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Ask HN: Where Are Nvidia's GPUs?
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We might be dealing with a MiniScribe situation (bricks being shipped to warehouses to inflate inventory statistics). And if so, we'll need about 2 years till all of the new DCs catch up with getting hardware wheeled in. But by then, it will have to be considered obsolete...
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Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in' https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-says-company-doesnt-122000891.html
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Rumor has it that much of the capacity is routed through to two "mystery customers" that regularly show up on the Nvidia balance book. One is probably NRO, the other is your pick of an alphabet soup agency.
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I might be an useful idiot in this case, but I can't imagine they would be that late to the game. I suppose they get dibs on anything that's a year ahead of its time before manufacturers send it to the unwashed masses.
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Plot thickens... But this doesn't explain the lack of power and datacenters.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Word spacing (en.wikipedia.org)
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OT: Urdu, like Arabic/Persian, is written with an alphabet where letters can change shape based on whether they are at the start, middle or end of a "word" [1]. I say "word" because some letters don't have a middle form, so each actual word is broken into a sequence of composite-letter-shapes, where each composite shape start with such a no-middle-form letter. A problem arises when one wants to write a compound word, which the last letter for the first word and the first letter of the second word must not be joined. To achieve this, the unicode standard has U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER character, which should be used in such compound words [2]. The standard SPACE character should not be used because it will create a physical space, while U+200C will create a break with no space. However, typically Urdu keyboards don't have this character in them, so everyone ends up either using SPACE or just joining the words. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu_alphabet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner
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This is for Latin. The Dead Sea Scrolls have clear spacing between the words. https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/shrine-book/dead-sea-scrolls The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible: https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html
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> Word spacing [creates] what Paul Sänger, in his book The Spaces between the Words, refers to as aerated text. I like that term. I particularly enjoy a large amount of ventilation of code, with plenty of breezy white spaces after purposely short lines and between brief declarations.
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And then 7 centuries later, whiskey came about and look how terrible things turned out.............
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I'm told that things took a turn for the worse in 1649.
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Related self promotion: this factoid about spaces, along with other fun slices in the evolution of writing, features in my decade-ago Ignite talk “For the love of letters” https://youtu.be/g1Rko-LG6aY?si=SbLDRnORPnKiXCxu
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Since we're already being picky about languages, that's not a factoid: Factoids are things which resemble facts, but aren't actually facts. Asteroids aren't really stars, meteoroids aren't really meteors, androids aren't really men, spheroids aren't really spheres, factoids aren't really facts, etc.
Weird that only Latin, Greek, and Irish is mentioned in the article.
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Also English. ("In English, the ability to ...")
This is fascinating! At the same time, this wikipedia article is of surprisingly low quality, with sentences like > It is hard to determine how much spacing should be put in between words, but a good typographer is able to determine proper spacing.[3] > Since the fifteenth century, the best work shows that text is to be read smoothly and efficiently.[4] > Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.
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Exactly the same sentences grated here. It is the subjective passed off as the objective, passed on with a tone of false authority. A surprisingly large majority of public communications fall in to this category. Mastering this puffery, usually for the express purpose of swaying the wills of lesser minds or pressing buttons in funding and grant processes, grants you the reigns of bureaucracy and a career in corporate, public or international relations. A horrible way to waste a life.
I actually like the interpunct way better (which I first saw when I visited Italy and saw historical carvings): instead⸱of⸱putting⸱spaces⸱you⸱put⸱a⸱small⸱dot⸱between⸱words⸱instead.
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I love that better! I was also just in Italy recently and you made me double take this tablet hanging on a canopy in one of the peregrination churches and they ARE interpuncts but for names only
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Nowadays I only see/use the middle dot to cla⸱ri⸱fy syl⸱la⸱bles in lyr⸱ics.
Google Tells Advertisers It'll Bring Ads to Gemini in 2026 (adweek.com)
The most enviable part of Star Trek isn't warp speed or teleporters; it's the complete lack of advertisements shown to the characters. Moreover, there isn't a technological barrier to an ad-free life like the other technologies. We just haven't the collective social will to make it happen. In some sad way it feels even more impossible than FTL.
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I acknowledge that like prostitution advertisement isn't going to ever go away completely, and I acknowledge that also like prostitute it's a better world where we legalize and regulate advertisement over a world where we didn't but with that said it's really dismaying that vanguard of our industrial and technological capability as a species is built on advertisement. Will that always be the case? Or will the people who work at these organizations finally realize that they're only making the world a worse place every time they integrate advertisements into their business model?
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It's totally possible. My computer blocks ads, and the city I live in bans billboards and requires things like an evergreen hedge to block commercial parking lots from being visible from an arterial. The signs businesses are allowed to have are there to help you find where to turn, and have things like size restrictions and aesthetic requirements.
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The second most enviable is locally hosting "Computer" The entirety of the future Starfleet on our current timeline gets bricked whenever us-east-1 goes offline
I truly wonder how long until there is ublock origin or similar for AI tools. One can only hope a gorhill like figure will emerge to save us.
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Assuming you can't just directly filter it, and even if it's hard to run a high quality LLM locally for the time being, it should be feasible to run a smaller model on the returned output of large commercial models to identify and remove any advertising. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if you could plug a model for filtering malicious content from all web pages right into the local translation framework Firefox already has.
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This, I had actually thought about the ads idea but then realized that local models can filter it out. But then again, the ads models have worked out fairly well for google and meta when ublock origin on firefox and for a loong time on chrome too was literally just go to appstore, search ublock origin, click download That was it I am sure that we are gonna see similar innovations happen for these ads too but then again, I think that the key point here is that the ad models works right now when we have ublock origin, so even if we have your tool, maybe most people (would still be ignorant about it?) I think this is what is basing the whole AI industry in but this cannot be the way they can fund trillions of $'s spent. I think what would happen more likely is that they will use AI to create a detailed profile of you and see the code generated, where its deployed, see what username it was and what email, link all your emails to every platform and every connection. Not going to lie, but its a scary thought. I think something scarier can happen if it can actively shadow-ban you like its doing but now from the whole web in a more "personalized way" Imagine if google chrome launches out a feature that blocks websites which can be harmful to you creating an AI generated block-list I guess giving reasons why... I think AI context windows are going to be an issue here and compute required to do this at scale so I don't really know and I am just rambling right now. Personally I don't really know, If Google has ads, I just use gemini web for some vibe coding, I might take more questions to chinese models or even pay for them via something like open router where they might not have ads if this still happens via anonymity or just run the models locally yeah. I wonder if we can create a community of people who have gpu who can have web of trust-like properties and they can share AI access to people who they trust and so on and maybe some gift properties but just niche closed properties where the trust factor is (more?) Maybe offtopic but if we ever implement something like this, I really like https://ch.at 's interface and how minimalist it is.
Cancer is surging, bringing a debate about whether to look for it (nytimes.com)
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Surely it has nothing to do with the proliferation of chemicals and microplastics into the ecosystem, water, food, etc. That would be absurd, after all, a Monsanto-sponsored study found that their pesticides are totally safe.
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"Some cancer specialists counter these concerns, saying the surge in diagnoses is primarily a surge in detecting cancers that did not need to be found..." This seems excessively paternalistic. If medical professionals hold a legal monopoly on providing diagnostic care, then decide it's better to just not diagnose things, it leaves patients with no way to discover life-altering information about their own health.
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There is cancer in your body every single day . Your immune system handles it just fine. There is an explicit difference between cancer that needs treating and cancer that should be ignored because it's a waste of time and resources to treat. You're not a doctor, you're not qualified to tell the difference, you're not trained on cancers, you're not even in the medical field. The monopoly is held for exactly this reason . We already have an extreme shortage of available healthcare workers. We don't need to stress them further because 20% of the population suddenly decides they need 80 elective surgeries to remove things that would've gone away or stayed benign on their own.
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The rise in the preventative screening centers (such as prenuvo) that offer whole body MRIs will be interesting. The research seems split on if it is worth it or just causes unneeded worry. Obviously if you catch something early then that is great, but there are a lot of people who have a ton of followup testing only to find out there is no issue. There are also limitations with the level of detail a full body MRI can capture. I could see it becoming similar to a colonoscopy where you get it like when you turn 30 or something and then every 5-10 years after that.
