that hasn't centralized so much of the internet. If a company has grown too large and complex to be well managed and effective and it's starting to look like a liability for large numbers of people there are obvious solutions for that.
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What "hundreds of billions of dollars"? Cloudflare's annual revenue is around $2 billion, and they are not yet profitable.
> Control-plane and data-plane should be separate They are separate. > a react patch shouldn't affect traffic forwarding. If you can’t even bother to read the blog post maybe you shouldn’t be so confident in your own analysis of what should and shouldn’t have happened? This was a configuration change to change the buffered size of a body from 256kb to 1mib. The ability to be so wrong in so few words with such confidence is impressive but you may want to take more of a curiosity first approach rather than reaction first.
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You really should take some of your pill. > Instead, it was triggered by changes being made to our body parsing logic while attempting to detect and mitigate an industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. > Unfortunately, in our FL1 version of our proxy, under certain circumstances, the second change of turning off our WAF rule testing tool caused an error state that resulted in 500 HTTP error codes to be served from our network. The body parsing logic is in react or nextjs, that's my takeaway, is it that incorrect? and the WAF rule testing tool (control plane) was interdependent with the WAF's body parsing logic, is that also incorrect? > This was a configuration change to change the buffered size of a body from 256kb to 1mib. Yes, and if it was resilient,the body parsing is done on a discrete forwarding plane. Any config changes should be auto-tested for forwarding failures by the separate control plane and auto-revered when there are errors. If the waf rule testing tool was part of that test then it being down shouldn't have affected data-plane because it would be a separate system. data/control plane separate means the run time of the two and any dependencies they have are separate. It isn't cheap to do this right, that's why I speculated (I made clear i was speculating) that it was because they wanted to save costs. > The ability to be so wrong in so few words with such confidence is impressive but you may want to take more of a curiosity first approach rather than reaction first. Please tone down the rage a bit and leave room for some discussion. You should take your own pill and be curious about what I meant instead of taking a rage-first approach.
My guess? Code written by AI
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TBF they are still hiring a lot of eng people from US/UK/EU: https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs/?department=Engineering
> Do I want to deal with what Cloudflare offers? I do not, I have higher value work to focus on. I want to pay someone else to deal with this, and just like when cloud providers are down, it'll be back up eventually. This is specious reasoning. How come I had to endure a total outage due to the rollout of a mitigation of a Nextjs vulnerability when my organization doesn't even own any React app, let alone a Nextjs one? Also specious reasoning #2, not wanting to maintain a service does not justify blindly rolling out config changes globally without any safeguards.
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If you are a customer of Cloudflare, and not happy, I encourage you to evaluate other providers more to your liking. Perhaps you'll find someone more fitting to your use case and operational preferences, but perhaps not. My day job org pays Cloudflare hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and am satisfied with how they operate. Everyone has choice, exercise it if you choose. I'm sure your account exec would be happy to take the feedback. As a recovering devops/infra person from a lifetime ago, perhaps that is where my grace in this regard comes from. Things break, systems are imperfect, and urgency can lead to unexpected failure. Sometimes its Cloudflare, other times it's Azure, GCP, Github, etc. You can always use something else, but most of us continue to pick the happy path of "it works most of the time, and sometimes it does not." Hopefully the post mortem has action items to improve the safeguards you mention. If there are no process and technical improvements from the outage, certainly, that is where the failure lies (imho). (i have seen a proof of concept tested and known good against React2Shell and understood the severity of the vuln and level of risk of not broadly attempting to mitigate this with WAF rules across their customer base, as someone in an enterprise responsible for triaging and mitigating it)
Is a roll back even possible at Cloudflare's size? With small deployments it usually isn't too difficult to re-deploy a previous commit. But once you get big enough you've got enough developers that half a dozen PRs will have been merged since the start of the incident and now. How viable is it to stop the world, undo everything, and start from scratch any time a deployment causes the tiniest issues? Realistically the best you're going to get is merging a revert of the problematic changeset - but with the intervening merges that's still going to bring the system in a novel state. You're rolling forwards, not backwards.
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Disclosure: Former Cloudflare SRE. The short answer is "yes" due to the way the configuration management works. Other infrastructure changes or service upgrades might get undone, but it's possible. Or otherwise revert the commit that introduced the package bump with the new code and force that to rollout everywhere rather than waiting for progressive rollout. There shouldn't be much chance of bringing the system to a novel state because configuration management will largely put things into the correct state. (Where that doesn't work is if CM previously created files, it won't delete them unless explicitly told to do so.)
To be precise, the previous problem with Rust was because somebody copped out and used a temporary escape hatch function that absolutely has no place in production code. It was mostly an amateur mistake. Not Rust's fault. Rust could never gain adoption if it didn't have a few escape hatches. "Damned if they do, damned if they don't" kind of situation. There are even lints for the usage of the `unwrap` and `expect` functions. As the other sibling comment points out, the previous Cloudflare problem was an acute and extensive organizational failure.
