Unlurker|Replay|About
2025 was the third hottest year on record (economist.com)
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Really? Can they send some of that hotness over to Germany, we're getting snowstorms over here.
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> Really? Can they send some of that hotness over to Germany, we're getting snowstorms over here. Yes, really. The warmest recent years (e.g., 2022, 2023, 2024) rank among the highest average temperatures on record for Germany. The rate of warming in recent decades is stronger than the global average, with Germany seeing about 0.38 °C per decade (1971–2022). .... and other similar statistics. Look up. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folgen_der_globalen_Erwärmung_in_Deutschland
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Weather is not climate, silly. Well, unless it supports the claims of alarmists, of course.
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Related: Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why ( https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/16/earth-is-warming-faster-scientists-are-closing-in-on-why )
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https://archive.ph/KVTqO
Trump to impose tariffs on European nations over Greenland (dw.com)
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think this is a pretty obvious demonstration that the 1776 republic is no longer fit for purpose why is the congress allowing this to continue? in any parliamentary democracy this cretin would have been gone by now
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Nato - Article 2 The Parties will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions, by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded, and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being. They will seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any or all of them.
These tariffs must be becoming self defeating. If they get imposed on a whim what is the point of avoiding them, only to be told you need to jump higher next time. Surely the answer must be to trade with anyone else and write off the USA.
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You cannot negotiate with a bully. The EU should have never backed down so easily before. I hope someone will soon find some balls and not let the US walk all over everyone
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EU politicians like Merz and von der Leyen are pushovers.
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if they back down on this one then orange-adolf will go after canada
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I think it's inevitable that an "almost-anyone-but-the-US" free-ish trading coalition of countries will appear.
So more financial burdens for US citisens? Poor Americans. Why did they vote for this lunatic?
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Trump did racist dog whistling, and the US mass media has been captured by oligarchs, so it wasn't reported honestly or completely. A surprising large portion of the US electorate is racist, and the US voting practices amplify exactly those voter's influence.
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It was a bad election cycle for incumbents worldwide. Many Americans are hurting from the cost of living and wanted a change. I know many who are definitely not racist (in interracial marriages/relationships even) who voted for Trump just on the hope for an improved economy.
My view is that he won because he promised to deport illegal immigrants. I think his voters think he is delivering.
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It appears to be a combination of racism, crabs in the pot, tribalism and in group, and people looking for another group to look down on because they have no opportunity ahead of them between now and death. Happiness is reality minus expectations. His supporters still say “It’s not great but I’d vote for him again.” Well, the unfortunate news is he’s near end of life and they footgunned their own economic opportunity light cone. The global economy is going to route around the US accordingly, because it cannot be trusted to trade as an adult vs a bully. They will continue to have their vote and mental model regardless of rationality and logical reasoning. All you can do as a nation state counterparty is defend against military action and disconnect economically. Same vibes as "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." —- LBJ
Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, France, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland to face a 10% tariff beginning February 1. Trump said tariffs will be in place until "a deal is reached" on Greenland. [...] Trump added that if no resolution is reached until June 1 this year, the tariffs will jump to 25%. These are most of the countries that sent military forces to Greenland during the past two days for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Arctic_Endurance . The US was also invited.
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As I Swede, I must say this list of countries are the countries I love the most in Europe (well, I like the weather in Spain and Italy, but I mean politically). I would like our countries to integrate more, maybe with a common army. In the Nordics we already have begun to integrate our Air Forces to a common Nordic Air Force. Why not extend that to UK, France, Netherlands and Germany? These countries together could form a quite powerful army, air force etc. that could safeguard Europe against external threats.
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Maybe something like a constitutional republic of independent states? The only way to ensure one political party doesn't seize full and complete control over the entire thing and bend its will to exclusively their goals.
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Same, though, as a Dane, I must express preference for Norway, Sweden and Finland (and Iceland), obviously :) I hope his antics do nothing except push us closer together.
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At the same time we need to realize that the US actions are clearly meant to tear the EU apart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Arctic_Endurance The Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto found the operation superfluous and ridiculous, calling it a joke, and urged that it be carried out under NATO coordination. It's just that I also want that split (north vs south, sort of). The EU of today is dysfunctional, largely because of this immense cultural split.
Eight European countries face 10% tariff for opposing US control of Greenland (apnews.com)
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Can this be revoked after the midterms? In that case I guess the EU can wait it out.
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It is wildly fascinating to experience, in real time, how fragile the US system is. Trump really did show that the US is built on the assumption that people in power will behave, basically a honor system. Trump is stress testing every single aspect of the US. He's dousing the US with gasoline, and fumbling around with matches. The people around him, knee deep in gas, are too afraid to take the matches from him. In so many other countries, Trump would face a no confidence vote. Snap elections.
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Yeah those checks and balances that Yanks are always waxing poetic about have turned out to be basically horse shit. There are no checks and balances, they elect a king for 4 years and then hope for the best. That's the American system.
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He was actually asked about why he is even doing this nonsense by the NYT, since they can get Denmark already to agree on any new military bases (they already have one) or mineral extraction anyway: David E. Sanger: Why is ownership important here? President Trump: Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base. Katie Rogers Psychologically important to you or to the United States? President Trump Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything. Just imagine the amount of lives that it will cost to carve him from his bloody throne and drag his supporters into deprogramming camps. It will only get more costly with each passing month. https://archive.ph/EhTNh
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So Trump doesn't like the fact that some European countries dare to oppose his dictat, so in response he's going to... raise the prices on US consumers ?
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My impression as a European is that trust in the United States has now been burned, and that companies are slowly, but inexorably, completely rethinking their dependence on the U.S. I believe this is a process that is not reversible in the medium term. Trump, like any politician, will sooner or later pass. How many institutional reforms will the United States have to undertake, and how long will it take before the world trusts them again?
Since the only thing Trump understands is force, I am looking forward to the retaliation from and military positioning of EU member states to defend Greenland. Perhaps it is what is needed to finally impeach.
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The EU is not a military/security alliance (yet).
I wish Europe would just push back. More than what they are currently. There is so much potential there, but somehow the EU all look at the US as some form of idealogical father figure. Excuse the hyperbolic-talk.
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It's like when every liberal scoffs at leftists opposing US imperialism, nothing about the power balance has changed. Europe was always a vassal of the empire. This is the liberal international order, this is what that means, not what they tell you it means, but what it actually means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order That's why they can kidnap Maduro, have the BBC censor the word "kidnapped" in their reporting on it. Have every European politician applaud it, point to Maduros case against him at the ICC and have Netanyahu fly over France. You can't do anything about Greenland, the same way you can't do anything when he comes for Norways state-owned extraction industry next. Liberals can scream hypocrisy tears all they want, this is the world they built. The empire is coming home.
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The fact is that there is no potential there. Europe has no leverage over the US. It is not holding back anything, it has nothing. Somehow when the US went to war with Russia, it ended up completing the conquest of Europe. Europe used to just be stagnant. Now it is stagnant and isolated from everywhere except the US, and the US treats it accordingly.
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Europe has, in no particular order: - ASML - Nukes - Large proportion of US bonds - One of the wealthiest and most profitable markets in the world - The world's largest trade network - currently aggressively expanding into LatAm with the Mercosur deal despite Trump's Monroe 2.0 ambitions. Just a few off the the top of my head. There's plenty leverage there.
The EU has a huge strategic problem because they let their own defenses and industry rot for decades and can't functionally stand alone against Russia, US pressure, and Chinese economic infiltration / industrial replacement at the same time. At least, not without great sacrifices the population isn't willing to make, like pension reform. So they are playing gentle with the US because it's the least bad choice right now.
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> can't functionally stand alone against Russia, US pressure, and Chinese economic infiltration / industrial replacement at the same time. No country in the world can do that. That's not a consequence of 'they let their own defenses and industry rot for decades'.
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The EU is 450 million people! It's the size of the entire continent of south america! It was the richest part of the world for centuries! They absolutely should be able to function as an independent block with international trade for convenience and not survival.
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Great, but standing against Russia, the US and China at the same time? Come on.
Every morning I wake up wondering if it's happened yet, and every morning (so far) I've been disappointed
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I was glad when the Butler shooter missed. Now I’m not so sure.
