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Show HN: Pulse 2.0 – Live co-listening rooms where anyone can be a DJ (473999.net)
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I clicked everything on the page but couldn't figure out how to join a room. Clicking a room card no worky. I can however view song history
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what browser / device are you using? this is not something I encountered when trying with a few different ones :/
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neat!
How wealth dies (surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com)
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> Renewables, and for that matter nuclear power as well, cannot materially slow, let alone reverse, the relentless rise in ECoEs caused by the depletion of oil, natural gas and coal. Neither can technology halt this trend, since the potential of technology, far from being infinite, is bounded by the limits imposed by the laws of physics. Why would this be the case? Are fossil fuels uniquely low cost in terms of energy in? I can't imagine them beating the ECoE of "put this magic panel on your roof and get free energy whenever the sun is out, for decades". If the problem is that you don't get solar during the night, then that's a question of battery technology. And that's not even a problem with nuclear reactors! And saying that technology is "bounded by the limits [of physics]" is not useful. That doesn't say where the limits are, only that there are limits. Yes, at some point, we'll have almost 100% efficient solar panels being fed into batteries with the highest practical energy density. But we're nowhere near that. Insamuch as the western world is being hit with increasing ECoEs, it's from people who either can't or won't switch from chemical fuels to something with a lower ECoE. It would be more useful to identify those industries and show any evidence of cost disease in those industries brought about by the dependence on diminishing reserves of fossil fuels.
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While Dr. Morgan makes a few reasonable points about "real wealth" (aka points I agree with), he also hand waves many assumptions which are, at best, questionable. Finally, be aware that he's been predicting imminent economic collapse for almost 20 years now. He'll probably be correct someday (assuming he lives a very long life), but that doesn't mean much IMO.
Kids glued to "fun" (addictive) video games on their phones is not wealth, it is the feeder channel for these "efficient" health "care" schedulers, in your other example.
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That is, IMO, arguable. Entertainment has always been valued by humans. It is just the non-physical equivalent of fancy clothing or jewelry. And clothing/jewelry is most certainly a form of wealth. So, it can be argued that things that you can buy that make you feel better emotionally or increase your social status are forms of wealth. That some forms of entertainment may be detrimental if abused in the long-term is an orthogonal topic.
>> Rather, what we need to do is to calibrate the physical economy such that we can benchmark the monetary against the material. This enables us to avoid the futility of measuring the monetary only against itself. Garden-variety Gold Standard quackery.
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Wait, it's not obvious to me why this is quackery?
That may be 100% true, but the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and in this case, gold has been doing awkwardly well under current conditions.
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IMO, combining gold money arguments with observations about the price of gold is contradictory. If gold is money, then you should never wonder about the "price of gold" as gold should be used to price things.
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By the article's _own_ parable: if you were starving on a desert island, you wouldn't be relieved to be airdropped a briefcase full of gold. You're benchmarking money to money.
I kept having my bad vibes meter triggered by the italics so thanks for making the connection for me.
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My spider sense was going off because they spend the first several pages constructing the most obtuse definition of Inflation without just saying it.
The problems this article outlines are very real, but the explanation for the underlying mechanics doesn't really pass any kind of a sniff test for me. The central thesis is that real economic growth is stagnating because the overhead for producing energy grows with time. But this is not the case! Fossil fuels will run out eventually, yes, but nearly every other type of energy production does not suffer from this, and is in fact getting better over time. Solar panels of today are miles ahead of those of yesterday. Similarly we're building out more and more wind and thermal energy. Nuclear is also fine, if we don't account for the regulatory difficulty in actually getting new plants up and running.
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It points out a problem but ignores the obvious solution. We want the nominal value of stocks, houses, and essentially everything to continually increase. The escape hatch is that these can increase in value slower than inflation and thus be reduced in real value.
Less an article than an op-ed.
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Which part do you disagree with?
It doesn't make sense. But that is exactly how policy makers justify how "the economy is doing good!" The GDP was never intended to be used as an indicator of national economic well being; only a simple statistic to measure how much money is exchanged between people. But it only takes a few examples counter to what a public service should do to show that GDP reliance creates anti-patterns. e.g. rising healthcare costs is good for the GDP while universal healthcare is bad.
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First, you are correct. However, the reason GDP is used as a proxy metric for economic growth because it's convenient. Doing so does make a few assumptions though, foremost of which is that the structure of the economy will change very little from year to year. If that is so, than a rise in GDP should correspond to a rise in economic prosperity (and by extension wealth). Thus, using GDP change to measure changes in prosperity works (more or less) year by year. but the longer the periods you compare (5 years, 10 years, 20 years), the less meaningful the number becomes.
The GDP number is an example of "all models are wrong, some are useful". You'll inevitably oversimplify at least _something_ if you try to boil down the economy to a single number. GDP is still useful. I don't think there are examples of countries that had drops in GDP without being in deep trouble. It exploits the fact that economies [almost] never change quickly, so when you're looking at just one country, the GDP is a reasonable indicator of the overall state. Where the GDP sucks is when people try to compare the _rates_ of GDP growth between countries.