Consuming foods rich in antioxidants may help. "Research suggests that free radical molecules can add to the risk of health issues linked to aging. Some examples are heart disease, age-related macular degeneration, Alzheimer's disease and cancer." https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/add-antioxidants-to-your-diet/art-20546814
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On the other hand, it's known that consuming the antioxidant vitamin E actually promotes the progression of lung cancer. Cancer cells are under oxidative stress so antioxidants can help them survive and grow. https://www.lung.org/blog/antioxidants-lung-cancers
Tech elites are starting their own for-profit cities (ft.com)
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There’s an alternative theory that cities need to be bit chaotic: “The Uses of Disorder analyzes human development at the personal and collective level in wealthy cities, presenting the thesis that such cities are excessively ordered and thereby enable residents to avoid personal growth or change. Instead of relying on prescriptive plans and rigid self-conceptions, Sennett argues, people should remain open to difference and disorder while city life ought to be more disorderly and decentralized.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uses_of_Disorder
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Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong?
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The return of technocracy from 1930s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement "Technocracy advocates contended that price system-based forms of government and economy are structurally incapable of effective action, and promoted a society headed by technical experts, which they argued would be more rational and productive."
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I mean I love the concept. However something makes me suspect none of these will be the completely-walkable, full of art, no-pollution, no plastic, utopia city I'm thinking of. But no harm in them trying their idea...
Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%? (martinalderson.com)
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> Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%? I believe Betteridge's law of headlines [1] applies here: No. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
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If the cost of building software dropped so much - where is that software?.. Was there an explosion of useful features in any software product you use? A jump in quality? Anything tangible an end user can see?..
It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with. A few of them are starting to replace SaaS tools with custom built internal tooling. I suspect this pattern is happening everywhere to a varying level. Often these SaaS tools are expensive, aren't actually that complicated (or if they are complicated, the bit they need isn't) and have limitations. For example, a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features. Result = dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool. It's shipped and in production now. It would have taken similar amount of time to work around the API deprecation.
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I don't understand the timelines here at all.
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> It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with How many samples do you have? Which industries are they from? Which SaaS products were they using, exactly and which features? > ...a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features ... dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool Was that SaaS the equivalent of the left-pad Node.js module?
I read these sort of comments every so often and I do not understand them. You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes. I understand that for some reason this isn't the case for your work flow, but obviously it has a lot more value for others. If you are a chairmaker and everyone gains access to a machine that can spit out all the chair components but sometimes only spits out 3 legs or makes a mistake on the backs, you might find it pointless. Maybe it can't do all the nice artisan styles you can do. But you can be confident others will take advantage of this chair machine, work around the issues and drive the price down from $20 per chair to $2 per chair. In 24 months, you won't be able to sell enough of your chairs any more.
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> You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes But that's exactly not the case. Everyone is wondering what tf this is supposed to be for. People are vehemently against this tech, and yet it gets shoved down our throats although it's prohibitively expensive. Coding should be among the easiest problems to tackle, yet none of the big models can write basic "real" code. They break when things get more complex than pong. And they can't even write a single proper function with modern c++ templating stuff for example.
Spreadsheets are an incredible tool. They were a key innovation in the history of applications. I love them and use them. But it's very hard to have a large conventional cell-formula spreadsheet that is correct. The programming model / UI are closely coupled, so it's hard to see what's going on once your sheet is above some fairly low complexity. And many workplaces have monstrous sheets that run important things, curated lovingly (?) for many years. I bet many or most of them have significant errors.
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It's astounding how useful and intuitive they are, but my biggest gripe is how easy is for anyone to mess calculations, say, SUM(<RANGE>), by simply adding one row/column/cell. I use Google Worksheets frequently to track new things that fit into lists/tables, and giving someone else editor access without them knowing a few worksheet nuances means I have to recheck and correct them every month or two.
> written an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours It’s often hard to ground how “good” blog writers are, but tidbits like this make it easy to disregard the author’s opinions. I’ve worked in many codebases where the test writers share the authors sentiment. They are awful and the tests are at best useless and often harmful. Getting to this point in your career without understanding how to write effective tests is a major red flag.
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I've used llms to help me write large sets of test cases, but it requires a lot of iteration and the mistakes it makes are both very common and insidious . Stuff like reimplementing large amounts of the code inside the tests because testing the actual code is "too hard", spending inordinate amounts of time covering every single edge case on some tiny bit of input processing unrelated to the main business logic, mocking out the code under test, changing failing tests to match obviously incorrect behavior... basically all the mistakes you expect to see totally green devs who don't understand the purpose of tests making. It saves a shitload of time setting up all the scaffolding and whatnot, but unless they very carefully reviewed and either manually edited or iterated a lot with the LLM I would be almost certain the tests were garbage given my experiences. (This is with fairly current models too btw - mostly sonnet 4 and 4.5, also in fairness to the LLM a shocking proportion of tests written by real people that I've read are also unhelpful garbage, I can't imagine the training data is of great quality)
Good write-up. I don't disagree with any of his points, but does anybody here have practical suggestions on how to move forward and think about one's career? I've been a frontend (with a little full stack) for a few years now, and much of the modern landscape concerns me, specifically with how I should be positioning myself. I hear vague suggestions like "get better at the business domain" and other things like that. I'm not discounting any of that, but what does this actually mean or look like in your day-to-day life? I'm working at a mid-sized company right now. I use Cursor and some other tools, but I can't help but wonder if I'm still falling behind or doing something wrong. Does anybody have any thoughts or suggestions on this? The landscape and horizon just seems so foggy to me right now.
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Most of the suggestions will be a variation of getting into a higher level role rather vs a build/IC role. Things like product or management - but these are very different roles and potentially lock you into a domain; one you may not find long term enticing. My advice to the young in this field (under 35) would be to move out of the field entirely - not to be a doomer but IMV the risk/uncertainity you are taking on your career isn't worth the effort you need to put in these days (e.g. swe interviews, constant learning, outsourcing, etc all for AI to maybe in the future just do it all anyway). Its a big bet to put your career on and right now IMV it isn't worth it; especially when I see a lot of money right now (trillions?) betting and investing in the opposite outcome. The high risk/effort required was rewarded in the past by high pay in certain locations but that's changing as well. Ironically the "bullshit jobs" as they call them might be safe havens in the short term since they often exist due to corporate processes, regulation, etc and already don't provide much value so in turn aren't measured by that. Its no accident that I see the people most excited by AI were the people who delivered the least value in the delivery process previously from an anecdotal POV. No one knows the future and many are in the same boat as you. Its not great news (not even for me) but that's where things are heading I think. Its definitely the loosely stated goal of AI labs, etc to democratize coding and probably most creative/intellectual work at that.
90% more - nope. 35-55% more, just about on average. I am 30-year in though, not sure what these numbers are for junior devs
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https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/ They thought they were faster too. Yes, I know, AGI is just around the corner, we just need to wait more because "agents" are improving every day. In the mean time, LLMs are kinda useful instead of web searches, mostly because search is both full of spam and the search providers are toxic.
Texas traffic stop reveals pitfalls of police surveillance Intel (houstonchronicle.com)
Law enforcement is mostly mundane repetitive boring work. It can't be easy sitting alongside a highway for hours on end, waiting for someone to do something that requires your intervention. Police engage in shared fantasies. Which can lead them to hallucinate. They often end up wanting a crime to be committed just so they can intervene and exercise and validate their skill set. Civilian behaviors will be observed, recorded, and matched: against a theory of a crime which may or may not have been committed. Depending how bored and unfulfilled the coordinated LEOs are, a dark fantasy of ongoing crime can be enabled, and confirmation bias follows immediately, with every civilian action (or inaction) being re-interpreted through the lens of an understandable rampant LEO desire -- They want so much to catch the bad guys that they will actually manufacture probable cause from stretched whole cloth, so they can believe a crime is in their purview and they're righteously on the case. Otherwise it can become a really boring gig. Advances in surveillance technologies and predeterminations of crime probabilities via automated software will only serve to add fuel to the fire of the aggregate LEO imagination. What we witness here in Texas is the result of a shared fantasy. Remember that shared fantasies become more real the longer they are shared and sustained... even the "trace" amounts of imaginary drugs on which Max the dog alerted become a part of the now-permanent interdiction team's backstory. This kind of thing is happening all over America, all the time. We face a crisis of fantasy addiction. So many are unhappy with reality that they are constantly fantasizing something better for themselves. Not to pick on the LEOs, but they are supposed to be the best of us, holding the line, and not compromising their integrity for the transient satisfaction of an imagined felony stop.