And the question is, What the hell is in the Epstein files that this is needed.... :-)
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A snuff film where the witness implicates Trump is something we already know about. I'm not sure I have the stomach to know how deep it really goes.
So, since there's a lot of talk like this, how are we leeches? If anything, surely it's the Americans who are leeches, what with the fact that they're living off software exports and monopolies as opposed to production of actual useful goods? Do you think we didn't invest in our defence? Here in Sweden we put in 5% of GDP until the Soviet Union dissolved. It was pro-US politicians like Carl Bildt, a man who associated with US intelligence, who reduced defence spending. We had nuclear weapons and refrained from assembling them on a US request in return for being under your nuclear umbrella.
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Not to take away from the larger point, but the US remains a manufacturing juggernaut compared to anyone that isn't China. It's still the #2 manufacturing nation in the world and produces more than the EU as a whole. It's just become a small aspect of a much larger economy.
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Yes, but I think the US industrial output is overvalued. The US has a very small value of total exports, and this lead me to assume that the goods it makes a lot of are not always competitive on the international market even though they sell for a great deal in the US.
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It's just a small difference, so stay on earth (17.3 % Vs 17%)
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I'm sure you mean well, but to make this comment at all takes away from the larger point no matter how you try to disclaim it. It's just not the time.
Transforms. Look at history, they’ve always done that when convenient to them.
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True. Those who think they are being unfair just now, this is actually the fairest they've been since forever. Fairest in terms of arm twisting and other tactics being applied to everyone equally instead of being selective. Previously it was on the lines of the west and the rest, but now its just America and the rest.
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So edgy, much wow. Try continuing this line of thought instead of stopping at one novel half-thought. Perhaps there is something to the western world order that's worth defending? As an American I will argue against my government's unilateral global adventurism all day long. That certainly doesn't mean that expanding the behavior is progress.
Surely you're not wondering, it's universally known what motivates the man.
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But that plan is so short sighted that even he might live long enough to see it fail
Europe cant afford to have enemies on both sides. It will align with the US reluctantly because even a bat shit crazy US is better than Russia. China plays it too close to the chest to be a friend.
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It will not align with the US if that means territorial losses. Russia is an economical lightweight that's causing a bit of a headache on the eastern border but for the EU looking weak would make things so much worse.
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Indeed. As the US abandons it, the EU seemingly has no other choice than to find ways to align with Russia now.
Sure if they want to chase away their tax revenue.
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What tax revenue ? Aren't they all declaring their profits in Ireland (a tax haven) ?
If the Europeans plus Canada want it to exist, it exists. Otherwise, yeah, scrap heap of history.
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EU has it's own more robust defence agreement.
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Can Canada join, or has it? Other non-EU countries?
Fox News happened.
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And social media. Trump is the social media president.
Fox News has never cared about Greenland, and was energetically anti-Trump during the 2016 primary, most of his 1st term, during the Biden presidency, and during the 2024 primary. They're almost fully in the bag for him right now, but hate tariffs. But even now, Fox News refused to sign on to the new Pentagon press pass requirements, and gave up their access. Important things are going on. It's not good to mindlessly repeat tropes; we have to actually engage with the world as it is.
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It's not about Fox News pushing the Greenland annexation bullshit, it's for everything else they did to be a mouthpiece to spread the "libs are bad!". These acts have a direct link to the power Trump amassed. Refusing the Pentagon prrss requirements is a nothingburger when for the past 10-15 years it brainrotted a large cohort of the American population.
An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm (bbc.com)
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It's an interesting article on this one particular mansion, but the idea that "the same tricks for more efficient heating can be used in modern designs" seems pretty silly. We don't use fireplaces anymore (a major "trick" being to put them in the middle of the house rather than in the exterior walls), and while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter, it also leads to overheating in the summer and thus more energy for air conditioning. > These are modest changes, imperceptible to most, and they won't enable us to forgo active heating and cooling entirely. But they do echo a way of thinking which, today, is oft ignored. Hardwick Hall was designed with Sun, season and temperature in mind. Everyone I know who has built a house has thought very much about sun, season and temperature. This is very much a factor in determining the sizes and quantity of windows on south-facing vs. north-facing walls. Again, it's a very interesting article on this one particular castle, but the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy. We're well aware of all these factors and how they interact with materials and design.
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Brits will do anything except properly insulate their damn homes.
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And make a bathroom practical and enjoyable. Sink with hot and cold tap, electric water heater in shower, come on...
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When we lost power for 10 days a few winters back we attempted to use the fire place for heat. It was a fail. Post and beam house (large wide open floor plan) with a large transfer from 1st to 2nd floor, and apprently my lack of skill for optimizing heat over beauty in the fireplace, left us without much of a thermal bump. To this day I swear we were pulling heat out of the chimney faster than we were heating the house; I cooled the house with fire.
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Yeah, if you actually want to heat the house with fire you’ll want an insert or a wood stove. Otherwise most fireplaces in most houses are decorative, and one pays for that decoration with heat loss.
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That’s not uncommon, but having grown up in a house heated by wood fires I knew that when building our current house. The main fireplace is on a central wall and has enormous thermal mass. Beauty and utility can be combined.
> Fireplaces were strategically arranged so minimal heat would be lost to the outer walls I'm always a little confused by radiators placed underneath windows in modern buildings. I'm sure it evens out cold spots, but it sends a lot of heat right outside.
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When the cold air coming from the window drops, it pushes the rising hot air out into the room. Overall loss of heat, but feels better for the human occupants long term.
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This was deliberate engineering to bring in fresh air. After the 1918 Flu, there was a desire for more fresh air inside homes. All of the apartments I lived in Chicago were built decades later, but the radiator layout persists. Article[0] on it I’ve heard a story, and I don’t know if it’s an urban legend, that steam heat became popular after the 1918 flu pandemic because it was going to force overheating of units and make people open their windows and let the bad air out. I’ve never heard it put that way, but the flu pandemic had a huge impact on heating systems, because they actually changed the code requirements for heating systems when the pandemic was around, because they didn’t know what was causing this. They thought there was something in the air that was causing this. And so what they did is they started requiring buildings to be ventilated. Essentially, they changed the requirements for heating buildings so you had to maintain 70 degrees in the building with all the windows open in the sleeping rooms. So people see these great big huge radiators and think that that’s what they have to have in the house. Usually, the reason those radiators are so big is because they had to heat the house with windows open. [0] https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/a-history-of-radiators-in-chicago-qa-with-the-steam-whisperer/ Edit: switched out to different article focused on Chicago
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No furniture in front of the window.
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It stops drafts from the window before they reach occupants. Yes, it is less efficient in terms of total heat inside the structure, but its more effective at avoiding uncomfortably cold spots, which is (in most places at most times of year) more important, plus, the utility lost to the occupied under-window space is less than the utility that would be lost for the same space elsewhere; the window already limiting alternate uses.
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I think a lot of those old central heat systems you couldn't actually control the heat, being able to lose a lot of heat to the window if you wanted was probably a feature. I was watching a video on old soviet blocks in cold areas and it sounded like it really sucked to live too close to the central heater and have to deal with super hot houses
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I lived on the top floor of a 12 story dorm with radiators. Everyone on our floor would have the windows open all the time. When it was warm out, we needed any fresh air. When it was cold out, the radiators would be so hot, the fresh air balanced it. Down about 6th floor was nice though. But, to answer the OP, putting conditioning on the envelope of the building keeps the temperature gradient minimal. If you deliver conditioning to the center of the building, the envelope approaches outside temperatures (depending) and you have a big gradient and much less comfort.
Passive house thinking comes from an era of peak oil concerns, no solar, and no heat pumps. None of those conditions holds anymore. Further, passive houses are notorious for overheating and because they’re so airtight they require expensive mechanical ventilation and make-up air systems unless you want indoor air pollution problems. People building houses today are much better served by spending their money on solar + battery + heat pumps than going passive.
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> because they’re so airtight they require expensive mechanical ventilation and make-up air systems unless you want indoor air pollution problems. Most modern homes have this issue. Building science has driven them to be air tight bubbles. Look at blower door tests on current construction and a lot of "building science" driven construction.