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[delayed]
I enjoyed the linked post overall, but want to highlight one thing: >The real insight: paying down your mortgage reduces your monthly burn, which reduces the chance you’ll need to sell stocks in a downturn. It’s not about math, it’s about resilience. This seems more emotional than anything. The feeling of paying off a mortgage and being relieved of some monthly burden. But there will always be monthly burdens, that's life. Everyone needs monthly cashflow. So the insight of putting extra cashflow into a mortgage to offset the burden is just reversing the purpose of why you got the mortgage in the first place? What I mean is money has time value, a mortgage is paying for the time. So being in a hurry doesn't automatically insightfully make sense. The post is all about resilience, I suppose my point is that there will always be a need for monthly costs, so trying to be free of the stress of a monthly cost -a time cost- is overly emotional in my view.
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But it doesn't, does it? If I have $300K on my mortgage and a monthly payment of $2000, and I pay an extra $100K, that 100K reduces the principal of the mortgage by $100K, and so the mortgage will run for several years less than it would have. But my monthly payment is still $2000 for the years I have left on it. There are other ways to structure it - you can pay ahead, paying next month's payment this month so that you don't have to pay anything next month if you don't want to. Can you pay $100K so that you don't have to pay the next 50 months' payments? I don't know, but probably. You have to be clear with them what you are trying to do, though.
Risk analysis depends highly on your views of the world? "Are we in/heading towards a recession?""will the stock market continue its explosive growth"? "Do I as a person favor stability or prefer to take a bit of risk?" All these will influence your EV.
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Well yes, precisely. Which is why nobody can give this guy an objective answer to his question -- it's entirely dependent on him and his views. That being said, there is absolutely an analytical way to approach the problem, which is what I outlined.
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I imagine that someone asking for advice isn't trying to take any comment wholesale. It's to help answer one of the above questions that they currently cannot right now. For an internet forum, I've found it easier to ask direct, actionable questions like "should I buy this couch" than "is [couch brand] good?". Even if what I really wanted to get at was the former. Maybe the brand isnt good but the price is a steal. Maybe the brand is so utterly trash that you couldn't give it away. But putting the brand into the question instead of a direct 'thing' changes the discourse.
Imgur Geo-Blocked the UK, So I Geo-Unblocked My Network (blog.tymscar.com)
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[delayed]
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I've not managed to succesfully use a VPN to get around the geoblock. It seems that most of VPN exit nodes are also blocked (but in a different way)
> First, I just upgraded to 2.5 Gbps internet and I don’t want to route all my traffic through a VPN and take the speed hit. I have this bandwidth for a reason You don't have to. You create a container which runs openvpn to connect to your vpn provider, and also hosts an ssh daemon. The ssh daemon receives incoming SOCKS5 connections from a firefox portable browser, which has been configured to use the proxy (your Docker openvpn-container) for browsing and DNS resolution, and pipes it through the VPN tunnel. So you have that one browser just to surf imgur. if that's your thing. And you could also use Firefox on Android (maybe also iOS) with those proxy settings (a secondary Firefox browser, like the beta version). So you get very high control about what you are using the VPN for, you don't just pipe your entire OS's network traffic through the VPN.
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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-proxy/ You can default route domains through a VPN using a Firefox tab container, you don’t need a separate browser instance running!
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That doesn't seem very practical. The issue is that imgur links are everywhere and you wouldn't want to switch browsers whenever you encounter one. Not to mention it requires per device setup. Author's solution is much better than what you describe.
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This is a great idea except for me (and for the author I suspect) I regularly come across attachment of Imgur hosted images on sites (like a post on a DIY forum but not all of them) so it wouldn't solve my issue unless I were to use your browser in the container all the time (I suspect the author also doesn't just 'surf imgur' but randomly comes across images hosted on imgur linked to from other locations).
I was hoping, from the title ("Geo-Unblocked") that this would be about arranging an IP address block that wasn't associated with the UK, rather than just selectively running some traffic through a VPN.
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I don't think that would work though. If you changed your WAN address it wouldn't be dissimilar from changing your IP to a different schema on a machine in a given network, no? It just wouldn't work at all.
This is quite easy with OpenWRT. Install the Wireguard packages, create a connection to your VPN of choice in a nearby country (I chose Sweden). Then I used the "vpn-policy-routing" package to route Imgur IPs (199.232.196.193 199.232.192.193) through the VPN. Works for websites that keep nagging you for age verification too. But seriously, it's been more emotional than I'd expected to get my cat memes back.
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Yeah, doing it with OpenWRT and PBR is definately much simpler than this approach. However by using hard-coded IP addresses you are at risk of breakage if they change in the future. Also fastly-hosted services are a bit awkard to configure IP ranges to cover whole blocks as they seem to not use normal CIDR-blocks for different customers. But you use PBR's ntfset functionality to have your dns server automatically update a set whenever an DNS entry is resolved, then set the policy rules based on the set.