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You can make an argument that.unwrap() should have no place in production code, but .expect("invariant violated: etc. etc.") very much has its place. When the system is in an unpredicted and not-designed-for state it is supposed to shut down promptly, because this makes it easier to troubleshoot the root cause failure whereas not doing so may have even worse consequences.
> They really need to figure out a way to correlate global configuration changes to the errors they trigger as fast as possible. This is what jumped out at me as the biggest problem. A wild west deployment process is a valid (but questionable) business decision, but if you do that then you need smart people in place to troubleshoot and make quick rollback decisions. Their timeline: > 08:47: Configuration change deployed and propagated to the network > 08:48: Change fully propagated > 08:50: Automated alerts > 09:11: Configuration change reverted and propagation start > 09:12: Revert fully propagated, all traffic restored 2 minutes for their automated alerts to fire is terrible. For a system that is expected to have no downtime, they should have been alerted to the spike in 500 errors within seconds before the changes even fully propagated. Ideally the rollback would have been automated, but even if it is manual, the dude pressing the deploy button should have had realtime metrics on a second display with his finger hovering over the rollback button. Ok, so they want to take the approach of roll forward instead of immediate rollback. Again, that's a valid approach, but you need to be prepared. At 08:48, they would have had tens of millions of "init.lua:314: attempt to index field 'execute'" messages being logged per second. Exact line of code. Not a complex issue. They should have had engineers reading that code and piecing this together by 08:49. The change you just deployed was to disable an "execute" rule. Put two and two together. Initiate rollback by 08:50. How disconnected are the teams that do deployments vs the teams that understand the code? How many minutes were they scratching their butts wondering "what is init.lua"? Are they deploying while their best engineers are sleeping?
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I see lots of people complaining about this down time but in actuality is it really that big a deal to have 30 minutes of down time or whatever. It's not like anything behind cloudflare is "mission critical" in the sense that lives are at stake or even a huge amount of money is at stake. In many developed countries the electric power service has local down times on occasion. That's more important than not being able to load a website. I agree if CF is offering a certain standard of reliability and not meeting it then they should offer prorated refunds for the unexpected down time but otherwise I am not seeing what the big deal is here.
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> about this down time but in actuality is it really that big a deal to have 30 minutes of down time or whatever. It's not like anything behind cloudflare is "mission critical" in the sense that lives are at stake or even a huge amount of money is at stake. This reads like sarcasm. But I guess it is not. Yes, you are a CDN, a major one at that. 30 minutes of downtime or "whatever" is not acceptable. I worked at traffic teams of social networks that looked at themselves as that mission critical. CF is absolutely that critical and it is definitely lives at stake.
this time in lua. cloudflare can't catch a break
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Anyone knows why lua? Or is it perhaps as a redis script in lua?
Jolla Phone Pre-Order (commerce.jolla.com)
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Reminder that the greenest smartphone is one you already have. If my phone died today, I still have a company-given one that I never use. I'd just ask my org to give or sell it to me for personal use.
Android and iOS need to be shaken up so badly that I welcome more or less anything into this space, no matter how flawed. That said, I think the chances I buy one of these is very low. At the moment, I keep a smart phone solely so that finding work is not difficult. You need quite the personal network to explain that "I don't have a smart phone." Otherwise, I'm trying to abstain from smart phone usage as much as possible: the market is probably _never_ going to solve one which solves addiction problem. (the best solution for this is to have a desktop computer which you only sit at for specific tasks) On the other hand, if I could run my company's OTP and it were much more private than iOS or Android I would probably jump ship.
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Its a compact Linux PC in a phone form factor - especially if you do not install the Android emulation layer. :)
Same reason why Linux is not crashing the desktop market? (I have a Jolla 1 and a Jolla C sitting in a drawer, now I fully switched to Graphene OS.)
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With all the latest Windows fuckups its picking up recently in the form of SteamOS and Bazzite.
>Ruthless monopoly building on both Google and Apple side IMHO. Microsoft spent a lot of money and resources trying to compete and failed. Android/Apple just started early enough and by 2012 it was too late as most consumers have decided. To enter this market you have to be truly unique or else you are just copying the competitor and why would users switch if they are happy enough? Is that really a monopoly if you had a third competitor come in and try?
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Consumers decided - and Google also decided to ban manufacturers from building phones with another OS or they loose access to Google Play store and Google apps on the lucrative Android phones they also manufacture: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ (the article is from 2013 but was updated in 2018) So no manufacturer that already builds Android phones will make an alternative OS phone for you - and that's effectively all of the mobile phone manufacturers given Apple makes all of the iOS devices.