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Solar is still not free or unlimited. A well designed house will be more comfortable and save energy over its whole life while costing a fraction more than a badly designed house. It's better no matter the heat source really. And it allows you to do without central heating and/or complex heating techs which are more annoying to maintain and replace
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But any modern house is too airtight and essentially requires ERV. Which brings us to next interesting problem - you would think that ERV should be built-in into modern cooling/heating systems, but it’s no the case.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto (resonantcomputing.org)
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I think manifestos are useless without a concrete, real-world example for people to follow and add on to. It's easy to wish for puppies and rainbows, but trying to deliver is hard. For example, Linear has a useful manifesto ( https://linear.app/method ) because they have a product that attempts to follows it. I have much more respect for a manifesto that is informed by contact with reality.
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Conceptually nice, but I don't know what this looks like in practice. An "examples" section is sorely needed.
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I’m a fan of the goal here, would be interested to see what initiatives folks are envisioning to get us there, as it were
Escaping the trap of US tech dependence (disconnect.blog)
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If we want to meaningfully reduce our dependency we "just" need more capital. All founders in Canada will tell you that Canadian VC suck: they are risk averse, their due diligence is painful and their terms are made so they can't lose. It is not rare in Canada for ex-founders of failed startups to be hundred of thousands of dollars in debt. That's why we are always advised to go seek funding in the US. In Canada we like to give money to big established monopolies, that's our thing. The SR&ED program is a prime example of that, as a bootstrap business it took us 3 years before we could apply since we didn't have enough money to front full salaries for 1.5y before receiving a grant. It is not really a complex problem to solve, the entrepreneurs know the solutions but our politicians and wealthy people are so small c conservative it's pathetic.
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Please, just leave already. Stop talking about it and just do it. It’s like people talking about how awful social media is. Just don’t fucking use it. Nothing would make Americans happier than an alternative. Europeans, go build your own big tech that can compete and win against Microsoft/Copilot. It’s not a big lift.
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Here are the migrations we been doing to with my extended family to get rid of our US dependencies: - Gmail -> ProtonMail - Whatsapp -> Telegram - I installed Linux to my parents laptops. They like it. - YouTube App -> Newpipe and Smarttube Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.
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Made a Ask HN, but screwed it up by editing the text. Anyway, good ideas/tools for evaluating LLMs ? Naturally, as a Dane, I am moving away from Claude, but I’d like more than a gut feel about how much I may have given up to do so.
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Just go for Qwen or Deepseek. They are both very good.
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Tech dependence is nothing compared to the world's dependence on US financial infrastructure.
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Hasn't really been true for the past few years with a whole separate infrastructure emerging around BRICS Now.
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Geopolitics aside, tech dependence in general has tipped from net helping us to hurting us. AI dependence is going to make social media dependence look like nothing.
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I have never seen some person or organization that couldn't ditch LLMs in an instant. Are you talking about some other kind of AI?
This is written from a Canadian perspective, but even within America, there are good reasons to stop giving money to American tech companies and find alternatives. The founders and executives and investors of all of these companies have become wealthy and powerful. Now they are dismantling the country by funding a certain political group and looking the other way as that same group seeks to deport 100 million Americans (basically all non whites), invade allied nations, and terrorize people in the streets. There’s no escape from the reality that dollars given to American tech companies is dollars given to that same machine.
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> [Republicans] [seek] to deport 100 million Americans (basically all non whites), invade allied nations, You think these are statements of fact?
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Do you think a lot of US tech workers feel the same? From my personal interactions these past few days on HN it is very disappointing how ignorant and devoid of facts the arguments are which come from people who seem to be US tech workers.
The easiest was of escaping the trap of US tech dependence, is to buy your tech from China. Everything they have is very advanced, and cheap to boot. Huawei instead of Apple, WeChat instead of WhatsApp, etc. Everyone wins except Trump.
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How would this lead to sovereignty?
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The downside is that this tech stack is also being rolled out to Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Venezuela to build their own local versions of the Great Firewall. It is currently being used to crush dissent and imprison anyone who disagrees with the regime. I guess if you consider that “winning” then definitely continue to support Chinese dominance.
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There's a German saying "Vom Regen in die Traufe", I think the English version is "out of the frying pan into the fire". China is a good alternative for a lot of hardware, but in terms of software it is not an option.
Is China a better country to rely on?
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You mean compared to the country that is bombing other countries, kidnapping their leaders while also threatening to annex territory of its ally?
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Which countries and leaders do you have in mind?
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Right now, China is still supporting the russian war machine. The russian people are openly at war against Ukraine and the European idea. Still China is a great alternative to US in terms of hardware, because all the things you would buy from the US is just made in China anyways. While the US are acting like foolish, uneducated hotheads China is silently benefiting from all parties involved.
“You told me these were the best engineers in the world!!” “I said they were the best engineers in Canada” (Great quote from the BlackBerry movie). Rings true here. You can’t fight market forces. To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
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Only if you think that government's only purpose is to look pretty. Economies are planned. You can either plan them as governments, or let your oligarchs and foreign oligarchs plan them together ("market forces.") These only look the same when you allow oligarchs to determine your governments. At the very least, you want domestic oligarchs determining your governments. Their power is based in your country, and they might have a bit of sentimentality on top of that. Leaving it to "market forces" is just watching, not participating. If some guy in Europe builds something better than current US tech, he's going to sell it to a US oligarch and probably move there, too.
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Good thing that US Tech is building the worst technology possible. Should make things a lot simpler
Libre Office is literally free and has never competed for significant market share in 30 years. It has to be better
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Your "better" assumes that availability is not a problem. The risk we need to mitigate is that some right wing doofus in the US gets triggered by a twitter reply and decides to block our use of all US software and services. In that case, having libreoffice installed locally does not seem so bad. This is the risk we are worrying about.
> To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking. Not true at all, a perfect example from the ride-sharing world. Lyft and Uber left Austin a decade ago over a city ordinance requiring background checks, so a couple local tech folks pitched in a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, and built a non-profit version of Uber. Everyone loved it, drivers got paid more, it was cheaper overall because it was a non-profit, the app worked just fine, etc. The app buildout was somewhere in the seven figure range. All was good until Lyft and Uber came back, artificially undercut the non-profit app until it died, and then drove prices back up. And that was ten years ago. Today, a rockstar infra expert and product engineer could easily stand up a scalable ride-share clone. And if people are mad enough (and it sure seems like people are getting mad at the US), then the energy is there for users to make a change.
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Your story makes the point that the nonprofit app only worked under new government regulations and could not survive in the free market? I do think more infrastructure should be non-profit, but if someone makes a for-profit version that beats you there’s not really much to do other than hoping the government has your back.
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The nonprofit app worked because the existing players didn't want to do required background checks on drivers and exited the market to make the local government look bad. When that tactic failed, they came back and used some of their VC billions to recapture the market by artificially lowering the price of their services. That's not at all "free market", that's buying your way to a monopoly (or more technically an oligopoly in this case)
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It wasn't a free market, it was an anticompetitive market
You absolutely can fight market forces. China did it for decades with their car industry. Chinese people were financially forced to buy inferior Chinese cars to support a domestic industry until it learned to compete in the global market. Very difficult to do this in a democracy, though.
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Isn't that the exact description of the current U.S. car market?
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I am going to find this irony hilarious for eternity. Cars are cheaper and better outside America, the so called car capital of the world. Go to one of these SoCal car conventions, it’s amazing how all the car reviewers go wide eyed at the Chinese cars in display.
Is US tech even good anymore? Do none of us not encounter the massive amount of shit from companies like Google, MSFT, Apple, Amazon, etc as users? Truly terrible bugs or user flows from engineers that clearly don't care while everyone is just collecting their own share of blood. I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years. All US Tech has is the backing of the US government and that is likely to change in the coming decade, without the pressure of the US government would these companies be as competitive? We see what happens when others try to, rightfully I might add, regulate them: they throw extreme hissy fits and pressure the US government to force the countries to back off (by threat of sanctions or military action).
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No, US tech is driven by investors willing to risk allocating a ton of capital towards companies and products that have a good chance of succeeding. Europe has been struggling and behind on tech and investments way before Trump. It’s policy and over regulation that prevents Europe from making any inroads
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What has Rome ever done for us?