> Second, even if I installed a VPN on my main machine, what about my phone? My laptop? My desktop? Every device would need the VPN running, and I’d have to remember to connect it before browsing. It’s messy. This is what routers are for. My router (a cheap fanless box with several network ports running linux) is the only thing on my network that knows there's a VPN. I can selectively route whatever I want through it, including having a separate SSID/VLAN from which everything is routed through the VPN. It's wireguard based so there's no "installing a VPN", just an interface/network configured in systemd-networkd (once, on the router). Edit: Routing by domain name could be tricky, though. I haven't had a need for that, and a proxy with local DNS override (as in the article) might needed if it came to that. I'd still do it on the router, though.
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You can just use FoxyProxy instead of a separate browser instance. This firefox addon will use a proxy based on URL patterns.
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> a cheap fanless box with several network ports running linux Do you remember the name of the product?
Could this be built into open source routers? If you wanted to get fancy you could even select the best VPN for the particular service.
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[delayed]
> waves hands things government censorship called it for what it is
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The Online Safety Act is censorship but that's not why Imgur left the UK, they were under investigation for supposedly violating data protection laws, which is a different set of rules enforced by a completely different part of the government.
Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?
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FreeBSD.
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Debian: The Universal Operating System, same as the past 25 years.
Pleasantly happy and surprised by Linux after many years. I'm not happy with the insidious lock-in that Apple and Microsoft engage in. When I'm developing I need the machine to be by own, and only a few distros provide that. I do wish to try kde though because it receives a lot of praise but just can't figure out which distro is the sweet spot, allowing for games, but good package management too.
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kubuntu is pretty cool. i would recommend trying that.
Aaand this confirms once again that this website is in a bubble. Everybody else in the world uses Windows.
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You might find the StackOverflow surveys more representative: they crown Windows as the most used OS, with a solid margin. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-computer-operating-systems
I need to give Omarchy and Hyprland a real try at some point. I love the idea of a tiling window manager. I just haven't used one in 10 years and it's a big adjustment to classic window management.
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You can just use apps on fullscreen with no tiling, that's how I use Omarchy most of the time.
28M Hacker News comments as vector embedding search dataset (clickhouse.com)
I don't know how to feel about this. Is the only purpose of the comments here is to train some commercial model? I have a feeling that, this might affect my involvement here going forward.
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>> a couple resources abuse public data > IS THE PURPOSE OF COMMENTS ON THIS WEBSITE TO TRAIN SOME COMMERCIAL MODEL? You’ve cracked it. Back in 2007 PG implemented the plot to gather THE smartest on one website with intention to execute order 66 and create genius LLM to earn gorriliard of dolares. Now that you’ve figured out the plot, you have a chance to stop it all, because with you it will all fall apart. > this might affect my involvement here going forward Please, keep everyone posted!
But is that a reason to keep doing it? Is the penalty the only reason people hold back on doing bad stuff?
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(Violation of HN Terms & Conditions || Violation of copyright) != "bad stuff" (Violation of HN Terms & Conditions || Violation of copyright) = Potential penalty
fine, I guess they're associated to HN and so free to plunder... steal... I mean, legally used my content ah, if only I knew about this small little legal detail when I made my account...
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Do you have some expectation that when you post your content to some 3P site that you somehow continue to exercise control over it (other than rights under the GDPR)? What basis do you have for this belief?
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They can update their privacy policy at any time so it wouldn't have mattered if they added it after you made your account.
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Functionally, it doesn't matter anyway. These licensing schemes only serve the owners of services large enough to legally badger other moneyed entities into retrospective payments. Individual users have no agency over their submitted content, and nobody in charge of these companies even gives a second thought to keeping it that way. As I've said many times, nobody in this space gives a shit about anything except how they look to investors and potential users-- least of all the people that make the 'content' these machines 'learn'.
Someone made a tool a few years ago that basically unmasked all HN secondary accounts with a high degree of certainty. It scared the shit out of me how easy it picked out my alts based on writing style.
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I think that original post was taken down after a short while but antirez was similarly nerd sniped by it and posted this which i keep a link to for posterity: https://antirez.com/news/150
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"Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate account" (2022), 500 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
You'd get sentences full of words like: tangential, orthogonal, externalities, anecdote, anecdata, cargo cult, enshittification, grok, Hanlon's razor, Occam's razor, any other razor, Godwin's law, Murphy's law, other laws.
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Clicking "Betteridge's" would bring down the site.
I know it's unrelated but does anyone knows a good paper comparing vector searches vs "normal" full text search? Sometimes I ask myself of the squeeze worth the juice
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Compared in what? Performance, user experience?
Wow! That's a really great point of reference. I always knew text-based social media(ish) stuff should be "small", but I never had any idea if that meant a site like HN could store it's content in 1-2 TB, or if it was more like a few hundred gigs or what. To learn that it's really only tens of gigs is very surprising!
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Scraped reddit text archives (~23B items according to their corporate info page) are ~4 TB of compressed json, which includes metadata and not just the actual comment text.
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I suspect the text alone would be a lot smaller. Embeddings add a lot - 4K or more regardless of the size of the text.
Molly: An Improved Signal App (molly.im)
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What is the point of this? Just use the regular signal app. It may be more safe, but are the developers trustworthy enough?
What about the server portion? that's the thing I would like to have forked / open source.