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LEOs are basically municipal clerks with guns who are expected to also do violence to force compliance as needed. IDK why it'd be any surprise when they start acting all capricious like municipal clerks dealing in BS paper pushing issues of no real consequence. "This guy looks sketch, no permit for him." A big part of the problem here is that they're tasked with enforcing a bunch of what amounts to petty bullshit that only exists to legitimize the state in the eyes of the people who want to see petty enforcement (taillight out, are you f-ing kidding me? A $100k/yr employee doing taillight out stops?). Like for all their ills you don't hear about "serious police" like swat teams and the like behaving quite so badly so regularly (not that they don't do plenty of bad stuff).
>Not to pick on the LEOs, but they are supposed to be the best of us, holding the line, and not compromising their integrity for the transient satisfaction of an imagined felony stop. I mean for the most part this has never been the case. Cops themselves have not been very far about the criminals they are supposed to stop historically. Almost all improvements in policing have been forced upon LEO from outside organizations. >is the result of a shared fantasy One hundred percent. When I was younger I was around LEO quite often and they'd sit around and pass stories back and forth on how bad everyone else is, and how everyone was out to get them. Now they have the internet to sit around and feed each other bullshit, and worse, be propagandized to.
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I'm elderly now, but in my distant youth I had many encounters with police officers. Every single one of them was a blessing to me. Of course, I am a white male, and my encounters with police were probably affected by my (traditionally) privileged status. I do not blame LEOs for the growing encrouchments on my (our) personal liberties. I view them as bona fide public servants, motivated mostly by genuine generosity of spirit, wanting to help people. But police culture is another matter, and it is the culture than corrupts. Because it is such a boring job (for the most part), management is always seeking new ways to keep their officers engaged, enthused, gratified. That job, sitting alongside the highway, is less boring if there's an ongoing story that you're part of, a team that you serve, that's counting on you. So you're going to do your part, hold up your end, carry your weight, even if that means you need to do something that makes your conscience go squiggly, it's okay, it's just the compromise expected of a player, taking a little one for the team. That corruption is something that management enables, and wink nod encourages. And management does it, and gets away with continuing to do it, because a large portion of the public are okay with it too. What are the chances that the next mistaken AI-assisted surveillance conclusion is going to capture you in its crosshairs? It's a small probabilty, right? Just don't drive near the border, don't drop any women off at motels, don't drive I35 in Texas: you'll be okay.
As I understand it, judges typically defer to law enforcement. Anyway, replacing a leader would have very little impact on the laws, practices, training, or political mandate. Might just make for an unusual headline.
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> judges typically defer Sadly true. > would have very little impact In my daydream, elected Sheriffs don't want to be dumped out of office - so they ignore crap-quality Intel, don't hire deputies based on phrenology, double-check the paperwork before releasing prisoners, ...
Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1 (jepsen.io)
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Every time someone builds one of these things and skips over "overcomplicated theory", aphyr destroys them. At this point, I wonder if we could train an AI to look over a project's documentation, and predict whether it's likely to lose commmitted writes just based on the marketing / technical claims. We probably can.
> By default, NATS only flushes data to disk every two minutes, but acknowledges operations immediately. This approach can lead to the loss of committed writes when several nodes experience a power failure, kernel crash, or hardware fault concurrently—or in rapid succession (#7564). I am getting strong early MongoDB vibes. "Look how fast it is, it's web-scale!". Well, if you don't fsync, you'll go fast, but you'll go even faster piping customer data to /dev/null, too. Coordinated failures shouldn't be a novelty or a surprise any longer these days. I wouldn't trust a product that doesn't default to safest options. It's fine to provide relaxed modes of consistency and durability but just don't make them default. Let the user configure those themselves.
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> Well, if you don't fsync, you'll go fast, but you'll go even faster piping customer data to /dev/null, too. The trouble is that you need to specifically optimize for fsyncs, because usually it is either no brakes or hand-brake. The middle-ground of multi-transaction group-commit fsync seems to not exist anymore because of SSDs and massive IOPS you can pull off in general, but now it is about syscall context switches. Two minutes is a bit too too much (also fdatasync vs fsync).
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NATS is very upfront in that the only thing that is guaranteed is the cluster being up. I like that, and it allows me to build things around it. For us when we used it back in 2018, it performed well and was easy to administer. The multi-language APIs were also good.
NATS data is ephemeral in many cases anyhow, so it makes a bit more sense here. If you wanted something fully durable with a stronger persistence story you'd probably use Kafka anyhow.
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> NATS data is ephemeral in many cases anyhow, so it makes a bit more sense here Dude ... the guy was testing JetStream. Which, I quote from the first phrase from the first paragraph on the NATS website: NATS has a built-in persistence engine called JetStream which enables messages to be stored and replayed at a later time.
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So is MQTT, why bother with NATS then?
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MQTT doesn't have the same semantics. https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/core-nats/reqreply request reply is really useful if you need low latency, but reasonably efficient queuing. (making sure to mark your workers as busy when processing otherwise you get latency spikes. )
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Core nats is ephemeral. Jetstream is meant to be persisted, and presented as a replacement for kafka
Realistically speaking, postgresql wasn’t handling a failed call to fsync, which is wrong: but materially different from a bad design or errors in logic stemming from many areas. Postgresql was able to fix their bug in 3 lines of code, how many for the parent system? I understand your core thesis (sometimes durability guarantees aren’t as needed as we think) but in postgresql’s case, the edge was incredibly thin. It would have had to have been: a failed call to fsync and a system level failure of the host before another call to fsync (which are reasonably common). It’s far too apples to oranges to be meaningful to bring up I am afraid.
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NATS allows you to fsync every calls, it's not just the default value.
> 3.4 Lazy fsync by Default Why? Why do some databases do that? To have better performance in benchmarks? It’s not like that it’s ok to do that if you have a better default or at least write a lot about it. But especially when you run stuff in a small cluster you get bitten by stuff like that.
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Massively improves benchmark performance. Like 5-10x
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/dev/null is even faster.
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/dev/null tends to lose a lot more data.
Likewise. It took me a moment to realise Jepsen!== Jeppesen
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It's named after Carly Rae Jepsen, of 2012 hit single "Call Me Maybe" fame.
Deep dive on Nvidia circular funding (philippeoger.com)
Not a big fan of the circular observation. It's not the gotcha people seem to think. If the baker sells bread to the butcher, and the butcher sells meat to the baker then they can still both go to bed with a belly full of sandwich (aka actual utility & substance). Adding a third party to make it look more circle-y doesn't change that logic. Round trip financing is mostly an issue if it is artificial (e.g. a circle of loans) and between affiliated parties, not when something of substance is delivered. Oracle is a business partner of nvidia but I'd wager they'll still kick up a fuss if they don't get their pallets of GB200s. They'll expect actual delivery...like you know...in a real sale.
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That's the wrong analogy, because the butcher is giving money to the baker for the bread. If we we fix the analogy, then the baker gives money to the butcher so that he buys their bread with that money . The butcher cannot afford the bread without it!
> Net Income and Operating Cash Flow are not the same thing This is the second article that gained a lot of traction on HN in the last few months with similar fundamental errors. The previous one was similarly written by someone with a dev background where they didn't understand the difference between gross margins, operating profit, and net income–concepts which were the basis for their analysis. I wonder with this author or the previous, if they're just a little too confident in their abilities. Accounting and Finance are very deep and highly technical fields. Particularly for publicly traded companies where the businesses tend to be very complex and sophisticated and the consequences for making mistakes or committing fraud are severe. I'm not suggesting that non-finance people shouldn't try to analyze this stuff, but some humility might be in order. It reminds me of a data scientist I worked with who was doing some modeling on companies' revenues. He believed he'd uncovered some secret, conspiratorial truth about Samsung having trillions in revenues, thereby making it the largest and most powerful entity on Earth. We had to gently inform him that he was looking at the revenues denominated in Korean Won and they needed to be converted to USD.
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A confident yet clueless swe? I don't believe you.
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Don't get me wrong, I love SWEs and I think they do tend to be much smarter than the average. But, in my experience, they also exhibit higher than average hubris.
This is what happens when highly confident uneducated people read slop from other uneducated people with an agenda (Twitter, Burry et al) and then regurgitate more slop. There is no circular funding. There’s certainly circular speculation that is driving up the prices but the revenues are all accounted. The DSO change is meaningless if you understand accounting. The inventory building up is the cost of materials and incomplete inventory. It’s not chips sitting around waiting to be deployed. > holding ~120 days of inventory seems like a huge capital drag to me. Yeah I guess this guy who knows nothing about running a business like Nvidia is allowed to make confident statements like this despite no education or experience. This article is garbage and he wasted his 48 hrs investigating the same things I read in another worthless tweet several weeks ago.