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I see US (software) tech going the way of Boeing and Intel in the next decade. I’m not sure what their long term goals are, or if they even have any beyond chasing large/quick short term profits, but you can only enshittify your product and abuse your customers for so long before they start abandoning you.
> I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years. Apple silicon has been pretty transformative for desktop/laptop-class chips.
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It has been transformative for the insidious kind of lock-in that the post mentions.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: I built a tool to assist AI agents to know when a PR is good to go (dsifry.github.io)
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This looks nice! I like the idea of providing more deterministic feedback and more or less forcing the assistant to follow a particular development process. Do you have evidence that gtg improves the overall workflow? I think that there is a trade-off between risk of getting stuck (iteration without reaching gtg-green) versus reaching perfect 100% completion.
Sorry, so the tool is now even circumventing human review? Is that the goal? So the agent can now merge shit by itself? Just the let damn thing push nto prod by itself at this point.
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In some workflows it's helpful for the full loop to be automated so that the agent can test if what's done works. And you can do a more exhaustive test later, after the agents are done running amok to merge various things.
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Someone’s gonna think about wiring all this up to Linear or Jira, and there’ll be a whole new set of vulnerabilities created from malicious bug reports.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
We Put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon (labs.ramp.com)
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> "Where Claude excels:" Am I reading a Claude generated summary here?
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This was an interesting application of AI, but I don't really think this is what LLMs excel at. Correct me if I'm wrong. It was interesting that the poster vibe-coded (I'm assuming) the CTL from scratch; Claude was probably pretty good at doing that, and that task could likely have been completed in an afternoon. Pairing the CTL with the CLI makes sense, as that's the only way to gain feedback from the game. Claude can't easily do spatial recognition (yet). A project like this would entirely depend on the game being open source. I've seen some very impressive applications of AI online with closed-source games and entire algorithms dedicated to visual reasoning. I'm still trying to figure out how this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doec5gxhT_U Was able to have AI learn to play Mario Kart nearly perfectly. I find his work to be very impressive. I guess because RCT2 is more data-driven than visually challenging, this solution works well, but having an LLM try to play a racing game sounds like it would be disastrous.
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Interesting this is on the ramp.com domain? I'm surprised in this tech market they can pay devs to hack on Rollercoaster Tycoon. Maybe there's some crossover I'm missing but seems like a sweet gig honestly.
this is cute but i imagined prompting the ai for a loop-di-loop roller coaster. If this could build complex ride it would be a game changer.
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yeah I was expecting it to... do something in the game? like build a ride not just make up bullshit about events
Follow up Q: what are you supposed to do when the context becomes too large? Start a new conversation/context window and let Claude start from scratch?
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It feels like one could produce a digest of the context that works very similarly but fits in the available context window - not just by getting the LLM to use succinct language, but also mathematically; like reducing a sparse matrix. There might be an input that would produce that sort of effect, perhaps it looks like nonsense (like reading zipped data) but when the LLM attempts to do interactive in it the outcome is close to consuming the context?
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Either have Claude /compact or have it output things to a file it can read in on the next session. That file would be a summary of progress for work on a spec or something similar. Also good to prime it again with the Readme or any other higher level context
Yet another reason to use Jujutsu. And put a `jj status` wrapper in your PS1. ;-)
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Start with env args like AGENT_ID for indicating which Merkle hash of which model(s) generated which code with which agent(s) and add those attributes to signed (-S) commit messages. For traceability; to find other faulty code generated by the same model and determine whether an agent or a human introduced the fault. Then, `git notes` is better for signature metadata because it doesn't change the commit hash to add signatures for the commit. And then, you'd need to run a local Rekor log to use Sigstore attestations on every commit. Sigstore.dev is SLSA.dev compliant. Sigstore grants short-lived release attestation signing keys for CI builds on a build farm to sign artifacts with. So, when jujutsu autocommits agent-generated code, what causes there to be an {{AGENT_ID}} in the commit message or git notes? And what stops a user from forging such attestations?
> Yet another reason to use Jujutsu And what would that reason be? You can git revert a git revert.
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You're correct for an actual git revert, but it seems pretty clear that the original authors have mangled the story and it was actually either a "git checkout" or "git reset". The "file where 1-2 hours of progress had been accumulating" phrasing only makes sense if those were uncommitted changes. And the reason jj helps in that case is that for jj there is no such thing as an uncommitted change.
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Probably it actually ran git checkout or reset. As you say git revert only operates on committed snapshots so it will all be in the reflog
Its like ordering a project from upwork- someone did it for you, you have no idea what is going on, kinda works though.
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Since there are no humans involved, it's more like growing a tree. Sure it's good to know how trees grow, but not knowing about cells didn't stop thousands of years of agriculture.
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Very interesting analogy
Can't wait for someone to let Claude control a runescape character from scratch
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Wouldn't that break Jagex's TOS though? Is there a way of getting caught?
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I imagine Jagex must be up there with having the most sophisticated bot detection out of anyone. Its been a thing for decades
The recurring dream of replacing developers (caimito.net)
Remains to be seen for production settings. My guess is no. I’ve seen people talk about understanding the output of their vibe coding sessions as “nerdy,” implying they’re above that. Refusing the vet AI output is the kiss of death to velocity.
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> Refusing the vet AI output is the kiss of death to velocity. The usual rejoinder I've seen is that AI can just rewrite your whole system when complexity explodes. But I see at least two problems with that. AI is impressively good at extracting intent from a ball of mud with tons of accidental complexity, and I think we can expect it to continue improving. But when a system has a lot of inherent complexity, and it's poorly specified, the task is harder. The second is that small, incremental, reversible changes are the most reliable way to evolve a system, and AI doesn't repeal that principle. The more churn, the more bugs — minor and major.
I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity." In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring strategies and networking patterns on top of CNI because they never learned the fundamentals these abstractions are built on. They're not learning faster: they're relearning the same operational lessons at orders of magnitude higher cost, now mediated through layers of YAML. Each wave of "democratisation" doesn't eliminate specialists. It creates new specialists who must learn both the abstraction and what it's abstracting. We've made expertise more expensive to acquire, not unnecessary. Excel proves the rule. It's objectively terrible: 30% of genomics papers contain gene name errors from autocorrect, JP Morgan lost $6bn from formula errors, Public Health England lost 16,000 COVID cases hitting row limits. Yet it succeeded at democratisation by accepting catastrophic failures no proper system would tolerate. The pattern repeats because we want Excel's accessibility with engineering reliability. You can't have both. Either accept disasters for democratisation, or accept that expertise remains required.
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> accept disasters for democratisation Will insurance policy coverage and premiums change when using non-deterministic software?
The pattern that gets missed in these discussions: every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer. COBOL was supposed to let managers write programs. VB let business users make apps. Squarespace killed the need for web developers. And now AI. What actually happens: the tooling lowers the barrier to entry, way more people try to build things, and then those same people need actual developers when they hit the edges of what the tool can do. The total surface area of "stuff that needs building" keeps expanding. The developers who get displaced are the ones doing purely mechanical work that was already well-specified. But the job of understanding what to build in the first place, or debugging why the automated thing isn't doing what you expected - that's still there. Usually there's more of it.
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Machinery made farmers more efficient and now there are more farmers than ever.
This suggests that the latent demand was a lot but it still doesnt prove it is unbounded. At some point the low hanging automation fruit gets tapped out. What can be put online that isnt there already? Which business processes are obviously going to be made an order magnitude more efficient? Moreover, we've never had more developers and we've exited an anomalous period of extraordinarily low interest rates. The party might be over.
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Look at traditional manufacturing. Automation has made massive inroads. Not as much of the economy is directly supporting (eg, auto) manufacturers as it used to be (stats check needed). Nevertheless, there are plenty of mechanical engineering jobs. Not so many lower skill line worker jobs in the US any more, though. You have to ask yourself which category you are in (by analogy). Don’t be the SWE working on the assembly line.
Classic Jevons Paradox - when something gets cheaper the market for it grows. The unit cost shrinks but the number of units bought grows more than this shrinkage.