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Good news! https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
> What "proprietary blobs" does Signal have? As they say in the Github readme, FCM and Google Maps. FCM doesn't technically require a blob — it's just that Google wants you to think it does. I reverse engineered their library and it turned out to be a criminally over-engineered wrapper around two broadcast receivers. So, the Mastodon app is proudly the first app ever to both support FCM push notifications, and be 100% open-source.
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>As they say in the Github readme, FCM and Google Maps. Thanks, I didn't notice that. Reading this, I'm kind of surprised that Signal doesn't offer an OpenStreetMaps build as it seems like it'd be more inline with their philosophy.
Oo, do you have a link for your implementation? I will soon be looking at creating a library to support FCM (android push notifications) in Android apps written in Rust. And having a simpler interface with the OS (esp. if it therefore doesn't require building a non-syste library) would be incredibly helpful.
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Looks like this is the first commit where it was added: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/commit/a0cbf0fa31cbed1993daf6fda065739341f51643
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Thanks! It looks like that repo is GPL though, which I respect but isn't going to work for my usage (where I'm trying to build a generic UI toolkit that can be used by all sorts of applications including closed source ones).
Firebase, GMS (Google Mobile Services). The Alphabet Corporation is part of many security and privacy conscious users' threat model, and these users aren't generally thrilled about leaking even limited message metadata like timing to their adversary, particularly when that adversary is known to cooperate with global passive adversaries. There are actually two builds of Molly: Molly and Molly-FOSS. IIRC Molly uses regular Firebase, which can be faster and more reliable but comes with the above tradeoffs, while Molly-FOSS uses UnifiedPush. Your point about exercising caution with forks of encrypted messaging apps is a great rule of thumb, and in general, social proof should NOT substitute for competent software security specialists reading and evaluating source code, but given you seem to trust GrapheneOS, it's worth noting that they've formally endorsed Molly: https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1769277147569443309
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> Your point about exercising caution with forks of encrypted messaging apps is a great rule of thumb, and in general, social proof should NOT substitute for competent software security specialists reading and evaluating source code Also a great point :) And thank you for the reference.
>What database? The local database used by Signal to organize every message, every contact, every profile photo, every attachment, every group, basically every dynamic piece of data you interact with in the app. Signal is basically a UI layer for a database. The in-transit encryption is genuinely good enough to be textbook study material for cryptographers, but the at-rest encryption became a joke the moment they stopped using your pin to encrypt the local DB and requiring it to open the app. As someone who's been enthusiastic about Signal since it was TextSecure and RedPhone, the changes made over the years to broaden the userbase have been really exciting from an adoption perspective, and really depressing from a security perspective. TL;DR of Molly is that it fixes/improves several of those security regressions (and adds new security features, like wiping RAM on db lock) while maintaining transparent compatibility with the official servers, and accordingly, other people using the regular Signal client.
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> As someone who's been enthusiastic about Signal since it was TextSecure and RedPhone, the changes made over the years to broaden the userbase have been really exciting from an adoption perspective, and really depressing from a security perspective. As always, it depends on your threat model. I use signal because I value my privacy and don't trust Facebook. Not because I'm an activist. So I'm in the target group for Signal's new behavior and I welcome it (especially since to use it to share personal information that I don't want Facebook or advertisers to get, I need my parents and in-laws to use it as well, so it must be user friendly enough). I wish they continue moving forward in that direction by the way and allow shared pictures to be stored directly on the phone's main memory (or at least add an opt-in setting for that), because the security I get from it not being is zero and the usability suffers significantly.
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You're absolutely right that the appropriate level of security does depend on someone's threat model, but I do want to point out that you don't need to be an activist to benefit from privacy. I'm a really big fan of the airport bathroom analogy. When you use the restroom in the airport, you close the stall door behind you. You're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide, and everyone knows what you're doing. But you take actions to preserve your privacy anyway, and that's good. Everyone deserves privacy, and the psychological comfort that comes with it. Dance like nobody's watching, encrypt like everyone is :)
Meh, most phones have full disk encryption. For the average person, encryption at rest in signal doesn't provide very much.
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I mentioned some of the pragmatic constraints of fully trusting typical Android / iOS FDE to fully protect the confidentiality of Signal messages in another comment above that I would encourage you to read. That said, Molly definitely isn't designed for the average person's threat model, that's totally true, but it's also worth noting that just because someone isn't aware of a certain risk in their threat model, that doesn't mean they will never benefit from taking steps to proactively protect themselves from that risk. IMO, security and privacy are best conceptualized not as binary properties where you either have it or you don't, but rather as journeys, where every step in the right direction is a good one. I'd always encourage everyone to question their own assumptions about security and never stop learning, it's good for your brain even if you ultimately decide that you don't want to accept the tradeoffs of an approach like the one Molly takes towards at-rest encryption.
Isn't the phone filesystem encrypted?
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Depends on quite a few other factors, but if someone with a GrayKey or Cellebrite appliance gets your phone, there's a good chance they can get in both in BFU and AFU states, even if locked. Once unlocked (or broken into), stock Signal offers you zero protection, while Molly forces them to start a brute force attack against the password you gave Molly. This is less true for fully patched GrapheneOS devices than it is for fully patched iOS and other Android devices, but this space is basically a constantly evolving cat and mouse game. We don't get a press release when GrayKey or Cellebrite develop a new zero day, so defense in depth can be helpful even for hardened platforms like GOS.
Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messaging app. People continue to breathlessly mentioning the lack of database encryption as a problem, but that never made it a real security issue: its job is not, and has never been, dissuading an attacker who has local access to one of the ends, especially because that is an incoherent security boundary (just like the people who were very upset about Signal using the system keyboard which is potentially backdoored - if your phone is compromised, of course someone will be be able to read your Signal messages).
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Database encryption isn't comparable to the keyboard drama. Protecting against malware in your keyboard can be done by using a different meyboard and is of course out of scope. But if my phone gets taken and an exploit is used to get root access on it, I don't want the messages to be readable and there's nothing I can do about it. It's not like I can just use a different storage backend. It's also a very simple solution - just let me set an encryption password. It's not an open-ended problem like protecting from malware running on the device when you're using it.
Anti-patterns while working with LLMs (instavm.io)
Perhaps we can add that using LLMs for logical, creative or reasoning tasks (things the technology isn’t capable of doing) is an anti-pattern.
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In my experience, LLMs work pretty nicely as rubber ducks, for logical, creative or reasoning tasks. They'll make lots of mistakes, but if you know the field, they are often (not always, though) easy to detect and brush off. Whether that's worth the environmental or social cost, of course, remains open for debate.
It is at the very least an anti-pattern in the same way hiring an assistant to do the work for you is an anti-pattern
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I agree, moving into management is definitely an anti-pattern.
This post is a mess. The best advice is clear and specific, and this is neither. The examples are at best loosely related to the points they're supposed to illustrate. It's honestly so bad that I cynically suspect that this post was created solely as a way to promote click3, in the first bullet, and then 4 more bullets were generated to make it a "whole" post
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The five anti-patterns (or remedies, rather)- 1. Don't re-send info you've already sent (be resourceful) 2. Play to model strengths (e.g. generating an image of text vs generating text in an image, or coding/executing a string counter rather than counting a search string) 3. Stay aware of declining accuracy as context window fills up 4. Don't ask for things it doesnt know (e.g. obscure topics or outside cutoff window) 5. Careful with vibe coding
Bringing Sexy Back. Internet surveillance has killed eroticism (lux-magazine.com)
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> I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism Well, maybe it should be. I'm a progressive but I'm tired of people trying to ruin my life over nothing, just as the author is. I'm am against the far right, and as a result I feel we should not give the far right ammunition. A lot of people voted for DT because they saw him as the lesser a-hole, and the left badly needs to acknowledge that.
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> I'm tired of people trying to ruin my life over nothing Could you give an example? Because most commonly, it seems that people who take this position are writing about what happened to some celebrity who indulged in some ill-advised public behavior, and extrapolating it to their own lives due to some sort of parasocial thinking. What environment are you in that this is actually a real problem in your own life?
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> I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon — one was teaching the other how to do it a certain way. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified. I would look at her in horror too. My aversion to touching, being touched by, or even being in a close space with other people comes from exactly this sort of worry, that my presence is being used for some sort of sexual experience unbeknownst to me. Some lines from the article gave me the ick. > It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us. I don't need to be told to free my mind just because I don't conform to your gooner sh*t. > Only when we are unafraid can we begin to let desire flourish. Oh okay, if I disagree with the author then I am just ~afraid~ It really seems to me that the author is internally dealing with sexual feelings and rationalizing them as social commentary, transforming her views into a critique of society and cancel culture, while simultaneously backing out and promising that MeToo was valid and that she was definitely not trying to say that MeToo was an overreaction (nice save author!)
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> A Socialist Feminist Mag For The Masses Good fucking grief, what has HN become?
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Sounds to me more like the author has weird friends and never had a stable relationship in her life. Relationship sharing is awesome if you have a stable relationship. And people usually don't talk about their kinks in this weird fashion. In fact, I think the Internet has increased eroticism manyfold. Look at porn apps, games and websites. People are more open about their sexuality than ever, but anonymously.
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Can you elaborate more about relationship sharing? Do you mean having an open relationship or something else?
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Sorry typo, I meant location sharing in relationships.
Whatever the direct cause, as an older person who grew up Catholic, quite literally the most surprising thing in life for me to discover: Sexual repression emphatically cannot be strongly blamed on religion. And I'm not mentioning this to defend religion necessarily, I'm just surprised and almost "impressed" at how, in the absence of religious sexual repression, young people and the internet invented a whole new way of doing it.
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Also lots of repression in countries run by atheist ideologies.
"Projecting one's problems on others" does not mean that someone is sharing their problems with the world. It means they take their problems and assume that they are problems that others have. So, GP is suggesting that the authors is assuming society has certain attributes, when in reality its likely just attributes of theirself.