The Open Sourcing? There is more about it on the forum for Sailfish with phase 1, the weather app, notes app and a few other bits: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/open-sourcing-proceeding/24689 Then there is community news category with updates, but it's a bit haphazard and ongoing in this context: https://forum.sailfishos.org/c/community-news/25 The Camera app, Gallery app, Nexcloud accounts and other accounts components are open sourced and on github. There is now talk about Silica, the Wayland compositor. It hasn't been updated well in recent years and there is talk about moving it to Weston or Wlroots, while also supporting xdg-shell for GTK applications.
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This is really nice to finally see this happen! It has been super awkward that often small bugs and messing features persisted for years for the sole reason of the given app being closed source, so the permanently busy Jolla engineers just could not get to fixing it & the community couldn't help withou source & license enabling them to contribute. It never made sense not opening everything up from the start - did they really thing someone would just clone it and made bank if they themselves usually struggled to make the whole thing work financially. In my opinion it was most likely the combination of the combination of three things: 1) The race to release the Jolla 1 ASAP back in 2013, resulting in a messy codebase and systems not setup for community to contribute. 2) Then clueless investors got involved, especially when they needed emergency funding after the Jolla Tablet debacle in IIRC ~2015, blocking Jolla from opening the full source. 3) Constant firefighting preventing engineers on actually opening things up and setting things up for people to contribute & actually review the contributions in timely manner. So good to see things finally improving. :)
This. Some people just don't realize how pervasive and essential WhatsApp is in some countries, mine included. I'd much rather use Signal but that's not realistic.
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But isn't it a timebomb waiting to blow up eventually? Like, Meta fucks something up with it and there is nothing you can do. IIRC South Korea used to be fully depedent on a horrendous AcriveX applet running only in Internet Explorer for all their online services, yet they eventually managed to get rid of it. It should be possible here as well.
What 5-ish inch screen phone has even been released within the past 5 years? The only ones I can think of are the Unihertz phones, and those don't get a single update after getting shoved out the door, not to mention that they're probably full of Chinese backdoors. I'd buy that exact phone in a heartbeat if it didn't have those problems, and all the other ones I've seen have similar dealbreakers.
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If 5-ish includes 5.7", then the Librem 5 that I'm typing this on would qualify. It's still borderline too big for my tastes though.
Thats part of it actually , they have(had) a nonstandard offering via Sony hardware. If it was a known OEM like Oppo/Honor/Oneplus theres already some familiarity/buyin from users and lines possibly can be opened for select verticals. Instead with the SonyX offerings , they linited it to a tiny range, upgrades as i recall were sometimes not possible to newer versions and a separate support contract to Jollla was needed. A pure play ala android would do better, they (jolla) do the software - the OEM does the hardware/updates similarly to how Linux distros like Ubuntu get bundled into Dell etc. If they were a hardware firm like Huawei bulding their phone and OS makes sense , or with massive scale like Google with Pixel.They are neither. Hardware is hard, and scaling it at volume moreso.
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I have Sailfish X on an Xperia 10 III (eg. officially supported Sailfis OS) and I am getting Sailfish OS updates just fine. As for phone model support - mobile hardware is a mess at low level with most APIs that make PC hardware easy to support by a single OS image (such as ACPI tables) simply missing. Not to mention various hardware bugs that the Android firmwares need to work around or paper ober as well. As for support contract/subscription, that is I think still a recent idea they are playing with on some newer devices. I actually think its a good idea, as it adds an incentive for the OS vendor to support existing hardware. Currently it is usually the other way around, where the manufacturer is also the downstream OS vendor that does not get any money past initial purchase and basically wants the device to become unusable as fast as possible, so that you buy another one soon.
Libhybris not halium, and those are open, the android driver blobs are closed and it's the same on pmOS with halium? They did start open sourcing a lot of their UI components recently, so hopefully this continues, we'll see
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Btw, Jolla created libhyris back in the day for the first Jolla phone in ~2013. It has been since used by other phones and comanies for various purposes when the only thing you have is a board with only Android bionic libc compiled blobs available.
The platform always suffered from two big architectural missteps. 1 - the native browser being an old firefox/gecko fork embedded into their own UI framework, giving a poor performance and dated compatibility quirks 2 - the android emulating runtime meant that you get again, dated , poorly performing android apps, that you're driven towards because the browser engine was so poor. these two mean you basically end up with a sub-standard android handset/UI, and a tiny market for native app development (because everyone made do with android), its a real chicken/egg. In fairness I've not used it since the sony XPeria days, but it was my daily phone for 3-4 years since the Jolla 1. It was cool being able to emacs and irc natively on the phone, but that was limited in use cases tbh.
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The Firefox engine legacy goes back to the Maemo times - its not ideal, but what else would you use ? The web engine situation is quite bleak even on desktop Linux distros and its even worse on mobile Linux.
They're probably not interested in the Linux power user. They're interested in making their phone viable for everyone else, since that's a much bigger market, and for that customer base, a keyboard is very much going to be a negative and not a positive. The Linux part of their Linux phone also has the same problem, but they apparently have faith in that part.