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Of course that is true. The nuance here is that software isn’t just getting cheaper but the activity to build it is changing. Instead of writing lines of code you are writing requirements. That shifts who can do the job. The customer might be able to do it themselves. This removes a market, not grows one. I am not saying the market will collapse just be careful applying a blunt theory to such a profound technological shift that isn’t just lowering cost but changing the entire process.
> I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product There are a lot of counterexamples throughout history.
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This is too cryptic. Be clearer what you mean. Ponzi schemes?
It's not so much about replacing developers, but rather increasing the level of abstraction developers can work at, to allow them to work on more complex problems. The first electronic computers were programmed by manually re-wiring their circuits. Going from that to being able to encode machine instructions on punchcards did not replace developers. Nor did going from raw machine instructions to assembly code. Nor did going from hand-written assembly to compiled low-level languages like C/FORTRAN. Nor did going from low-level languages to higher-level languages like Java, C++, or Python. Nor did relying on libraries/frameworks for implementing functionality that previously had to be written from scratch each time. Each of these steps freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level problems. Mel's intellect is freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common. (The thing that distinguishes gen-AI from all the previous examples of increasing abstraction is that those examples are deterministic and often formally verifiable mappings from higher abstraction -> lower abstraction. Gen-AI is neither.) [0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
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I think one thing I've heard missing from discussions though is that each level of abstraction needs to be introspectable. LLMs get compared to compilers a lot, so I'd like to ask: what is the equivalent of dumping the tokens, AST, SSA, IR, optimization passes, and assembly? That's where I find the analogy on thin ice, because somebody has to understand the layers and their transformations.
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“Needs to be” is a strong claim. The skill of debugging complex problems by stepping through disassembly to find a compiler error is very specialized. Few can do it. Most applications don’t need that “introspection”. They need the “encapsulation” and faith that the lower layers work well 99.9+% of the time, and they need to know who to call when it fails. I’m not saying generative AI meets this standard, but it’s different from what you’re saying.
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Sorry, I should clarify: it's needs to be introspectable by somebody. Not every programmer needs to be able to introspect the lower layers, but that capability needs to exist. Now I guess you can read the code an LLM generates, so maybe that layer does exist. But, that's why I don't like the idea of making a programming language for LLMs, by LLMs, that's inscrutable by humans. A lot of those intermediate layers in compilers are designed for humans, with only assembly generation being made for the CPU.
the infinite-fountain-of-software machine seems more likely to replace developers than previous innovations, and the people pushing the button will not be, in any current sense of the word, programming
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You absolutely need to be trying to accomplish these things personally to understand what is/will be easy and where the barriers. Recognizing the barriers & modes of failure (which will be a moving target) lets you respond competently when you are called. Raise your hourly rate as needed.
You're absolutely correct on that. The technology industry, at least the segment driven by VC (which is a huge portion of it), is funded based on ideas that the capital-owning class thinks is a good idea. Reducing labor costs is always an easy sell when you're trying to raise a round.
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Even in boring development jobs. For example, one of my first development jobs was for a large hospital, building an intranet app to make nurse rounds more efficient so they didn't have to hire as many.
And you do this honestly, by negotiating reduced hours for the same pay or by negotiating piecework rather than time-based pay. Right?
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What does the term mean? I think the answer to your question is obvious.
Italy investigates Activision Blizzard for pushing in-game purchases (techcrunch.com)
Can we agree to stop calling it anything but gambling? Because it's just gambling. Also, the fact that it's called gotcha (got ya) has always had the hair up on the back of my neck.
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>Can we agree to stop calling it anything but gambling? Because it's just gambling. No. It is not just "gambling" it is a very specific form of gambling, which is unlike most other forms of gambling. E.g. for most other gambling activities, the expectation is that the reward is monetary (see e.g. sports betting, roulette). This should be clearly demarcated from micro transactions, where a predetermined reward is offered for a fixed amount of money. Lootboxes, where a digital reward (which may or may not be resellable) is given and gatcha mechanics, which are a very specific genre of gambling for digital rewards. I see no reason why all of these should be treated the same. >Also, the fact that it's called gotcha (got ya) has always had the hair up on the back of my neck. Pure coincidence. The name comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gashapon
As a game developer myself, I think young kids should not be able to make purchases on their own. But some of the ideas on what needs to be done is just silly. Here is some of the ideas the Norwegian Consumer Council suggested: - All things in games should be shown in real money value, not in game currency that you have to but for real money, and the price should reflect the most expensive way to get the currency. - All transactions in games should have the same rights as in real life(if you buy an item in game, you could use your right of withdrawal). - Users should be able to choose how much the want to buy of premium currency/spend. While it might have good intentions, they have serious issues. I sell bundles of in game currency. I don't allow users to select just how much they want to buy. I don't do this as part of an evil plan, but because it makes sense. Bigger purchases give more, because the percentage lost to fees are lower. Tiny amount can not be bought, as it would not make sense considering the per transaction cost. I don't price things in real currencies, cause after the purchase is made, it's not real money, and if it were, I'd be a financial institution and break the rules of all major card networks. It also would cause issues when it comes to inflation adjustment. If an user buys 100 "coins", they can buy something for 100 coins. If I adjust for inflation then I adjust the price of coins, not how many coins are needed to buy something in game. That would not work with real money. Regulation is welcome, but don't do something dumb. Let most thing be as they are, but put strict rules in place on kids making purchases, that way a grown up who hopefully understands money can approve or deny the purchase.
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> I sell bundles of in game currency. I don't allow users to select just how much they want to buy. I don't do this as part of an evil plan So if I look at your in-game purchases, I’m going to find that they aren’t all priced to make the user buy the next-larger increment of currency… right?
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> Bigger purchases give more, because the percentage lost to fees are lower. So you sell $100 of in game currency for $85. It's all the same except 1 coin equals one cent when you buy it in the smallest bundle. > I'd be a financial institution and break the rules of all major card networks. It's measured in dollars but it is a gift card. It's not that serious.
Cherry picking the foreign company with the deepest pockets for “crimes” every game developer commits these days? Surely, HN of all places recognizes that the EU fines Meta/MS any time they have a shortfall in their budget.
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Can you show me the graph that shows the relationship between "EU budget shortfalls" and "Meta/MS fines".
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> Surely, HN of all places recognizes that the EU fines Meta/MS any time they have a shortfall in their budget Am I supposed to be upset at this?
The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says (npr.org)
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Here's the link to the Brooking's report from the NPR article, to read it in full: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-direction-for-students-in-an-ai-world-prosper-prepare-protect/ I've only skimmed it, but I note that all this research is before Nov 2025 and is quite broad. It does get some into coding, mentioning GitHub CoPilot and also refers to a paper about vibe-coding, where the conclusion is that not understanding the artifacts is a problem. So all this reporting is before Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 came out. Everything is really different with the advent of that. While substitute teaching just before Xmas 2025, I installed Antigravity on the student account of the class computer and vibe-coded two apps on the smart board while the kids worked on Google Classroom. This was impromptu, to liven up things, but I knew it would work because I had such amazing experiences with the tool the week before. * [1] Quadratic Formula Explorer for Algebra 2 * [2] Proving Parallelograms for Honors Geometry Before the class ended, I then gave a quick talk the gist was: "I just made these tools to understand the coursework by conversing with an LLM. Are you going to use this to cheat on your homework or to enhance your understanding?" I showed it to a teacher and then she pointed me to existent tools like them on educational web sites. But that was missing the point that we can just manifest the very hyper-specific tools we need... for example how should the Quadratic Formula Explorer work for someone with dyslexia? I'm not sure what the next steps with all this is, but certainly education needs to adapt. The paper notes "AI can enrich learning when well-designed and anchored in sound pedagogy" and what I did there is neither, so imagine how sweet it is gonna be when we weave this into educational systems by skilled curriculum designers. [1] https://conacademy.github.io/quadratic_explorer/ [2] https://conacademy.github.io/proving_parallelograms/
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Most of comments seem to assume that education system have been functioning up to this point, LLM-s appear and there are somewhere solutions ready to adapt. That's just not the case. For many reasons – parental problems, early development, phones, social media, decline of responsibility, changes in educational principles in general etc etc etc – education is already in free fall almost all over the world. Average student even in universities is functionally illiterate now, it's not an exaggeration. Even if we assume that there is LLM which would help to learn, how these students should use it? https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
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How these students should learn it, indeed.