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Are partially processed wafers on Nvidia's balance sheet or TSMC's? Or are you saying Nvidia is holding sawn die in inventory? Confused as to what state the product might be in for it to make sense to hold for 4 months when supposedly you can sell everything you make.
Since SRAM is typically built in logic fabs (like TSMC) alongside the processors themselves, it theoretically shouldn't face the same supply chain crunch as HBM. DRAM and logic fabs are both sold out so replacing one with the other doesn't really help. And SRAM uses ~6x more silicon area than DRAM. Groq may be undervalued but not for supply chain reasons.
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> Groq may be undervalued but not for supply chain reasons. Groq isn’t listed is it? Hard to know what its valuation might look like.
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I see people routinely discussing valuations of private companies with certainty. I don't know how often those numbers are wrong.
Forget about DRAM vs. SRAM or whatever: How does a cheaper source of non-Nvidia GPUs help Oracle? They’re not training models or even directly in the inference business. Their pitch is cloud infra for AI, and today that means CUDA & Nvidia or you’re severely limiting your addressable market.
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Yeah, some customer would have to commit to renting the chips before Oracle would buy them.
If it's fully AI generated, perhaps add a disclaimer to it?
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It is discouraged to post AI-generated comments to Hacker News, even if disclosed.
then stop wasting peoples time with slop if i wanted to read llm output i'd go dump it into chatgpt into myself
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Do I need to explain the meaning of not?
Is this the new form of ad-hominem? ad-AI?
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ai-hominem
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Ad machinam. “To the machine”.
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ad machina
> However, Groq’s architecture relies on SRAM (Static RAM). Since SRAM is typically built in logic fabs (like TSMC) alongside the processors themselves, it theoretically shouldn't face the same supply chain crunch as HBM. It's true SRAM comes with your logic, you get a TSMC N3 (or N6 or whatever) wafer, you got SRAM. Unfortunately SRAM just doesn't have the capacity you have to augment with DRAM which you see companies like D-Matrix and Cerebras doing. Perhaps you can use cheaper/more available LPDDR or GDDR (Nvidia have done this themselves with Rubin CPX) but that also has supply issues. Note it's not really about parameter storage (which you can amortize over multiple users) it's KV cache storage which gets you and that scales with the user count. Now Groq does appear to be going for a pure SRAM play but if the easily available pure SRAM thing comes at some multiple of the capital cost of the DRAM thing it's not a simple escape hatch from DRAM availability.
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Is Groq different from Grok?
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They're unrelated. Groq = chip company, Grok = model by x.ai.
NAND is built with dozens of layers on one die. HBM DRAM is a dozen-ish dies stacked and interconnected with TSVs, but only one layer of memory cells per die. AMD's X3D CPUs have a single SRAM die stacked on top of the regular CPU+SRAM, with TSVs in the L3 cache to connect to the extra SRAM. I'm not aware of anyone shipping a product that stacks multiple SRAM dies; the tech definitely exists but it may not be economically feasible for any mass-produced product.
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I agree with your description and conclusion. Additionally the companies that can make chip stacks like HBM in volume are the HBM manufacturers. As they are bottlenecked by the packaging/stacking right now (while also furiously building new plant capacity) I can't see them diverting manufacturing to stacking a new SRAM tech.
I agree it's poorly written, but I'm _much_ more interested in whether it is correct, or incorrect. Do you believe it is incorrect?
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75% margin means they have around $79.2bn of potential revenue sitting in inventory. Next quarter revenue is projected to be $65bn, so 110 days of stock.
The critiques of 'circular funding' don't really make sense to me. If you invest 20 billion and you get back 20 billion, your profit is the same. Sure your revenues look higher but investors have access to all that information and should be taking that into account, just like all the other financial data. Michael Burry is betting against AI growth translating into real profits as a whole, not the circular funding.
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Yeah, I saw this critique show up a few months ago and now I'm seeing it everywhere, even in major financial news sites like Bloomberg.[0] It's certainly worth discussing, but people are taking it as a gotcha to prove the AI boom is fake. However, all the AI companies have to buy from Nvidia anyway. And Nvidia has tons of cash, in fact it has 4x the cash on hand now than it did in 2023, despite all the investments.[1] So yes, if they think the AI market will grow then of course they will buy into it. If all of Nvidia's deals went bad, their stock would plummet, but not because they lost a few tens of billions, rather because that would mean the AI market is going down in general. There is a great counterexample to the "AI is propped up by circular funding" argument in Google, which uses its own TPUs and builds its own AI, and integrates it into it's own end-user products, no circular deals needed. If AI is propped up by anything it is investors and companies thinking it will give them a huge return. Circular deals are a result of that: cash is going everywhere into that market, it's that simple. The AI boom may be a bubble, but not due to circular deals in particular. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-07/openai-s-nvidia-amd-deals-boost-1-trillion-ai-boom-with-circular-deals [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/04/nvidia-has-a-cash-problem-too-much-of-it.html
Burrys critique is that the Nvidia funding deals have them investing money in a company and getting both stock in that company and their own money back to buy the chips. They then book the chip sales in revenue but they don’t show the investment as a cost, since investments are treated separately from an accounting perspective. So it looks like they’re growing revenue organically at no cost, while that doesn’t seem logically consistent with what’s actually happening.
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Burry's critique is even more general than that when it comes to tech companies doing accounting fraud. It's his argument as to why "the market doesn't make sense" and his bets have failed -- which is why I'm not sure anyone would summarize it as "betting against AI growth translating into real profits as a whole"
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The truth is you can't properly account for these transactions. If they are making legitimate equity investments (ie, that an independent investor would reasonably make) it's all fine. If they are investments that don't hold water, it's fraud. It's not that different to any type of vendor financing. Vendor financing is legit, if done legitimately.
this isn't an investing site but Coreweave is what I watch. All those freaking datacenters have to get built, come online, and work for all the promises to come true. Coreweave is already in a bit of a picklye, I feel like they are the first domino. /not an investing/finance/anything to do with money expert.
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Coreweave’s price has been sliding since June. Odd for a bubble to behave like this.
The problem is that stocks are often valued and traded on revenue growth, not profit[0] So circular funding generates stock price bumps when, as you said, there's no inherent value underneath. Creates a recipe for a crash. [0] consider pagerduty, incredibly profitable with little revenue growth. Trading at 1.5X revenue, where high revenue growth, unprofitable companies are trading at 10X revenue.
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I feel like it's almost more of a Popular stock thing. Consider if pagerduty eked out an empty deal with any one of the "Pop stocks" that had little impact on their real profitability. Would stock trade differently or better? It feels like it really would in the modern market. Like even if the numbers weren't a big change, the buzz would be.
Its crypto wash trading.
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Nvidia is buying customers that will likely have increasing need for Nvidia. Those investment dollars will be spent on Nvidia. Future dollars will be spent on Nvidia. Second order effects are that everyone serviced by AI today will need even more AI tomorrow. Nvidia is there for that. They're increasing AI proliferation. By increasing the number of engineers, dollars, watts spent on GPU, Nvidia grows its market. The added benefit here is that Nvidia gets to share in the upside if any of these companies succeed in their goals. This is really smart chess play.
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Why? Wash trading is about selling and then requiring the same asset for tax purposes. How is this analogous, other than that you presumably dislike both practices?
AI should only run as fast as we can catch up (higashi.blog)
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It's like a buffered queue, if the producer (AI) is too fast for the consumer (dev's brain) then the producer needs to block/stop/slow down other wise data will be lost (in this analogy the data loss is the consumer no longer having a clear understanding of what the code is doing) One day, when AI becomes reliable (which is still a while off because AI doesn't yet understand what it's doing) then the AI will replace the consumer (IMO). FTR - AI is still at the "text matches another pattern of text" stage, and not the "understand what concepts are being conveyed" stage, as demonstrated by AI's failure to do basic arithmetic
I have my best successes by keeping things constrained to method-level generation. Most of the things I dump into ChatGPT look like this: public static double ScoreItem(Span<byte> candidate, Span<byte> target) { //TODO: Return the normalized Levenshtein distance between the 2 byte sequences. //... any additional edge cases here ... } I think generating more than one method at a time is playing with fire. Individual methods can be generated by the LLM and tested in isolation. You can incrementally build up and trust your understanding of the problem space by going a little bit slower. If the LLM is operating over a whole set of methods at once, it is like starting over each time you have to iterate.