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>It means they take their problems and assume that they are problems that others have. Well, it's the internet and no one's singular experienc truly unique. So yes, that is a safe assumption. I doubt the author is the only person in the world with a friendship broken over some relatively benign story. >GP is suggesting that the authors is assuming society has certain attributes, when in reality its likely just attributes of theirself. Could be both. Or neither. It's a blog, not a study, so I don't see much point dissenting an anecdote. The point is to share ideas to the world. And given the nature of the internet, some will resonate.
> She demanded that I apologize to the women This is antisocial advice. It's beyond inappropriate to use the pretense of apology to announce your intimate fantasies to strangers.
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One of the big rules is you don't expose the unwilling public. Apologizing to the two women who were brushing the author's hair is a double-whammy: you're involving them in the sexualizing of this experience, and you're implicitly expecting them to be ok with it and forgive you. If someone is going to demand you do this or they will end their friendship with you, you're "lowkey" better off losing that friend.
I'd push back on drawing a sharp line between "institutional abuse" and "genuine erotic connection among equals". As the essay points out, the MeToo campaign did use call-outs against individuals in service of its goal. Some of those callouts were alleging criminal conduct, but on the other end of the spectrum you had much more dubious stuff, or completely unsubstantiated rumors that some person was "bad". I agree that stopping institutional abuse is a noble goal, but the MeToo practice of naming and shaming personal friends in anonymous spreadsheets is the type of thing that builds the internal panopticon: what if our personal circumstances changed so that there's a power imbalance, or someone misinterpreted them? If you accept that practice on political grounds because it's a useful weapon against the "enemies of liberation" (as the author put it), can you really claim to want people to change their attitudes about sex? It doesn't work nearly as well if we stop seeing sexual behavior as inherently scandalous.
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It's not so much that sexual behavior is inherently scandalous, the issue is with the broader context where a formalized hierarchy of power and a potential for intimidation are quite antithetical to any kind of genuine, consensual connection. The potential for borderline-abusive behavior in the workplace (not necessarily criminal, either) is orders of magnitude greater than any concern about "naming and shaming".
Beginning with: "Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us. Were we peasants instead of spreadsheet jockeys, warehouse workers, and baristas, we would toil in our fields in the shadow of some overbearing castle from which the lord or his steward would ride down on his thunderous charger demanding our fealty and our tithes." This is gutturally revolting to me. The insinuation here is that the average person is a passenger in their own lives, without free will. You don't come out of the womb and someone puts a stamp on your head saying "Barista! Paperboy! Grocery bagger!" Barring considerable physical/mental disabilities, or personal choices like deciding to have kid(s) that you're financially responsible for at a young age with no money, I'd make the argument that most people can become millionaires.
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> I'd make the argument that most people can become millionaires. Hmm would you propose as the primary way to make that happen?
Eroticism is more about art and media. Being sexually aroused is not art, it is an occurrence in the real world. This is like saying science fiction is talking to a chatbot. OP is being a bit pedantic.
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Of course it isn't about art and media. If you think so, then you need to go and find your soul, because it isn't with you currently.
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>Being sexually aroused is not art, it is an occurrence in the real world. Based on the definition I shared, it's not about your feelings. It's the quality of what made you feel that way. An important bu subtle difference. To take your example, it's less about the chatbot and more about how and what it responds with. If suddenly it's responding based on its remembered experiences and sense of the world, I. E. 'Sentience', we would start to wonder if its science fiction.
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> It's the quality of what made you feel that way. Given that hair brushing was apparently involved, I'm going to throw out a wild guess and say ASMR. If you interpret ASMR or frisson sexually (to be clear, not everyone does) I suppose that they do shade into the erotic, if perhaps just barely.
videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions of views. Anecdata: even if they're wearing bras and not dressed in a revealing way and it's a still photo... the views will pour in. I've had a Flickr account for about 20 years. I used to run a community and I took a lot of pictures at our gatherings, which were primarily 20-somethings. Some photos had 100-1000x the views of other pictures and it took me a while to figure out why. The photos with surprising view counts had women with large chests. I know how obvious that sounds but many of these photos were so lowkey that... trust me, it was not obvious. For some of these photos, we're talking about something that would not be out of place as a yearbook photo or hanging on a church's bulletin board. It would just be a group photo of people hanging out, nothing sexy or revealing, and rando woman #7 in the photo might be apparently chesty. And it would have 100x the views of other photos from that event. Interesting and amusing. There are a number of ways you could think about it. Some views might be attributable to people who can't access explicit content due to parental controls or local laws but I have a hunch some people actually prefer this sort of thing to explicit content. (I also wonder if there's a slight voyeuristic/nonconsensual appeal to these photos. Which ties back in to the opening paragraph of the linked article...) It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.
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thanks JohnBooty for sharing your insights about women with certain bodies
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Like the valiant Sir Mix-a-lot before him, he can not lie
Go to any photography subreddit that's not already focused on nudity or sex. Any photo with naked women will get more upvotes than most other submissions. It can be an objectively bad photo, that doesn't really matter.
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I can totally attest this. I was an avid viewer of r/analog. I don't know if this was 'recent' or not, but every time someone post a naked picture, either good or not, it goes rapidly to Top posts. Even though it used to had many comments like "This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman", the upvotes arrived anyway. I think nowadays they mostly block the comments in those posts, but what used to be an inspiring subreddit that would pop from time to time in my feed, is not longer that interesting to me.