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If they're not interested in that market, they're not doing a good job in showing it. They mentioned "Linux" *five* times on that page, but don't explain what it is. Normal folks don't even know what Linux is, let alone know what the difference between a Linux-based OS like SailfishOS and Android, that would entice them to buy this phone. It's clear that "Linux" is a big selling factor for this given that they mentioned it so many times, but they do little to elaborate on it. It's clear who their audience is.
Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality (jamanetwork.com)
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I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer. But I do have doubt in vaccines especially mRNA vaccines nowadays, and I wish these studies do more than just this. I have 4 kids, and 3 of them got vaccinated for the covid (1 is a baby 2 years old) for the very first time with Delta. They struggle for weeks to recover, they get tired, they seem to have heart related symptoms. Eventually, those went away after months. The baby has never had covid (no vaccine). I then have never covid vaccinated them, and they have never been sick with covid even though my wife and I caught covid after our 3rd vaccine shots. We didn't do any isolation, we share things and direct contacts with them. They might have had Covid but very mild, the quick tests never showed positive. My wife got blood clot issue that I saw blood coming out from her skin. I struggled many months with the vaccines with weird fatigues (I'm normally very healthy in my late 30s). My gut biome seemed to change and I became quite sensitive to some food (milk proteins mostly, not just lactose intolerance) My mom who lived in a different country got 3 shots and she struggled with heart condition for more than a year, Drs couldn't find the reason why. It was difficult for her to do anything with strength. She finally recovered after 1+ year. There're many real and true stories like mine, I really have no idea what these studies saying anymore.
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> I don't consider myself an anti-vaxxer. But you write anti-vax comments filled with the usual anti-vax post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies.
No. Questioning the dominant narrative was in fact censured.
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I believed in the lab leak theory so for me getting the vaccine was a no brainer. I could get infected by one of two things developed in a lab, only one of which had clinical trails on humans. I went with the clinically tested option.
Also, what's the overlap here between people who believe a) the unborn have a "right to life" (or forced birth as some others call it, where the parent has no choice but to take the pregnancy to term and give birth), and b) those who think the parents have every right to decide not to vaccinate their children? If you believe (a), shouldn't you believe (not b)? And if you believe (b), shouldn't you believe (not a)?
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Indeed. A lot of antivaxxers mockingly say "my body, my choice" but they are highlighting their own hypocrisy, not anyone else's. One critical difference between the cases is that pregnancy is not contagious.
Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication (lemonde.fr)
Trust the science. The World Health Organization on glyphosate in 2016: "The only large cohort study of high quality found no evidence of an association at any exposure level" "Glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures" "Glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet" "The Meeting concluded that it was not necessary to establish an ARfD for glyphosate or its metabolites in view of its low acute toxicity" https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/agphome/documents/Pests_Pesticides/JMPR/2016_JMPR_Summary_Special.pdf Tptacek in 2018: "There are no credible studies indicating that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and it would be a little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic pathway not present in animals. Meanwhile, many of the herbicides that glyphosate displace, plenty of which remain in use, are known human carcinogens. The most widely reported declaration of glyphosate's carcinogenicity, by IARC, was disavowed by the WHO, IARC's parent organization...The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17043887 When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate, ten prominent physicians wrote a letter to Columbia University in demanding his removal from the faculty for an "egregious lack of integrity" and for his "disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine." He replied "I bring the public information that will help them on their path to be their best selves" and provides "multiple points of view, including mine, which is offered without conflict of interest." https://www.agrimarketing.com/ss.php?id=95305 Here is Reuters with a 3000-word Special Inverstigative Report filed under "Glyphosate Battle" carrying water for Monsanto, after IARC declared the chemical 2A (probably carcinogenic): https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/who-iarc-glyphosate/
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> Trust the science. I haven't kept up with research. Do you have any actual science showing that glyphosate is a carcinogen? Retraction of a paper doesn't automatically mean the opposite is true or that Dr. Oz was right. Using the retraction of a paper to elevate a known pseudoscience pusher who constantly makes claims without scientific basis is intellectually dishonest.
It's been awhile since I've done any reading on glyphosate, which I mostly paid attention to because of a wave of bullshit stories about how Monsanto was suing people over seeds that blew onto their land (that basically never happened). Nothing in the intervening years, including this specific retraction, changes what I think about glyphosate, which is that it's probably safer than the herbicides that are used when glyphosate isn't. I don't know why you think bringing me into this discussion is useful. If you were thinking that some regulatory agency made decisions based on the persuasiveness of my HN comments, probably no. I'm generally comfortable being on the other side of whatever Mehmet Oz is talking about.
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Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it? Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells. I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection. This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society. Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want. The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.
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I think it's quite the compliment - you should be flattered! Unrelated: I really enjoy "Security, Cryptography, Whatever".