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I do this but with copilot. Write a comment and then spam opt-tab and 50% of the time it ends up doing what I want and I can read it line-by-line before tabbing the next one. Genuine productivity boost but I don't feel like it's AI slop, sometimes it feels like its actually reading my mind and just preventing me from having to type...
Yes, unfortunately those who jumped on the microservices hype train over the past 15 years or so are now getting the benefits of Claude Code, since their entire codebases fits into the context window of Sonnet/Opus and can be "understood" by the LLM to generate useful code. This is not the case for most monoliths, unless they are structured into LLM-friendly components that resemble patterns the models have seen millions of times in their training data, such as React components.
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Well structured monoliths are modularized just like microservices. No need to give each module its own REST API in order to keep it clean.
Yup. Codebase structure for agents is a rabbit hole I've spent a lot of time going down. The interesting thing is that it's mostly the same structure that humans tend to prefer, with a few tweaks: agents like smaller files/functions (more precise reads/edits), strongly typed functional programming, doc-comments with examples and hyperlinks to additional context, smaller directories with semantic subgroups, long/distinct variable names, etc.
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Aren't those all things, humans also tend to prefer to read? I like to read descriptive variable names, I just don't like to write them all the time.
I think your intuition matches mine. When I try to apply Claude Code to a large code base, it spends a long time looking through the code and then it suggests something incorrect or unhelpful. It's rarely worth the trouble. When I give AI a smaller or more focused project, it's magical. I've been using Claude Code to write code for ESP32 projects and it's really impressive. OTOH, it failed to tell me about a standard device driver I could be using instead of a community device driver I found. I think any human who works on ESP-IDF projects would have pointed that out. AI's failings are always a little weird.
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In large projects you need to actually point it to the interesting files, because it has no way of knowing what it doesn’t know. Tell it to read this and that, creating summary documents, then clear the context and point it at those summaries. A few of those passes and you‘ll get useful results. A gap in its knowledge of relevant code will lead to broken functionality. Cursor and others have been trying to solve this with semantic search (embeddings) but IMO this just can’t work because relevance of a code piece for a task is not determinable by any of its traits.
Honestly, if you've ever looked at a claude.md file, it seems like absolute madness. I feel like I'm reading affirmations from AA.
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It’s magical incantations that might or might not protect you from bad behavior Claude learned from underqualified RL instructors. A classic instruction I have in CLAUDE.md is „Never delete a test. You are only allowed to replace with a test that covers the same branches.“ and another one „Never mention Claude in a commit message“. Of course those sometimes fail, so I do have a message hook that enforces a certain style of git messages.
Yes, but not like what you think. Programmers are going to look more like product managers with extra technical context. AI is also great at looking for its own quality problems. Yesterday on an entirely LLM generated codebase Prompt: > SEARCH FOR ANTIPATTERNS Found 17 antipatterns across the codebase: And then what followed was a detailed list, about a third of them I thought were pretty important, a third of them were arguably issues or not, and the rest were either not important or effectively "this project isn't fully functional" As an engineer, I didn't have to find code errors or fix code errors, I had to pick which errors were important and then give instructions to have them fixed.
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Yeah, don‘t rely on the LLM finding all the issues. Complex code like Swift concurrency tooling is just riddled with issues. I usually need to increase to 100% line coverage and then let it loop on hanging tests until everything _seems_ to work. (It’s been said that Swift concurrency is too hard for humans as well though)
You're rather dramatically demonstrating how remarkable the progress has been: GPT-3 was horrible at coding. Claude Opus 4.5 is good at it. They're already far faster than anybody on HN could ever be. Whether it takes another five years or ten, in that span of time nobody on HN will be able to keep up with the top tier models. It's not irrational, it's guaranteed. The progress has been extraordinary and obvious, the direction is certain, the outcome is certain. All that is left is to debate whether it's a couple of years or closer to a decade.
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Why is the outcome certain? We have no way of predicting how long models will continue getting better before they plateau.
Launch HN: Nia (YC S25) – Give better context to coding agents (trynia.ai)
augment is a coding agent. nia is an external context engine for coding agents that improves their code output quality
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Sure, but Augment’s main value add is their context engine, and imo they do it really well. If all they had to do was launch an MCP for their context engine product to compete, I think the comparison is still worth exploring.
It's amazing that you can do this on your own but the company in question cannot although they have raised $6M. If your README were their entire pitch and website and, it would be 100000x more convincing.
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YC these days is just a fast track for rich kids to raise millions with nothing but a landing page. Vaporware.
i am interested in knowing what would be the correct way to do it according to your checklist. For example you said testimonial from twitter can be bots, which testimonial according to you would give you confidence that product is genuine?
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Okay let's dissect it. First, I will say since this is a for-profit corporate website and they are trying to get something from me, I approach it with a fully skeptical, 0 benefit of doubt perspective. What's the gif supposed to tell me? It's supposed to demo the product and give me a feel for its capabilities. But it just flits around and goes so fast, offers zero explanation for anything, it just leaves me disoriented. So at minimum, this needs captions and it needs to go about 2x slower. But really, this one GIF should not be the most substantive element on the first page relating to the actual product and what it does. Trust lowered. Moving on to the "company carousel", which is trying to say "these other companies trust us so you should too". They're trying to ride on the reputations of Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, UPenn, Google, etc. as a sort of pseudo-endorsement, because they cannot post real endorsements from these institutions, because they do not exist. How are engineers using Nia at Stanford? We don't know, Nia will not say, likely because no one at Stanford is using it in any real capacity that is impressive enough to put on the front page of the website. If they were, then why wouldn't Nia tell us about that rather than just flashing the Stanford logo? So the logo suffices, and I guess the more logos the better. Trust lowered. Next the investor list: who is this for and what does it communicate? It appears to be a list of Chiefs, VPs, Co-Founders, and various funds who are deemed to be "world class", which is just another parade of logos but for a different audience, likely other investors who know these people. Maybe this speaks to some people in terms of the project having a solid financial backing but that's a smokescreen to distract you from the fact there's no actual business plan here aside from running on the VC treadmill and hoping to get acquired by one of your customers and/or investors. Trust lowered. Then we get to the Twitter parade, which is a third instance of "just trust us bro". And it includes such gems as "Can confirm, coding agents go hard" and "go try Nia, go into debt if you have to". Testimonials are for products I can't try myself, this seems like something that can be demoed, so why isn't it? Why did they opt to devote all this space to show a bunch of random people saying random uninteresting things about their product, rather than use the space to say more interesting things about their product? Because the testimonials are a distraction from the actual product. Trust lowered. Again, I'm left asking: Why do I have to listen to and trust these other people if the technology is so good? Why am I halfway down the page reading this thing, and I've yet to hear any specifics about how this thing works or what it does for me. I was told other people are using it but not how, I was told other people invested in it but not how much, and I was told some companies are maybe using it but not in what capacity. So in summary, this page is: "Look how shiny! You trust us. No really, you can trust us! Seriously, look at all these people, who say you can trust us, you seriously can! Now give us money." So to answer your question: > what would be the correct way to do it according to your checklist. Don't do any of the things that were done, and instead lead with the product. Prove all claims made. If a claim can't be proven don't make it. Stand behind your technology rather than testimonials.
Let's put Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle (tailscale.com)
I heard that a lord two provinces to the North had seven of his serfs severely whipped when he found out that they had been talking about how to violate the EULA. These agreements have to be respected!
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Well, you can always pray to only get a DMCA takedown request, because possibly you might get somethingi if not the whip. Surely the internet snarky comment coins will allow you pay the rent.
> is available for all but the most up-to-date Kindles Bought one from eBay to try it out. Silly me connected it to wifi and suddenly it’s up to date and no longer breakable
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Been there before with the OG pixel.
If you want a cheap rooted eReader I think you're better off getting a Kobo instead, they don't officially support rooting but AFAICT they make basically no effort to prevent it.
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I used to like my Kobo a lot but recently it's got some pretty severe unreliability issues, usually around reading non-Kobo epubs and PDFs. Like, if I open of those files, the device usually crashes and when it recovers after a reboot, the file disappears.