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I still find that one to be one of the better photography subreddits, but I do agree that that's been happening a bit too often lately. (I'd also love recommendations of other good photography related subreddits, if you have any!)
> how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized Give it a while, everyone falls off the attractiveness escalator eventually. For some the only thing worse than being objectified is being invisible.
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> For some the only thing worse than being objectified is being invisible. "It's a Wonderful Chest" from Chappelle's Show was ahead of the curve(s) on this.
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And for others, finally being invisible and not subject to leering in public and online is a mercy.
> or the most part, sexy never left, and statistics bear this out. OnlyFans brings in enormous amount of revenue, even after an expensive, failed attempt to be not-just-a-porn-site. Hypersexualized gacha games are pulling in tens of millions of dollars per month, and not just for men; the women-targeted Love and Deepspace had over $50 million in revenue in October. Marvel Rivals, criticized in some circles (such as the social circles of those in the article) for being an oversexualized "gooner game" has remained in the top 10 games played on Steam since its release a year ago. And nothing drives it home more than stumbling across the shady side of YouTube and finding videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions of views. These are all things about sex but none of them are sex or lead to sex. These are outlets for sexual desires that don't require any social connection at all. You could argue that the article outlines many of the reasons why these things are so popular today - there is a much higher social price to pay for a potentially embarrassing or humiliating situation than there used to be. Easier to avoid it altogether and play gooner games.
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30 years ago it was rather normal that a manager would touch the behind of a coworker, which is clearly a bad thing. Nowadays looking in their direction a bit too long seems to be labeled 'not done'. Some time ago I said to a coworker who I consider as a friend : 'I enjoy your company'. Another (younger, italian) coworker told me to be careful after I said to him 'she has such a soft voice'. I really did not expect that reaction. To my feeling, no line got crossed and the fact that we are still friends and at times even share our thoughts about love and relationships in general, proves that we trust and respect each other.
Yeah, I think she's assuming that, since some of those people are IRL friends, that means they're not terminally online people. I'm around finance folks and they're all trapped into the same crypto-and-AI influencer bubble, but they would never be able to tell because their physical connections are also finance people who are likely to be caught in the same corner of the algorithm. So their real life conversations reinforce the worldview that the internet presents. This is likely the same case. The author might not be involved in certain online spaces, but she shares characteristics with her friends who make them all be targeted by the same bubble, so everyone she knows echoes that space to her.
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With this post on HN, her 'puritan echo chamber/bubble' meets this 'nerdy/intellectual echo chamber/bubble'.
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Absolutely, I’m in a bubble as well. The average person would not only not know this site but assume something bad by its name.
> “Who are you defending yourself against?” To which he answered, to my astonishment: “I don’t know. The world.” Indeed. Moving our every interaction in daily life plus our innermost thoughts to the internet has instilled a low-key fear in all of us that we'll be raked over the coals and villified as the world's worst villains. The digital tar and feathers are lurking always, a menacing psychological force. And it can even happen without our knowledge; some stranger can post a two second context-less clip or a snippet of a conversation and make us look our worst. It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
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Who moved every interaction in daily life to the internet? Most conversations we have are private, even if they are digital. Most of my ms teams interactions are with a single person. I trust them to not make sceenshots to share those. I don't see much difference with oral conversations, where I also trust they do not gossip about them.
> you need to find the small hidden paths to take back what we once had. This will certainly not be offered by capital, though.
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Of course not, that's why it's small and hidden. As an example, you wouldn't even find a place like HN unless you are a particular kind of person or looking a a particular type of news. And I wouldn't even say HN is "hidden" per se. But it has kept its site counter to many other social media trends over the years. Those choices will build a different culture from Instagram or Tiktok.
I'd wager in the reason it's downloaded if in fact it is, is that it's creepy, not "conservative." Views of sex that are retrograde and nostalgic, motivated by challenging depiction of sexuality, are the problem. As we've seen with some public figures, being closeted about gender preference, kink, etc. is the real problem, not whether young people are being choosier about sexual partners or are just less interested.
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Can you explain what is creepy about not wanting to be bombarded with sexualised imagery in the service of peddling wares? Do you consider sexuality - our species most basic drive, hard-wired into both sexes and manipulable by those unscrupulous enough to do so - as just another 'expression of personality' that you want people to 'un-closet' their sexual proclivities instead of keeping them where they are traditionally kept, always a bit in tension with 'polite' society but for that all the more exiting?
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Ads have become safe and bland. Automotive parts and tools calendars ain't what they used to be. The sexual imagery of things like OF is the product, it's not selling a product. I've never seen one instance where trans visibility has been used in an ad. Closeted sexuality is a big source of society's problems. The combination of shame and power has terrible results. The era before Stonewall was certainly exciting for the police doing the beatings. But maybe those in the wrong people to ask.
Apple and Intel Rumored to Partner on Mac Chips (macrumors.com)
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I don’t understand why intel doesn’t build a fab in Taiwan or another lower cost location ?
you been in a cave for the last few years? things are bad at Intel for a while now and they need a fab customers. the deal they will likely throw at Apple to get capacity and show off their fab process doesn't suck is likely incredible.