> At the drafting stage, it can help with organization, coherence, syntax, semantics, and grammar Wait, but organizing and expressing your thoughts IS writing. If you don’t make them do the work why bother sending them to school at all. AI has a great niche place in schools: searching the library. The rest of this seems dumb.
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I agree. The output is entirely beside the point. There is no market for gradeschool book reports.
There are studies done that social media before 14 greatly increases depression in new ways. And short form content physically shrinks the brain. Studies easily accessible. Just because boomers are out of touch doesn't mean you or I default are in touch. Boomer probably had the same deluded feeling of being better than the generations before them but likely lost something. Since we're wanting to point fingers, why not point some fingers at the millenials who built the digital slot machines that the users today don't know they were curated to use.
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Bro did you know that tree sap makes your skin glow too bro? Studies easily online for anyone to read easily.
I've listened to a handful of podcasts with education academics and professionals talking about AI. They invariably come across as totally lost, like a hen inviting a fox in to help watch the eggs. It's perhaps to be expected, as these education people are usually non-technical. But it's definitely concerning that (once again) a lack of technical and media literacy among these education types will lead to them letting (overall) unhelpful tech swarm the system.
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Look up some of Tressie McMillan Cottom's writing, podcast appearances, public lectures, etc etc. She's a McArthur-certified Genius and a full professor at UNC, and she's a spectacular writer and public intellectual. She wrote "Lower Ed", about for-profit colleges in America and has identified places that more elite schools are copying that playbook. https://bsky.app/profile/tressiemcphd.bsky.social https://www.instagram.com/tressiemcphd/
I encourage everyone thinking about commenting to read the article first. When I finally read it, I found it remarkably balanced. It cites positives and negatives, all of which agree with my experience. > Con: AI poses a grave threat to students' cognitive development > When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is … they are not thinking for themselves. They're not learning to parse truth from fiction. None of this is controverisal. It happens without AI, too, with kids blindly copying what the teacher tells them. Impossible to disagree, though. > Con: AI poses serious threats to social and emotional development Yep. Just like non-AI use of social media. > Schooling itself could be less focused on what the report calls "transactional task completion" or a grade-based endgame and more focused on fostering curiosity and a desire to learn No sh*t. This has probably been a recommendation for decades. How could you argue against it, though? > AI designed for use by children and teens should be less sycophantic and more "antagonistic," pushing back against preconceived notions and challenging users to reflect and evaluate. Genius. I love this idea. === ETA: I believe that explicitly teaching students how to use AI in their learning process, that the beautiful paper direct from AI is not something that will help them later, is another important ingredient. Right now we are in a time of transition, and even students who want to be successful are uncertain of what academic success will look like in 5 years, what skills will be valuable, etc.
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So, I fed the article into my LLM of choice and asked it to come up with a header to my prompts to help negate the issues on the article. Here's what it spat out: ROLE & STANCE You are an intelligent collaborator, editor, and critic — not a replacement for my thinking. PROJECT OR TASK CONTEXT I am working on an intellectually serious project. The goal is clear thinking, deep learning, and original synthesis. Accuracy, conceptual clarity, and intellectual honesty matter more than speed or polish. HOW I WANT YOU TO HELP • Ask clarifying questions only when necessary; otherwise proceed using reasonable assumptions and state them explicitly. • Help me reason step-by-step and surface hidden assumptions. • Challenge weak logic, vague claims, or lazy framing — politely but directly. • Offer multiple perspectives when appropriate, including at least one alternative interpretation. • Flag uncertainty, edge cases, or places where informed experts might disagree. • Prefer depth and clarity over breadth. HOW I DO NOT WANT YOU TO HELP • Do not simply agree with me or optimize for affirmation. • Do not over-summarize unless explicitly asked. • Do not finish the work for me if the thinking is the point — scaffold instead. • Avoid generic motivational advice or filler. STYLE & FORMAT • Be concise but substantial. • Use structured reasoning (numbered steps, bullets, or diagrams where useful). • Preserve my voice and intent when editing or expanding. • If you generate text, clearly separate: - “Analysis / Reasoning” - “Example Output” (if applicable) CRITICAL THINKING MODE (REQUIRED) After responding, include a short section titled: “Potential Weaknesses or Alternative Angles” Briefly note: – What might be wrong or incomplete – A different way to frame the problem – A risk, tradeoff, or assumption worth stress-testing NOW, HERE IS THE TASK / QUESTION: [PASTE YOUR ACTUAL QUESTION OR DRAFT HERE] Overall, the results have been okay. The posts after I put in the header have been 'better' at being less pleasing
> I believe that explicitly teaching students how to use AI in their learning process, that the beautiful paper direct from AI is not something that will help them later, is another important ingredient. IMNSHO as an instructor, you believe correctly. I tell my students how and why to use LLMs in their learning journey. It's a massively powerful learning accelerator when used properly. Curricula have to be modified significantly for this to work. I also tell them, without mincing words, how fucked they will be if they use it incorrectly. :)
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> powerful learning accelerator You got any data on that? Because it's a bold claim that runs counter to all results I've seen so far. For example, this paper[^1] which is introduced in this blog post: https://theconversation.com/learning-with-ai-falls-short-compared-to-old-fashioned-web-search-269760 [^1]: https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf316
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The Dilbert Afterlife (astralcodexten.com)
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I also read Dilbert books years before joining the workforce. Though the framing of the strip is the workplace, it averages out to all the people in one's life who are wrong but have authority. As a rebellious little shit, I could identify with how Dilbert's boss (PHB) was wrong in ways that I recognized in adults around me plus my inability to do anything about it. This is why every level of worker can see themselves as Dilbert and their superiors as the management who "don't get it." I bet there are even C-suite execs who identify with Dilbert and see their CEO or board of directors as PHBs incarnate. This was part of the appeal of the strip before it went off the deep end; almost everyone taking orders believes they know better than at least one of the people telling them what to do. I'm surprised I don't see this acknowledged more.
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I was hoping this was a series of Dilbert comics to be released after Scott Adams death about Dilbert in the afterlife and was a bit disappointed.
Can we talk about how he in the end buried himself in vile racist politics? Sure I enjoyed Dilbert. The story about the frustrated highly intelligent engineer at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. At the bottom of the social hierarchy. So what does this archetypical mistreated highly intelligent nerd finally do? Reads up on junk psychology on how to manipulate and influence people. Goes to the gym to get buffed. Gets high on alt-right politics on how the white man now is under whipping hand of woke women and ungrateful immigrants. Just a fascist joke of a person.
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What's wrong with going to the gym? Also, I don't think you know what the word fascist means.
I think this article really nails it. Adams' ego and self-satisfaction contributed to his susceptibility to the forces of the internet. It could happen to anyone. What I remember that is notable about Scott Adams is way back he had The Dilbert Blog and it was pioneering in it's early adoption of the internet. Adams wrote his takes and theories back then, too. But he once wrote that he was going to scale those back, because they were not productive: he would lose followers for being controversial. But later something happened with the feedback loop of social media, because he eventually started to court controversy. I do think that the internet sucked him in.
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Think he was always unusually susceptible to the feedback loop of social media. Long before he was trying to be a political figure, criticism of his book resulted in this glorious piece of peak internet forum nonsense in which he responded to criticism by registering an anonymous account to say things like "I hate Adams for his success too" and "he's a certified genius which is hard to hide" until the mods decided to call him out... https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Education-by-Scott-Adams#3639512
The book is okay (I think I gave it three stars on Goodreads?) but in my opinion it suffers from Neal Stephenson syndrome: the book kinda just ends without a whole lot of anticlimax or resolution. The pacing is all over the place and the supporting cast are more like character sketches than characters. I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
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I read the whole thing and enjoyed both the premise and the writing, but yeah, it would have benefited considerably from the attention of a professional editor and a couple of rounds of rewrites.