The latest Kobos use MediaTek SoCs with locked bootloaders. The Kobo Clara BW's MT8113, for example. As far as I know, one of the early bootloaders it, BL1, refuses to execute the next bootloader (BL2) unless its signature is valid. We can get the device into a mode where BL1 waits for upload of a BL2 via USB using an exploit called Kamakiri, but in public there is neither an exploit to get BL1 to boot an arbitrary BL2, nor an authorized BL2 image to upload. See here: https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient/issues/1332 Kobo devices have root exposed but don't let users boot their own kernels (and the kernel they ship was not compiled with kexec either). I really don't know the reason so many devices these days don't have an unlock method. It seems predatory. Who knows where in the chain this happens... maybe it's Kobo, or maybe MediaTek won't sell you their SoCs for mass-market devices unless you lock them.
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Older Kobos sound ok though?
Can you just access /dev/mem or load a kernel module? Is there a SELinux policy stopping that? If you can do either of those, it should be trivial to get kexec working by just loading it as a module.
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As far as I know, yes, it's possible. No SELinux. Kernel is a branch from 4.9.something pretty far off mainline with a few proprietary binary blob modules. As far as I know the real impediment here is lack of demand.
Google confirms Android attacks; no fix for most Samsung users (forbes.com)
Never mind the December security patches, Samsung haven't even released the November patches yet, the ones for the critical severity RCE. Unless you have a "major flagship model" [1], because apparently only the richest users deserve to be secure. [1] https://security.samsungmobile.com/securityUpdate.smsb
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Why would you want security, if you get 'play integrity' for phones that received no updates since 2 years. Google's current security practices are more than dubious IMHO. Now they are not releasing any source for security patches for 3 month, to 'protect' vendors that are too slow updating. As if there is no chance for bad actors to reverse engineer those patch sets.
Samsung for the longest time was releasing updates way too late, and what they were releasing monthly was old patches. Buying a device directly from Samsung may be different, but the manufacturer still has to usually convert the pure android update to their branch. Still, trying to find a pure android phone is important. More manufacturers used to make them. Example: https://www.androidauthority.com/best-smartphones-stock-android-844672/
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> pure android phone Do these even exist? Last phones I'm aware about were Android One program, but it ended years ago. The link suggests Google Pixel, but it's not pure android phone, it's full of Google junk software.
Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro are still stuck on the October patches.
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My 7 is on the December one.
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Pixel 6a used to show a September patch as the latest, but tapping "check for updates" found a new one. As mentioned in other comments here, apparently tapping those buttons twice may help.
We have an OS security update that is only release to users of a specific hardware, once approved by their mobile operator. It may be added to vendor-specific OS versions some time later (weeks, month or never). The vendor-specific may not be approved by a telco if the vendor doesn't have a relationship with that telco. Now think that millions of people use the same OS on many different flavours, on different hardware, on multiple operators. What an inneficient way of doing things.
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I never understood why a mobile operator has any say in when to apply security patches? Does it happen with iPhones?
Are apples drivers open source?
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No. Which is why "the only exception is macOS" is also false. At some point Apple drops support for that model and then that hardware not only gets no more driver updates, because the whole system is tied to the rest of it, it gets no more updates at all. So the only exception is systems with open source drivers. Those are basically supported as long as the hardware architecture is and enthusiasts even have the option of adding support themselves. You can install the latest version of many Linux distributions on the first generation of x86-64 hardware from 2003 and some on 32-bit PC hardware going back to the 1980s. It should literally be a crime that you can't do the same thing on a five year old phone.
> Being reliant on the hardware manufacturer (or network operator?) for OS updates is the crazy world we live in. Being reliant on a single OS permanently nailed to the hardware is no less crazier. I'd like to be able to install another OS on a vulnerable device, it would help tremendously and not only with the security of that specific device. Now I've got some expensive paperweights that I can't even use as such because every time I see them I have the urge to throw them in the trash can. Provide a way to unlock the phones and a standard BSP, it should be the law.
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> Being reliant on a single OS permanently nailed to the hardware is no less crazier. Locking OS upgrades to a network vendor is substantially crazier. It creates pockets where the hardware vendor ships a security update but your network doesn't care to ship it and isn't incented to. It is BANANAS.
If you are buying now, you want a device on a v5 Linux kernel with BPF support, where the bootloader can be unlocked and VoLTE is implemented in the 3rd-party ROM. LineageOS has a build roster of current devices at this URL: https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/ The Pixels are the most flexible, but don't buy a model from Verizon (they don't allow unlocked bootloaders). Most other OEMs require you to generate an unlock token and send it to them, then wait a week, which is extrememly inconvenient (and sometimes they just stop and refuse, as I understand OnePlus has). If you want a locked bootloader at the end of the process for security, then you will be on a later Pixel with Graphene.
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Unfortunately, even with the best after-market support, banking apps and/or contactless payments becomes a cat-and-mouse game, that, even if it works, can stop working at the drop of a hat.
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I can tell you that Wells Fargo works both on Lineage with Mind the Gapps, and Graphene with the Play store installed. I have it on my OnePlus 5 and Pixel 6a. I understand that most U.S. banking apps work on Graphene. As far as contactless payments, try a Pixel watch. I understand that it is entirely separate from the phone.
The beginning of the English word "fuchsia" is not pronounced like the German word Fuchs, so indeed the spelling does not match the pronunciation. This is independent of the fact that it comes from that word. Plenty of things in English (and, in fact, loanwords in every language) sound different from the words they're derived from; that doesn't mean trying to imitate the source language is the "right" pronunciation. If you pronounce fuchsia like "fuksia" nobody will understand you.
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> If you pronounce fuchsia like "fuksia" nobody will understand you. TIL and yet another case of "English is fucking weird".
No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me (zerokspot.com)
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year. For me I find the $500 to be a pretty clear win as far as value goes. My shelves are already overflowing with, while not "timeless", much slower aging technical books. But quite often, throughout a year, I'll want a deeper dive into a current topic than I can get from online resources + Claude. Quite often that dive involves wanting to look through multiple books (even if only using a few chapters). I know I'm a dying breed, but, while I love AI for interactive exploration and learning, I find books more valuable in the era of endless YouTube tutorials and AI slop blog posts. Technical topics benefit from "big picture" thinking that basically doesn't exist in modern short-form web content.
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Books still activate a different part of the brain than reading on a screen, including e-ink, so it's not you or a dying breed, people may turn out to not learn as deeply or as quickly.
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I had kinda suspected this just based on my own experience of paper vs screen, but hadn’t run across any research. After seeing your comment I went looking! I found this interesting: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb-retain.html
I'm grandfathered in at $200/year from the Safari days. The main advantage of the subscription to me is being able to evaluate several books on a topic to pick the one that is the best fit for what I need. If I knew which books were best in category, it would be cheaper for me to just buy those specific books (or video courses, for things like Blender). But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.
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Agreed, I'm also on a $200/year plan and for me too the fact that I can skim multiple books on a single topic before settling on one is well worth the money.
My two problems with access through libraries is lack of app access, and that every time I login, all my progress is gone (not reset to cover - gone gone), and I have to find the resource again, open it and go to the page/time I was at. Also can’t create my own playlist or favorites. At least my library acts like that.
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Same for SFPL. Majorly annoying.
Anytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work. The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a direction - time will tell if it's the right one. Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.
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I haven't used any O'Reilly products, but if your library offers any, you can probably access the product via libby, which works on a phone/tablet? Just a guess. Libby also supports sending the data to kindles, at least.
It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
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As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate store filled with books on every technical topic imaginable. The publishing industry veterans I've worked with told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom: book sales in the 100,000 copy range was not that rare. Today I can only think of two truly technical book stores that still exist: The MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge, MA and Ada Books in Seattle, WA. The latter, while a delightful store, has relegated the true technical book section to the backroom, which unfortunately doesn't seem to get refreshed too often (though, part of the beauty of this is it still has many of the weird old technical books that used to be everywhere).
Definitely isn't the latter. Numerical Recipes and Hacker's Delight have tons of gems that you won't get from an LLM, or that an LLM will even understand despite appearing all their training sets.
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Even before LLMs became big I started hording solid technical books, as there was so much mis information on Google/SO that any non-trivial technical question could not be answer without a high probability that the answer was fundamentally wrong. LLMs are super helpful for learning, but without the foundation of a true textbook at your side they will very easily go off the rails into a world of imagination.
Maybe a bit depressing, but I'm not sure loaded. I was just talking to someone (in person!) a few days ago, who purported that online courses were basically dead, because people can learn from LLMs instead. And then, it seems to be a real issue amongst some people to ask, "why should I learn X, when LLMs already know it?" Not unlike, "why should I learn to divide, when we have calculators?" but on a grander scale.