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I'm not offended, it's just weird. And thank you! We've got fun stuff coming out. If anybody knows someone involved in GrapheneOS, we'd really like to get their perspective on modern mobile platform hardening. I will repay them in Monsanto Roundup-Ready(tm) gift certificates.
> The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans It actually might be the case and it still can be damaging to people by affecting the gut microbiome: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(23)00255-3/fulltext
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Did you read the paper? I just did. There's no data in it. It's a broad statement about research directions in glyphosate accompanied by concerns that all chemical agricultural supplements are objects of concern, epidemiologically, with Parkinsonism. I think the point about the microbiome is well taken, for what it's worth. It's a good response to "humans lack a shikemic acid pathway, which is where glyphosate is active".
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reference [5] (right in the middle of point 3, the one about gut microbiome) links to https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3233/JPD-230206 which is way too dense for me to unpack in general... e.g. Rotenone Mouse Oral gavage ↓ Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio, ↑ Rikenellaceae and Allobaculum; ↓ Bifidobacterium in both the caecal mucosa-associated and luminal microbiota community structure [169]
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I'm definitely not going to go crate digging through the cites in this paper! I think for the level of discourse we keep here on HN, it's more than enough to note (1) glyphosate targets metabolic pathways animals don't have, but (2) bacteria do have those pathways, which could implicate the gut microbiome. Point taken! In all these discussions, if I could ask for one more data point to be pulled into the context, it's what the other herbicides look like (my understanding: much worse). I think these discussions look different when it's "late 20th century SOTA agriculture writ large vs. modern ideal agriculture with no chemical supplementation" than when it's "Monsanto vs. the world". A very annoying part of the backstory of the "Monsanto vs. the world" framing are people who care about glyphosate not because they have very fine-grained preferences about specific herbicide risks (glyphosate is probably the only herbicide many of these people know by name), but rather because of glyphosate's relevance to genetically modified crops. I'm automatically allergic to bank-shot appeals to the naturalist fallacy; GM crops are likely to save millions of lives globally.
Thank You for Smoking !
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Great movie, opened the Santa Barbara International Film Festival years back.
The longest thread on this topic is currently about household use of glyphosate as weed killer. As many have pointed out that's unnecessary. There are plenty of ways of killing weeds without glyphosate. It's also not a huge problem in the way that industrial use of chemicals, like lead in gasoline, are a mass-poisoning event. Glyphosate is used to desiccate wheat to make it easier to harvest. That's where the big problems could come from.
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Not just wheat. Other crops. I was pretty shocked to see a field full of soybeans that were all dead. They were being dried before harvest. Terrible scheme.
I can feel the pull of glyphosate. I want to kill the weeds right around my house, but that's where my dog sleeps and rolls and eats the grass. Roundup is the popular weed killer and I've got a bottle in the garage. So I look up its effects on pets, and it says "manageable with precautions", particularly waiting for the fluid to dry before letting the dog on it. I'm not very comfortable with that so looking around for other solutions I see a guy on Youtube telling me how to manage weeds with vinegar. I figure that must be safe, so I buy a bottle of the recommended concentration, but for the hell of it look up its safety for dogs before applying it. They say hell no, this is way too strong for pets and can cause burns, etc. I would need to dilute it quite a bit, making it a lot less effective. So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better.
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Salt for cattle. Lasts for a few months.
How is this easier than pulling the plant out of the soil?
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Dandelions are really, really hard to eradicate by pulling. The roots grow very deep, and if you don't get them completely, the plant can re-grow from what's left. Even if you do successfully get it out, it really is going to be more work than painting a weed killer on them.
Most technical problems are people problems (blog.joeschrag.com)
"was maintaining a 100KLoC+ FORTRAN IV email program, circa 1975" That sounds challenging, and very early for email. Would I find it in the timeline or was it internal only? https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2022/08/102806104-05-01-acc.pdf
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It was basically before Internet email. Proprietary store-and-forward system, run by a BT subsidiary, named Dialcom. Ran on Prime minicomputers. I worked there in 1987. [UPDATED TO ADD] And to add insult to injury, it was all on sub-VGA 300-Baud VT-100 terminals and line printers. I spent a lot of time, staring at blue-striped paper.
Makes me think of something my dad and I both talked about with our time in the military. He was Army and I was Navy. But when the ability to promote is tied with ranking against your peers, if you really want to game the system, you essentially sabotage your peers. Which is the exact opposite you want in the military or really any organization. You want to foster a, rising tide lifts all boats with getting the work done. But it hard when your performance evaluations are the complete opposite of that, and I have seen people do it. I got qualified on our equipment quick and was in a position where I was training my peers who I was ranked against. If I were an asshole, I would have trained them poorly and drug it out. I didn't, but someone who is goal oriented to climb through the ranks as fast a possible, it is a logical action that I could have taken.