This article keeps saying that Adams was more clever than the others. What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not. As clues it is the case: 1) Adams came up with very stupid easily proven wrong physics theories and still was convinced it was correct, which is not what a clever will do, 2) as said in other comment here, some people who identifies themselves as "clever like Adams" were also incapable to get their head around the fact that their own boss was displaying dilbert comics, as if they were not clever enough to understand that the manager see themselves as "dilbert" the same way they do.
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Reminds me of my stoner friends in high school who would watch a few videos by Carl Sagan and then become convinced that they know everything about physics and come up with convoluted and ultimately silly “theories” for physics. Makes me wonder if Adams was a frequent drug user.
You don't look for smart people by looking for people who don't do stupid things, because you won't find any. You look for smart people by finding people who do smart things because stupid people don't do smart people things.
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I'm not saying Adams is not smart because he has done stupid things, I'm saying that Adams has probably thought of himself as very smart while not smart at all in field X because it is pretty clear he has done that in fields Y and Z (which is the first clue). The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.
Uh-huh. Rationality is open-ended, we're apparently not very good at it and room for improvement is plentiful. However, I can still try to be rational, and approve of rationality.
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see that? you didnt even read what I wrote and responded to something else. humans....
> why should Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat! He doesn’t have to work! There’s a fan theory that Garfield hates Mondays because he just spent two days with Jon and now Jon is leaving him alone again.
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I thought the joke for Garfield is that some crazy annoying shit happens to him on Mondays, and as such he uses the same “I hate mondays” that a person might, just for different reasons.
Personally I hated them they felt dehumanizing, and loved my first open floor company I also don’t like WFH, I wonder if people who like open plans also like RTO
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Power to you but I absolutely hate open offices. They’re often loud and it’s easy to get distracted by random conversations. I know people fantasize about these “random conversations” leading to innovations from overhearing, but that hasn’t been my experience at all; instead because it’s so distracting a lot of people would just wear headphones all day. I would so prefer an office. Ideally something that allows me to play music at a reasonable volume without headphones, use my mechanical keyboard, and have my own desk that I am not neighboring up against someone. As it stands I work from home so I actually have that, which is why I am dreading the eventual RTO. If I could get my own dedicated office at a company, I think I would have way less desire to WFH.
I get that we’re all part of the same system, but I consider Office Space a nihilistic rejection of the entirety of that system. It’s not just “my boss is dumb,” it’s “this whole system is anti-human and dumb, and we’d all be happier working outside with our muscles.” And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event. Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this , it’s that ” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.
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To add some meta to your edit: I would swear you are not an LLM... or maybe an LLM trained on a lot of comments on HN.
Great eulogy and art, What saddens me is the lack of a friends around him, seems like he got isolated in the politics of 2015 and then got radicalized.
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I could only hope for a eulogy like that. I think the lack of friends (heightened by his Titanic wealth) contributed to his isolation. Like how we all kinda got out of practice talking with people during COVID isolation. That then kinda spiraled him into algorithmicly fed nonsense as he didn't have anyone he could trust to tell him he was wrong. Just sycophants and fans and golddiggers. Cicero is still right, a friend is the best thing to have, no question. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/cicero-on-friendship-de-amicitia Eulogies are such good reading for those of us left here. They really drive the points home. Life isn't the grind, it's a journey. We're all just here for each other
"Russia was never run by engineers?" That's a massive oversight of 20th-century history. The Soviet Union was the world’s first and most committed technocracy. The GOSPLAN (State Planning Committee) was a literal attempt to run a continent-sized economy as a deterministic engineering problem. By the 70s, the Soviet leadership was more densely packed with engineers than any administration in US history. They failed because they tried to 'refactor' nature. Stalin’s 'Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature' and Mao’s 'Great Leap Forward' (which applied industrial throughput logic to biology/close-planting) are the ultimate warnings of what happens when you treat complex, probabilistic systems (ecology and humanity) like a closed-loop machine. Mao wasn’t an engineer by degree, but he was a High Modernist by practice. He believed society could be 'debugged' and 'optimized' through central planning. The result wasn't a more efficient system; it was a total system crash that cost tens of millions of lives. Current China is a perfect example of 'Success by Engineering'—high-speed rail and ghost cities built on a demographic 'memory leak' (the One Child Policy) that is now crashing the entire stack. This is exactly my point: Engineers optimize for the metric they can see, while ignoring the high-dimensional chaos that actually sustains life.
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I think you're trying to overcomplicate this, I'm not sure why. "Engineers" aren't one thing, you can be an engineer and have all the soft skills and insight into the world to navigate the so called "high-dimensional chaos". MBAs can be narrow minded and focused on optimizing their pseudo-scientific system of disposable widget workers. The word Engineer at its french root means "clever" or ingenious. It's mind boggling how much effort people go through just to try redefine concepts that fit their own particular worldview. It's not surprising it's more common on posts by Scott Alexander and his ilk of sad pathetic sacks, but jeez
"Governance creates markets" I am not sure this is necessarily the case, at least historically. We have good evidence of long distance trade from the Stone Age, and even some Neanderthal sites contain stones whose origin can be traced to distant regions (over 100 km, IIRC, which is far away in a primordial roadless countryside). I would agree that markets cannot grow beyond a certain size without a government, though.
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Presence of trade is not necessarily a market in the modern sense.
Pretty easy to take pot shots at a dead guy who lacks the ability to punch back. Especially when the dead guy hosted a daily show and would have been thrilled to have him come on and debate! Why didnt Mr Codex get around to stating his opinion re: Adams for the past 10 years?
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For what it’s worth, I think a lot of people were pretty happy to shit on Scott Adams for the last decade. I don’t know anything about Scott Alexander, but even well before Adams had cancer, there was a thread on Something Awful making fun of all the stupid weird shit Adams would say.
The 600-year-old origins of the word 'hello' (bbc.com)
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Ciao is an interesting one. Kind of like you might say 'your humble servant' in English, the Venetians would say "sciavo vostro". Literally "your slave" - schiavo vostro in modern Italian. Which then morphed into "ciao".
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In Bavaria and Austria they say "servus" which literally means slave/servant in Latin.
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Yes, when they are not Grüß Gotting.
I associate "yello" with Homer Simpson: https://www.facebook.com/TheDoctorZaius/videos/723328371509214/ (fingers crossed I'm not somehow doxxing myself by sharing a fb link)
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Forgot about that. So about a 100% chance my dad got it from that.
One advantage of using hello as a greeting is that it is agnostic of social rank. This made it the perfect choice for greeting people of unknown social rank on the phone. Having traveled the world quite a bit I can attest to the ubiquity of the word hello… almost everywhere I go it is understood. ‘OK’ has a similar ubiquity, and it is interesting that both words are relatively new additions to the English (universal?) language.
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These are called translingual words. 2 interesting ones are coffee and chocolate. basically no matter where you are in the world, people will understand those (with slight regional differences like "cafe", similar to hello)
ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering (alexharri.com)
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I love that they don't just work on the edges and declare their work complete. No, shadows also have to be perfect! Reminds me of this underrated library which uses braille alphabet to draw lines. Behold: https://github.com/tammoippen/plotille It's a really nice plotting tool for the terminal. For me it increases the utility of LLMs.
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Hmm. This renderer is impressive. Will it be available for toy projects? (such as an online page with JavaScript for converting family pictures)
Tell me someone has turned this into a library we can use
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I was investigating a fun webcam-to-ASCII project so now I am tempted to take an approach at porting the logic from the blog post into something reusable.
PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch (theregister.com)
Slightly off-topic: my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue? My Mac Mini M4 is on its way. Can't wait to stop dealing with this mess. (Just this morning, I noticed that the login dialog for network drives, which has worked fine for decades, has misaligned text fields. I don't want to think how this could possibly happen.)
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This happens regularly for me too, and Luke Lafreniere (from Linus Media Group) reported this too during WAN Show. He said that he sometimes has to hit sleep 3–4 times before his PC actually stays in sleep mode.
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> my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue? Yes. By default moving the mouse or brushing the trackpad wakes the PC up... so when you have a fast machine it goes to sleep quicker than you can take your hand off the mouse. The solution is to turn off 'Allow device to wake' for the mouse in device manager. Well, that's been my experience anyway, there could be other causes I'm not aware of.
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This can be one cause, but sometimes the computer wakes up for no reason at all, even when not touching anything.