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My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs and still want some sort of curated/guided learning experience through material to understand some subject. There is the problem of "I don't know what I don't know" that a course can solve for you. An LLM can sort of do that, but you have to take its word for it, and it does it pretty much strictly worse at the moment (but is much more flexible).
You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year. That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.
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Also check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series. But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs. At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
What are you paying?
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I also pay $200/year, well worth the cost for me.
I successfully recreated the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude (theahura.substack.com)
Wasn’t the OG Space Jam website an image map? Not so different
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Apparently it was a table.
Yes, anyone who reads the post will find that out because it says it in the post.
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I actually did read your post and it read to me as if it put in the background to get around some sort of issue with how you took the screenshot, but had still placed the images and text on top. What you wrote was: So it kind of cheated, though it clearly felt angst about it. After trying a few ways to get the stars to line up perfectly, it just gave up and copied the screenshot in as the background image, then overlaid the rest of the HTML elements on top. Which is only "kind of" cheating if only the background was wrong. Everything being invisible and in the wrong spot doesn't seem like merely "kind of" cheating. You didn't come anywhere close to addressing the problem that the original post was about.
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> I actually did read your post [...] > What you wrote was: [...] > You didn't [...] It's not my post.
I do not try to move anything, if you read my initial post. And after I have seen the final result coming from Claude, which is linked now in the blog post, I must say, recreation not completed! A lot of things are missing, proper zoom behavior, window resize, correct center aligned positioning. So what's the point here anyway?
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The original post that failed to create the Space Jam had no comments on a lack of "proper zoom behavior" or "window resize". It said that the LLM failed to place the elements on the page. The LLM has now solved that problem. You are repeatedly trying to change the criteria to be different than what it contextually was. "It's not a perfect solution because as a developer I would not get benefit from this." "It's not a perfect solution because it doesn't handle <thing which was never enumerated as a success criteria>". None of that was a topic in the original blog post. You can make another blog post, if you like, about how Claude can't handle proper zoom when creating the Space Jam website. My guess is someone will one-shot that too.
Strong earthquake hits northern Japan, tsunami warning issued (www3.nhk.or.jp)
Modern buildings like hotels are built to withstand earthquakes of some magnitudes. Wouldn't count on that at a local construction site or a worn down house you might pass on the street.
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Especially somewhere like Japan. A newer hotel is probably one of the safest places to be.
Buildings are built to resist earthquakes. Outside, anything (electric poles, roof tiles...) can fall on you.
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Shards of glass falling from ten stories up would be one of the main things to try to avoid.
I don't believe the video quite says this (I watched the relevant section). It's worth noting that they are mostly interested in critical phenomena in general, and earthquakes are kind of a drive-by application, treated along with fires and sand piles. They do hint around the edges, but they don't head-on make the claim for earthquakes that small EQs materially lessen stress buildup and thereby make larger EQ's less likely. I was looking for a credential of one of the people they interview, to see if they are really a solid earth person or more of a critical phenomena person -- their names aren't easy to find. This particular myth ("small earthquakes relieve stress") is a bit of a stinker in the solid earth community, and I think a solid earth person would be quite careful about their words as they discuss this.
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I think you've summed it up correctly. It's not proof and some scientists claiming some things isn't the same as studies/evidence. However, is there evidence that it's not true? The fact is we do have these smaller movements and earthquakes quite regularly, so we don't really know what would happen after a long absence of them (do we? I suppose there are simulations perhaps that could be run? But I don't know that that's proof either way). To me though it makes a lot of sense that it would/could spur a huge event.
Your comment prompted me to go read about epicenters and I learned something new. The hypocenter of an earthquake is apparently the point of origin of the earthquake and the epicenter is the point on the earth's surface directly above the hypocenter. Had never heard of a hypocenter before.
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Interestingly, I learned the word hypocenter in Japan as well, in a much more sobering way. The atom bomb that hit Hiroshima exploded above the ground, and the building directly under that, where the blast would have hit first, is called the hypocenter.
Paramount launches hostile bid for Warner Bros (cnbc.com)
Larry Ellison is my named enemy
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larry ellison is guilty of all of the things they accuse soros of doing
The most concerning aspect for me is the obvious and conspicuously-timed consolidation of these companies under David Ellison. Within the past few months he's taken control of Paramount, CBS, The Free Press, and now he's working on Warner Bros. From everything I've seen he's basically an ideologue, and has already re-structured CBS to align with his vision. Just something that seems very out in the open yet kind of pushed off to the side.
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https://bpr.studentorg.berkeley.edu/2025/12/03/how-the-ellison-empire-is-killing-americas-democratic-media/ > How the Ellison Empire is Killing America’s Democratic Media
I have seen several aspects of entertainment in my life get squeezed for money (Magic The Gathering, movies, TV streaming, video games) and I have decided to basically quit any form of entertainment which is solely controlled by large corporations. People get extremely angry when Magic The Gathering charges more money, for more exclusive products, in more frequently occurring releases. Rage, grief, and sorrow over an aspect of your life that you allow a singular company to control. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can walk away , and find more fulfilling activities that you control. This is what the kids call “touching grass”. At this point I don’t watch TV, I don’t watch movies, I don’t play Magic The Gathering, I only play video games over 10 years old. As I have gotten older I see now that this entertainment is junk food that replaces real satisfaction and accomplishment in life. Humans now more than ever have the opportunity to learn and do anything, but instead they spend it squandered on a shadow of real life.
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> As I have gotten older I see now that this entertainment is junk food that replaces real satisfaction and accomplishment in life A bit too condescending if you ask me. People are free to choose to spend time on things they find entertaining and that has no bearing on whether you find it "junk food" or whether the company producing the entertainment is trying to squeeze every penny they can out of it.
Skydance is also known as the then-obscure company that picked up Pixar head John Lasseter when his reputation for being overly affectionate got him pushed out of Disney. It's one of the Ellison family's forays into media. David's sister/Larry's daughter Megan has Annapurna. Annapurna produced the Spike Jonze's AI romance "Her" and many of the the most prominent indie games of the last decade (Outer Wilds, Cocoon, Stray, Kentucky Route Zero, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Journey, Donut Country…).
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Right. Also the weird part of the Skydance Lasseter drama is not just that is happened once, there, but that it happened at nearly the same time but worse at Annapurna. Annapurna games division that had done so well last decade got purged by rehiring someone to oversee it who had been fired the first time for the "overly affectionate" types of problems just before Annapurna's "Golden Age" and was hired as much to better align the games division with making movie knockoffs rather than producing indie darlings (which was a "distraction" for a company trying so hard to be a movie company). (You can almost excuse "hired someone Disney fired for this reason", but how do you excuse "we already fired once for this reason"?) The Ellison family's willingness to be tied to serial harassers, and in the case of Annapurna in direct expense of being a beloved media producer, makes you wonder what worse skeletons that family has in its closet if this is already just the open awful stuff they want us to know about their close associates.
They've just about said as much. They thought they had a friendly bid in the works just before WB announced a more exclusive friendly bidding process with Netflix. Definitely some drama going on there.
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they snoozed they losed
I think the political angle of this should not be discounted
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Stage AGs have a strong role to play in anti-trust law. And the other party they're suing _isnt_ a Federal agency this time. Now maybe nothing matters. But conflicts of interest will come up in those cases. Trump doesn't win _everything_. Trump wins at places where the Supreme Court is using him for their own project of reworking the constitutional order. Basically Trump shoots up a volley with some absolutely batshit PoV, they interpret the topic in some saner (still crazy) right wing legal idea. And the Supreme Court fast track's these cases about executive power. This case would be State AGs having independent standing to challenge major M&A. It will drag things out at a minimum, in a way the Supreme Court's rapid resolution of executive branch cases is not dragged out.
Some context: "Affinity Partners, the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, is part of Paramount's hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, according to a regulatory filing." https://www.axios.com/2025/12/08/jared-kushner-paramount-warner-bros-netflix
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The dark side of all this is a propaganda network. The government and who runs it should not be in business I'm sorry. This isn't free markets, it's manipulation and corruption.
Thank you, I had no idea how this was politically related, and honestly cannot keep track of all the corruption these days anyways. How does anyone? This is pretty much a genuine question.
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are executives breathing? then there is corruption. start following the money and you'll find it, we're in the new gilded age
I think it gives Netflix an advantage. When it comes up in front of a judge he'll note the obvious conflict of interest and Trump's idiotic pronouncements, like the fact that he said he will be personally involved, and rule for Netflix.