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> If I were an asshole, I would have trained them poorly and drug it out. That's of course the obvious way this goes wrong. Bad intentions. The much more insidious version is that you could have just been a terrible teachers, maybe you suck at training your peers, and you don't know. The end result is the same. You look like the only person who gets it amongst the riff-raff, but in this case you don't even have a choice. The system has produced a poor outcome not because anybody abused it, but because it was a bad system.
> It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
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Already in the original comment. Already in other replies as well. How, exactly, does one end up not ready anything in the thread before replying?
> sentiment ... > theory these two words aren't interchangeable > Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Louis Blanc ... > generic cog-in-the-machine critique that is explored by many other people literally only one of the names you mentioned were writing post industrial revolution - the rest had literally no notion of "cog in the machine" you're trying so hard to disprove basically an established fact: Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is certainly original and significant in his own work and those that followed.
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> these two words aren't interchangeable Exactly. That's why you can't jump from "people don't feel like they own their labor" and "people bemoan their boss" to Marx's theory of alienation. > literally only one of the names you mentioned were writing post industrial revolution - the rest had literally no notion of "cog in the machine" But the very framing that this is an ill that is unique to industrial society is Marxist. Slavery, corveé labor, taxes, poor laborers, marginalisation existed for thousands years in one form or another. > you're trying so hard to disprove basically an established fact: Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is certainly original and significant in his own work and those that followed. I don't dispute that Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is original or significant. I dispute your claim that people who share similar sentiment have to agree with Marx's theory of alienation.
Developers used to be freer to choose their tools, organize their routines, decide the result of their work, acquire transferable knowledge, and had access to their tools without any link to any organization (though that one has been steadily improving instead of post-peak). There is more to alienation than equity.
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My 40 years of alienation was not about equity, I was pointing out that the optimistic "We are all going to be rich" vibe of the 90s was wishful thinking due to the massive inequality in the tech world. Few teams other than green-field start-ups have flexibility regarding tools or technology. My first job was COBOL, 'nuff said about that. Even at start-ups the leads / architects choose most of the technology, and many of my ideas were shot down, such as using C++ in the late 90s, and using Scala in 2010. People seem to think agile has increased alienation, when in fact the pre-agile world was also terrible. What matters is the quality of the team, not the methodology.
That depends on the value of your generated production, among many other things, and ultimately isn't the right question to ask. Can an employee obtain better employment terms elsewhere (which is a complex concept to define in itself)? If so, they are underpaid, if not, they aren't.
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You were talking about exploitation. Using the fact that the employee cannot obtain a better employment elsewhere to extract as much of the production or value from the employee smells a lot like exploitation to me.
Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros (about.netflix.com)
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Where are American anti-trust instituitions?
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The most realistic acquirers were Paramount/Skydance or Netflix. Paramount/Skydance is a relatively new-ish entity with David Ellison (Larry's son) as CEO. The general sense in Hollywood is Paramount/Skydance will do little high-brow, art house or awards-fodder films but they will at least distribute films primarily to theaters (they promised to release at least 14 Warner films per year to theaters if their bid was accepted). Netflix is mostly uninterested in theatrical distribution so the main practical impact of this most of us see day to day may be less theatrical release movies and probably fewer higher budget films being made at all. Caveats include that the deal has to actually get regulatory approval in the U.S. and EU and survive potential (inevitable?) shareholder lawsuits. Netflix's offer reportedly involved less cash and more debt. Paramount/Skydance argued regulatory approval and the heavy debt made Netflix's offer less attractive than their own despite Netflix's higher top-line price.
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Reminder that Superman enters public domain in 2034, Batman in 2035, and Wonder Woman on 2037.
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Breathe a sigh of relief WB wasn't bought by David Ellison. Cry softly the next Superman movie will barely be in theaters... Surely there will be a kpop-demon hunters X DC universe X mortal kombat game that comes out of this...
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It's time for Netflix' greedy acqs Taking value to the max So just sit back and relax and give us all your cash We're now a Netflix acq!
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Netflix will adapt AI-driven Streaming on demand content. But, critically, it will now be backed up by the entire IP catalogue of WB. Wanna watch a new Superman movie where he meets Harry Pitter? Ok. Wanna see the Matrix as an animated version that includes the Flintstones? Ok.
I cancelled all my content subscriptions and I'm back to torrenting. I barely watch anything made my Netflix regardless. I think either Dark or the 3rd season of Stranger Things was the last time. Snyder's SciFi movie wasn't much good either. By now the streaming services are en route to become as terrible as whatever they were set out to replace. Once one of them started heavily advertising their own productions everywhere inside their apps I would've cancelled any remaining subscription at the latest.
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Usenet + the *arr stack + Plex or Jellyfin make it completely effortless to watch any movie or TV show I can think of. And I don't have to play the 'which service has this?' game.