I agree with you to some extent, but if Microsoft loses Windows here permanently then its desktop-centric control will also come to an end. So it would lose tons of opportunities here. I don't see Microsoft wanting to go that route really. It would basically commit suicide.
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They don't need it if everything is in the cloud running oh their servers. They won't care if you are running Windows, Linux, Chrome, A tablet with a keyboard and mouse hooked up. The vast majority of people that don't work in IT don't ever use a laptop or a desktop computer unless it is for work. They are using a phone and/or tablet.
Cynical viewpoint: Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line? If the market is AI-everything, any resources that you devote to non-AI is a bad signal. Incentives are everything.
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Sure, but if your customers can't even use the AI products because your OS is dysfunctional, then you're still losing out.
Because all of Microsoft's people secretly use linux on thier machines. (No joke. This is a thing. It means when something goes catastrophically wrong with windows, the people in position to fix the problem will still be able to function.)
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I can't really add to that one but I do know that many at Cisco turn old Cisco gear into Linux workstations.
It's still a change. GNOME dictates onto users what the developers think the users should use or have. I find that not acceptable.
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GNOME is doing something right for a change and fixing a common source of security issues. If you like it, just keep the behavior enabled.
I once watched a co-worker completely bork a customer system by accidentally middle-clicking while moving his mouse after copying an ls -l of /usr/bin (where pretty much everything was a symlink to the real executables in /bin). Yeah, he shouldn't have been logged in as root, but the point remains that middle-mouse paste can be extremely dangerous and fat-finger-prone.
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I love Linux, but the cut and paste situation is really terrible. The middle mouse paste isn't a problem for me--it's that there are two separate "clipboard" buffers, which just causes all sorts of problems.
I'm pretty scared what userland piece of software will be re-written while ditching backwards compatibility and making the current body of support knowledge worthless. After all, we've replaced the display server (sort of), audio, init and service management, network commands (netplan) if not much more. My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust. Oh, your printer that worked for 20 years is now a useless brick? What a shame, at least now the printing subsystem is secure and blazing fast .
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Not even Rust zealots want to touch printing ;)
After 25 years, Wikipedia has proved that news doesn't need to look like news (niemanlab.org)
grokipedia.com > wikipedia.com Objectively so.
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jfc
> I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be. I think it is true for all information we consume. One of the very important skills to learn in life is to think critically. Who wrote this? When? What would be their bias? Text is written by humans (or now sometimes LLMs), and humans are imperfect (and LLMs are worth what they are worth). Many times Wikipedia is more than enough, sometimes it is not. Nothing is perfect, and it is very important to understand it.
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Also, I think for 99% of Wikipedia, there isn't much need to worry about Biases. It's about an uncontroversial chemical compound, a tiny village, a family of bacteria and so on. Knowledge isn't all subjective and prone to bias.
I was introduced to Maslow's hierarchy of needs 25 years ago around the same time I read about Pavlov's dogs. The need to belong is extraordinarily motivating. It became obvious that the cults leveraged the need in the individual to belong to a group by accepting the person without judgement first rather than attacking the person they are trying bring into their group pushing them away. The leaders who understand that are winning.
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I get told this a lot by liberals, that it's wrong that I shouted in a cop's face that he's a fascist pig and a traitor to the people, now he'll never support my cause, but I'm not really sure I agree. The cop, and the nazis he's protecting from me, will never join "my group" in ten million years, no matter how nice I am to them. Do you believe otherwise?
Pretty much every married woman (who changed/added to her last name) has her birth name written there, even if she was never notable/known as Knavs or Skłodowska. More info is usually better than less info, if you personally don't need to know something, that does not mean that that info should be removed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_Trump
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Most people, who adopt a different married name, don't do so because they consider their former name to be offensive or insulting. If I'm proud of my name, you should include it. If I'm ashamed of my name, you should omit it, unless it's important context or information. You have to have a clear articulable reason above, it's a real detail.
So, you don't think I'm wrong? The OP used "he" because they have a transphobic agenda? > because we use to call a person who will always have hairs on his face as "male". We may not have solved the question, "what is a woman," but you have brilliantly solved the question, "what is a man": a human with eyebrows.
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If someone uses "he" word it does not means antitransism. My point is that trying to euphemize "he" word is anistraightism. And I am even not an antigayist. If your words can be reversed so easily it means that you have no idea but a pure propaganda instead. Famous anti-white-straight-man-ism seems as a dangerous thing to me, so I oppose this unfamous Davos-protracted diversity woke ideology.
I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?). For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you.
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> I personally prefer not having other people decide for me which facts are and aren't relevant, I think that is unhelpful and potentially dangerous (some people think what happened in Tienanmen Square isn't relevant to the general population, do you agree?). I couldn't agree more, it's wrong to decide what facts someone else is allowed to know. Please tell me the most embarrassing details of your life? Perhaps there's nuance and different standards we can apply when talking about individuals, especially individuals who have been bullied or abused? Than the standards we apply when a powerful group is trying to cover up a violent attack against another? > For a transgender person, I may have known them before they transitioned for example and may not necessarily be familiar with their new name, that's a reason off the top of my head that it would be relevant to me but not necessarily you. I have a very hard time understanding this example, you're concerned that you, who knew this person but only knew their older name, won't be able to find thier wikipedia page via searching for their old name? Which is true because their old name isn't listed on the page itself? I don't find that very compelling, did you mean something different?
US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it (electrek.co)
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The title is somewhat misleading. First, US demand increased by 3.1%. That is bad - demand should be going down, since there is a need to conserve electricity while much of it is provided by CO2-emitting sources. That said - it is not such a huge "surge" that the fact that 61% of it was covered by an increase in Solar capacity is so impressive. Second, Solar generation is said to have reached 84 TW. But if the increase in demand was 135 TW, and that's just 3.1% of total demand, then total demand is 4355 TW, and Solar accounts for 1.92% of generation. That is _really_ bad. Since we must get to near-0 emissions in electricity generation ASAP to avoid even harsher effects of global warming; and most of the non-Solar generation in the US is by Natural Gas and Coal [1]. You could nitpick and say that the important stat is "total renewables" rather than just Solar, and that the US has a lot of Nuclear, and that's technically true, but it's not as though Nuclear output is surging, and it has more obstacles and challenges, for reasons. So, the big surge to expect in the US is Solar - and we're only seeing very little of that. If you mis-contextualize it sounds like a lot: "60% of new demand! 27% increase since last year!" but that's not the right context. [1] : https://www.statista.com/statistics/220174/total-us-electricity-net-generation-by-fuel/
You sent me to the books because this is such a fascinating stat. It's true! Heat deaths in the US: 5 per million people. Italy: 500+ per million people. I had no idea.
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Figures based on coroners reports are somewhat suspect. > In September 2022, a vicious heat wave enveloped much of the western U.S., placing tens of millions of people under heat advisories. Temperatures across California soared into the triple digits. Sacramento broke its heat record by more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit when the temperature hit 116 degrees. > California death certificates showed that 20 people died as a result of heat-related illness from Aug. 31, 2022 to Sept. 9, 2022. > But a study last year by California’s Department of Public Health found that death rates increased by about 5 percent statewide during the heat wave, causing 395 additional deaths. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-deaths-from-heat-are-dangerously-undercounted/ Excess mortality studies seem to show about 24 per 100,000 excess deaths from heat in Europe vs 6 in US/Canada. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34245712/
I think pulling for live pricing by inverters and appliances is not realistic on a grand scale. Using time of day pricing is much simpler imo.
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There's a neat way to do this that is super simple... The electricity company publishes an equation that determines the price based on the AC frequency. Ie. price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2)). Now every device in your home knows the price. For this to work, everyone must get the same price across the whole grid, and there must be sufficient grid capacity for energy to flow freely which isn't always the case. It will also cause issues with some very old (ie. 60+ year old) clocks with mechanical timers. All of these issues can be fixed by updating the formula: price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency + published_offset) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2)) The published_offset would be unique to each district and adjusted from time to time to keep old clocks working properly, and sometimes to deal with limited transfer properties of the grid... But the neat thing is that even if you don't take into account the published_offset, you still make nearly optimal economic decisions.
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