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This will go to SCOTUS, which typically gives the administration preferential treatment. The US's current level of corruption is way too high to assume your scenario.
> Except there is robust competition in media —be it news, social, etc. As of a few years ago, there were six corporations owning 90% of US media: NewsCorp, TimeWarner, Comcast, Disney, Viacom, Sony. * https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/fs5g0b/more_than_90_of_the_us_media_is_controlled_by/ * https://techstartups.com/2020/09/18/6-corporations-control-90-media-america-illusion-choice-objectivity-2020/ Add to that local channel ownership (like Sinclair) concentration: * https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/media-consolidation-means-less-local-news-more-right-wing-slant * https://www.vox.com/2018/4/6/17202824/sinclair-tribune-map * https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/broadcasters-urge-fcc-to-hit-the-delete-button-on-antiquated-regs This is especially true when it comes to investigative journalism, where it may take weeks or months to run down leads and information.
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Sure, I would call this robust competition.
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[delayed]
Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices (office365itpros.com)
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WPS - Free tier
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25%++ up in my region (EU)
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Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
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Hoorah for Libre Office :)
Why do I, as a European, have to pay for Trumpflation?
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You don't? The price increases are below euro inflation (although the numbers are listed in USD so I'm unsure if the price will be meaningfully different in Europe
They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026 [0]. Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint, despite it being unable to natively open .pub files. The solution for that? Run a powershell script to convert all your publisher files to (uneditable) PDF. There are many memes about inserting photos into Word, and the content flying around and breaking. My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed or was included in M365, and used PowerPoint as an everything-is-a-hammer crutch, and have now gotten jobs at Microsoft and are sticking with it. Also, as far as I can tell, Publisher is the only application where the color-picker includes Pantone colors which is a must for professional poster production. I assume Microsoft is paying a licensing fee for this, and I wonder if they'll remember to cancel it. Perhaps Affinity can eat their lunch and release a word-processor. [0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-publisher-will-no-longer-be-supported-after-october-2026-ee6302a2-4bc7-4841-babf-8e9be3acbfd7
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Sunsetting a product to save money smells like promo-driven culture
I'd disagree in terms of the cloud capabilities. When it is used properly . The cloud stuff is very useful. I currently have a document that is going through multiple versions with about 8 people, with different expertise collaborating. Some have edit privs, some only have review. The ability for everyone to work on it simultaneously, with version history and no more document-v12-copy3_FINAL_FINALv2 is most welcome.
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If you heavily rely on Word and PowerPoint. I know several companies that almost never use those products except in limited situations (legal, keynote presentation etc). All "regular" discussions/presentations take place on Confluence/Notion/Quip etc. I wish my company did the same thing.
This feels like a dangerous game they're playing. Yes, there is some lock in, but competitors exist and are better than ever. The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
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> This feels like a dangerous game they're playing. There are different types of danger in playing the "We're the Monsters" game that Microsoft and the US Intelligence agencies seem to love. There's the danger their allies in Europe like Germany running the Open Document Foundation aren't as powerful as they think. I'm sorry if that's the case and I wouldn't want to be making those calculations. But there's a different danger to normal US citizens just trying to live their fucking lives and build theie life spreadsheet. It's so easy nowadays to fall into the trap of identifying more with European values, including digital data protection and open source. Or wanting to leave the country. But some people don't want to be forced out of their home when they're vulnerable. It hurts knowing we are seen as monsters ourselves and I don't blame that sentiment. But where will the next generation be shifted to? Launched to Europe after Canada? Then launched into Space? It's tied into the other social situations like public support for Luigi Mangione's actions and horrible calls for the death of political actors. You know it's a convenient way to demonize a large portion of the population and legally protect institutions like the FBI. Who does important work and is just doing their fucking job. That game isn't as dangerous for them. The cost to them is minimal, but huge for citizens stuck down here.
> A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, for example, gets you bundled Teams and Exchange. That's a negative.
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For end-users maybe, but for the business' IT who get a working mail server they don't have to mess with, and a whole remote work and videoconferencing package that "just works" and most people already know how to use, it's a hell of a deal.
Zoho and Collabora spring immediately to mind.
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Zoho is crap. Sure, on the tin it comes with 64 different things, but many are poorly integrated and feature set is just enough to be like "Yes, we have that feature."
None of the things you listed are suitable replacements for Excel. None. It has nothing to do with existing files/compatibility. Excel is unparalleled.
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Have to disagree. It depends on what you are doing. That the alternatives can be replacements, including the open source ones, is relative and should be looked at as a percentage. If you listed out all the things that Excel can do, we might find that the alternative is at 80% or so (just a number), with some additional things that Excel can't do. That 80% could be good enough to switch. It should not be looked at as "all or nothing", especially for every person or business.
I want to love these, mostly because they're FOSS and Office/Google Spreadsheets seems to get more and more bloated, and subsequently slower. But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts. I'm waiting for some FOSS spreadsheet solution that doesn't just try to copy Office, but comes up with something better. Then it'll feel like it's worth it to learn a whole new program and its UX, rather than just suffering through it because you wanna use FOSS.
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Many would say that the FOSS alternatives don't copy Office enough. Often, by going there own way with various tasks, they create a bigger jump. Case in point, the Linux distros that attract the most attention for common folk and not niche use, are the ones that are more Windows-like. Examples: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Zorin, etc... The smaller the jump, the more you can convince people to switch over. When there is a significant difference, it needs to be shown what the equivalent is in the alternative. The jump can be a bit mitigated by education or information, but usually by only so much, where it's still seen as attractive.
Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives. Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job. For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.
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It's interesting how views differ; I have never been able to make decent scientific graphs in Excel while Calc worked fine for me.
IBM to acquire Confluent (confluent.io)
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Adjacent space, but can't help but wonder why Confluent did so much better than MapR
IBM was teabagging the Hasicorp booth at re:Invent with conspicuously old hardware set out like a museum piece. Ugh.
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What does this mean?
You can measure it by how many management steps you, as an employee of the recently acquired company are from the CEO in the hierarchy. As time goes on, this number tends to increase. It used to be easy to see this in Lotus Sametime or something that had some form of employee directory.
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Fun fact: there's an IBM/Lotus Sametime theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daitUOzVpvc The lyrics rhyme "PC" with "easy."
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That's awesome. Before ~2007 they allowed you to use open-source Pidgin to connect to the Domino servers. A friend of mine and I used it to make a bot: if you sametimed me, you got Zork. It reminds me of another IBM IT rule: they wanted your chat history (and email) older than two years to be all deleted for legal liability reasons. It was important to save your sametime chat history (an XML file) and export your email periodically if you wanted to keep this stuff.
A lot of people seem to voice a disdain for Notes but I actually liked it for some reason.
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That's because your comment is only 3 levels deep. Let's revisit this when it's Reply to Reply to Reply to Reply :)
Not to be cynical but that's said a lot in acquisitions by bigger companies to motivate some people to stay, but just doesn't seem to happen.
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For every incredible journey there is an equal and opposite lesson to be learned
Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now. The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They've fallen behind now, but they were also quite strong on pre-LLM NLP for a couple of decades, it was not all fluff. Yes they have an awful enterprise culture and they are not focused on building excellent products. But what they offer fits the needs of many organizations, and a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke.
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> The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. But they don't have production. How can they develop successfully without running silicon in a fab?
Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.
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I had no idea about what Watson was initially meant to solve. I do remember they tried to sell it - at least in the meeting I went - as a general purpose chatbot. I did try briefly to understand how to use it, but the documentation was horrendous (As in, "totally devoid of any technical information")
Sure, but they were doing that stuff. They had ML people, infrastructure, marketing, branding,etc... already. Their product sucked, but they could have copy-catted OpenAI in 2022+ like everyone else.
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I don't think that would have gotten them much of anywhere. They already spent a decade trying to find markets for Watson to fit and generally failing at it. The problem with Watson wasn't technology, it was that it had no direction.
Event-driven AI decision making is the C-suite wet dream. A large % of major orgs run Kafka for their eventing systems.
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not for much longer
I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`
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Yes but try putting that on your CV.
Funny you mention that, because Kafka consumers actually pull messages.
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What is the reason for using Kafka then, sorry if I'm missing something fundamental.
Some people don't and won't need 50+ producers/consumers for a long while, if ever. Rewriting the code at that point may be less costly than operating Kafka in the interim. Kafka is also has a higher potential for failure than sqlite.
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Okay, then those people don’t have to use Kafka. What is your point?
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