One only has to look at the word of mouth reputation of Plex these days to know what's going on. I'd say more of my circle knows about it than doesn't, and a solid 15% run one or use someone else's, including my non-techie friends. Shoutout to Jellyfin it's great, but it is not nearly as turnkey, so Plex is clearly the dominant player for folks hosting their own media.
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I found Jellyfin was super easy but I came from XBMC/Kodi which was a big struggle.
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I think what trips people up with jellyfin is making sure they aren’t exposing their network. Getting it to work at home is one thing, getting it to work outside your home is a different beast
I also collect discarded physical media, there's still lots of people who want to get rid of their collections for nothing because of "Dude, there's streaming now, duh."
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Best sources to start accumulating? Just ebay?
I dont think I have ever seen a completely ad free cable channel?
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They do (did?) exist. Nickelodeon was originally a completely ad-free channel. HBO and Cinemax also didn't have ads.
He also really doesn't do much (almost any?) charity so far in his life. And he never had to split assets in a divorce. So he's like a dung beetle of money.
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He did buy an entire island in Hawaii and makes it a decent place for the natives (from what I hear) but otherwise... Billionaire Drools That “Citizens Will Be on Their Best Behavior” Under Constant AI Surveillance https://futurism.com/the-byte/billionaire-constant-ai-surveillance Is the kind of mindset behind this guy.
"Larry Ellison has been involved with two philanthropic organizations. First he made a $300M donation to Stanford, in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing in an options backdating scandal. All other philanthropic work is to the Larry Ellison institute for prolonging of life--namely his." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
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Sounds like he is a refreshingly honest person
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Honest doesn't make good.
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Sounds like he’s a twat.
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Isn't falling for virtue signalling charity donations more of a twattery?
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It is always enlightening when people criticizing "virtue signaling" accidentally reveal that the problem they have is not the signaling, it's the having virtue.
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If you choose to classify all charity donations as "virtue signaling", yes. If you reject that absurd false framing, no.
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Funny death is the equalizer for now till you get the foundation situation
> " Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free) " Microsoft's Annual revenue from Azure is $75 billion. Office Server is $40 billion. Office Consumer is $6 billion. LinkedIn is $15Bn. Dynamics is $5Bn. Gaming/XBox is $15Bn. Search/Advertising is $14Bn. Devices at $5Bn. Intelligent Cloud at $87Bn. Windows $21Bn. They are a HUGE company with a lot of multi-billion dollar product streams and a lot of business lockin around basically any company on the planet which isn't a new web app startup. Oracle sell an RDBMS. Competing with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and the last 15 years of NoSQL. Oracle is what Amazon Retail made a multi-year move away from ending in 2019, and were very happy about it, popping champagne in their announcement video[1]. Oracle license Java which has seen a mass migration to free OpenJDK and Amazon Corretto and all the other free forks. Oracle make a cloud service that you wouldn't touch unless you had a team of Fortune 100 lawyers pressing enter for you because you know Oracle saleslawyersharks are watching on the other side. Why does anyone other than the government give them money? What for? Okay yes they're "the best" at something or other for a Fortune 100 with serious needs, nothing else comes close, ... but 4-5x their valuation in the last 5 years?? > " Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. Amazon is... Actually wildly successful " Yeah, Tesla is hype-valued and Amazon does a lot of things in a lot of big markets, of course they're valuable. Oracle does some obscure boring IBM style thing that is never hyped and there is never any positive sentiment about it on the tech internet. [1] https://www.supportrevolution.com/resources/why-amazon-left-oracle/
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It took Amazon like 10 years to get off Oracle didnt it? Amazon is a tech company where tech is the product and so has lots of internal expertise. It is like banks trying to get off mainframes, they just cant do it organizationally and there are loads of failed attempts both public and private. I imagine most companies using Oracle are like that.
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The government has so much money, what need does Oracle have of anybody else's? Furthermore, what money the government doesn't itself have, it can pressure others into spending, on occasion. e.g. that Bytedance/Oracle deal
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Oracle had $57 billion in revenue in 2025, up 8% from last year. You do make the excellent observation that it's not as high or spiky as other tech companies. It is, however, consistent, and they've been at it much longer than most on the list (founded 1977). That last fact probably matters most regarding Ellison's fortune. Their "boring IBM style thing" continues to grow, slowly, and continues to make him money (a lot of it, given his continually-owned large stake); even if the velocity isn't as high as other billionaires, he started a lot earlier than they did. > Why does anyone other than the government give them money? I asked a similar question of a relative who was all-in on Microsoft in the '90s. His response was simple: "reliability and expectation of business-oriented service." When a company's been around since 1977, there's more trust they'll be around 10 years out. Oracle is many things, but it's not a company with a notorious "killed by" list of abandoned critical projects that other companies were relying upon to prop their revenue streams. And, if you spend enough money with them, they tend to put someone on helping you solve your problems to keep your business; this is something the alternatives do as well, but Oracle's seen a lot more business problems and has a big portfolio of past solutions that worked. I got to be a fly on the wall at one of the FAANGs transitioning off an Oracle DB, and the process took about 3x longer than scoped. The reason? Conservative decisionmaking: all the money flowed through the Oracle DBs, and you cannot screw with the money flow. This goes beyond the need for a business to make revenue; failing to properly track your money flow can put you out of compliance with financial laws and make people go to jail. They trusted their in-house databases for tracking user PII, for keeping the core services running, for doing internal infrastructure monitoring and employee recordkeeping... It took convincing to get every stakeholder to trust it with the money. Companies buy in with Oracle because they have some confidence they won't go to jail for doing so.
People don't seem to realize that Oracle is deep in the AI play, taking on a bunch of debt to make speculative leases and buildout of datacenters to rent to other players. It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze.
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Random but this is a very well written line: > It's been great for them so far, but if there's an AI winter, Oracle will be the first to freeze. Kudos
How does ZFS need to be liberated?
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They took the entire Solaris code back to proprietary source and kept improving ZFS themselves. For instance, they added encryption.
> Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers This is a very common narrative to this news. But coming into this news, I think the most common narrative against streaming was essentially "There is not enough consolidation." People were happy when Netflix was the streaming service, but then everyone pulled their content and have their own (Disney, Paramount, etc.)
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Netflix was the STREAMING platform - it was not really making content until the House of Cards went supernova. This is true consolidation and monopolization - regardless of the "narrative" in whichever news you happen to consume.
Maybe there are licensing restrictions or other things that prevent it, but wouldn't it make more sense to combine HBO Max and Netflix into a single app? Or at least make all HBO Max content also available in Netflix (and then eventually sunset HBO Max). That would make a Netflix subscription a much more compelling purchase for a ton of people.
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I'd rather not even have to sift through all the stuff on Netflix to get to the stuff from HBO. And I definitely don't want to pay double for one big catalog.
> They all had their chance. They blew it. This is so silly. It's like saying "Sweet manufacturers all had the chance to sell the same sweets, and they blew it. So I just nick most sweets." Just say "I don't like paying for things and can get away with this, and my ethics only work in public or when I'm forced to obey them." And then we're done.
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Sweets have a cost, and constitute a straightforward loss to someone if stolen. Digital copies of a file are clearly different. There's plenty of valid arguments against piracy, but equating it to zero-sum material theft is not one of the strong ones.
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Are you saying I wouldn’t steal a car, or a handbag, or a television, or a dvd? So piracy is a crime? Are you really making that argument in 2025? You must be very young. Bittorrent didn’t become popular because no one wanted to pay for things. In fact people stopped when Netflix was good. I stopped, all my friends stopped. It was no longer a mainstream thing. We even put up with a few price hikes. Then 1 service became whatever and people started torrenting and streaming sites started popping up. Everyone was willing to pay for convenience. No ones wants to pay even more for in convenience. You’ll note music piracy is not really a thing anymore. Thanks Spotify.
This deal is an indicator of huge changes in global film & TV production. Hollywood's struggles amplified after the writer's strike with a perfect storm of issues around unionisation, technology, fragmenting audiences, new formats, asset liabilities and enormous competition to the east. Now LA soundstages are empty while production centres in Europe, UK, India, China, Nigeria are booming and vast new studios cropping up in the Middle East. Proposed tariffs will do little to stem this tide as the money has moved on already. In addition, traditional production methods are unsustainable and decision-making is opaque in an era where sustainability, transparency and democratisation are taking over. The main benefit to Netflix is of course the IP, but the traditional studio assets of WB have their days numbered.
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Remember when a company that started out making car bumpers bought Paramount? Those were wild times.
More like how did these companies drop the ball so bad. Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation. Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles
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I remember Sony. Sony Rootkit, Sony BetaMax, Sony MiniDisc, Sony ATRAC, Sony Memory Stick [Select / PRO / Duo / PRO Duo / PRO-HG Duo / M2 / XC / PRO-HG Duo HX / WTF], Sony UMD, Sony Elcaset, Sony SDDS, Sony VAIO, Sony Walkman, Sony Discman, [...] At least they had some lasting success with their Umatic video tape cartridge, and with the CD that they co-developed with Philips. Their Trinitron tubes were unique and generally quite good -- and they lasted as long in the market as any other CRT did, I suppose. And their various iterations of PlayStation console have all been popular despite being Sony products.
> No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"? This is performative marketing for the regulators to allow the merger. No one (including the regulators) believes this, and it won't come to pass. ("More choice" won't, I mean, the merger will and a lot of regulators and politicians involved will end up with new cars, boats, and kids' college tuitions paid.)
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It potentially means fewer subscriptions to have more content options (eg, a bunch of services get folded into Netflix). Of course it will be region dependent for other licenses and rights.
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