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I have not been in a cave
TSMC's 2nm is much, much higher demand. Apple's probably getting priced-out of the node by Nvidia in much the same way Apple bought out TSMC 5nm before. Apple's cheaper products and hardware cash cows can't afford to pay that sort of tax, so it makes sense to boot them onto 18A. Those are the binned products that would have been throttling anyways.
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TSMC and Apple have a long standing partnership, and I doubt TSMC is dumb enough to throw a massive amount of long term business away in exchange for short term AI bubble gains. TSMC has even been cutting Apple special terms they don't give others: > every time TSMC introduces a major upgrade, called an advanced process node, to its chipmaking, the defect rates of the dies stay relatively high until it can iron out the kinks. For 3 nm, the most cutting-edge node launching this year, the yield on wafers has recently been in the range of 70% to 80%, according to analysts, as well as one person with direct knowledge of the process. That number would be a tough pill to swallow for TSMC’s customers, which typically pay for the wafer and all of the dies on it—including the bad ones. But in a break from standard practice, the Taiwanese manufacturer has only been charging Apple for dies that work—“known good dies,” in industry parlance—these people said. https://archive.ph/yfGLp
> Intel isn't a competitor to either TSMC or Samsung, their fab process is years behind. It's certainly in Apple (and every company that requires a leading-edge fab)'s interest to try and keep Intel competitive with TSMC and Samsung. 3 companies is already too few for a truly competitive market. And 2 is worse. I'd argue it's also in everyone 's interest to have some redundancy in the chip fabrication supply chain (esp. given the geopolitical situation in Taiwan). It would already be catastrophic if TSMC's production was disrupted for any reason. It would be even more catastrophic if there was no Intel.
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Everyone’s interest except, perhaps, the Taiwanese state… where TSMC’s know-how lives, and whose help you’d need to transfer it elsewhere. I keep hearing SMIC has allllllmost caught up, of course…
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Fully agree with you on all points, but I fear this requires serious governmental interventions - simply due to the massive amounts of money involved. The "free market" obviously has failed, with - as you mentioned - massive dangers to national security. Unfortunately, I also can't see any government willing to put the money on the table to establish a third party from scratch. All that seems to be available is handouts for TSMC to construct a fab in Arizona, and even that was widely criticized.
You’re suggesting altruistic nationalistic corruption?
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No, keep Intel afloat by any means, because USA is planning on attacking Venezuela and China. Maybe VZ is used to gear up production for the Taiwan war. There are a few ways to save the economy, hyperinflation (pay massive 38T debt with worthless paper), Jubilee (erase all debts like the fall of Rome) or war and mass death and destruction (WW2 and the Black Death).
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Remember that the people running the US government at the moment are a combination of mentally deranged ideologues and Fox News bimbos. There is no actual plan for anything.
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Not sure about altruistic, but definitely corrupt.
So you wanna build a local RAG? (blog.yakkomajuri.com)
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I'm interested in the embeddings models suggested. I had some good results with nomic in a small embedding based tool I built. I also heard a few good things about qwen3-embedding, though the latency wasn't great for my usecase so I didn't pursue it much further. Similarly, I used sqlite-vec, and was very happy with it. (if I were already using postgres I'd have gone with that, but this was more of a cli tool). If the author is here, did you try any of those models? how would you compare the ones you did use?
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If you end up using any of the frontier models, don't forget to protect private information in your prompts - https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/zink
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Doesn't seems necessary if you are using claude via bedrock or gpt via azure. At that point, its not different then sending PII through a serverless function.
Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker (objectiveunclear.com)
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As a bit of a Flight Aware addict, well done.
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Wow, great idea well executed, congrats
This is really freaking cool. Two asks - (1) you should default to a busy airport, eg. Atlanta, which is the busiest in the world. They have an order of magnitude more flights landing and departing. It seems random, but I keep getting New Orleans which is 10-20x less busy than Atlanta. ATL, SFO, LAX, ... That said, the topographically diverse places like Anchorage are nice too, and the height maps on the textures are fantastic. (2) Higher resolution satellite titles would be awesome. I have a high density flight path directly overhead and I'd love to see where I live on the map and know which way to look in real time, but the textures are about 10x too grainy to make out my street / neighborhood. Maybe you can download some high resolution tiles for free that won't be a big performance hit?
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interesting, seems to be random. I've gotten Portland which was also not too busy but nevertheless enough to understand the beauty of it.
This is quite cool, seeing taking off planes appearing and rising is cool. Some comments: - Is the Up axis correctly scaled? The ascent rate of planes taking off seems very steep - Planes landing seems to get "stuck" at the beginning of a lane at about 600 feet (tracking/radar cutoff?), maybe a fix the that slightly adjusts it to ground in a landed state if a plane "stops" or disappears from the data tracking.
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Down at the bottom of the menu there's an altitude scale slider. It defaults to 1.2, changing it to 1.0 makes the trails look better.
Lobsters Interview (susam.net)
The differences are well summarized on their /about page. I find both HN and Lobsters valuable for different reasons, but and the differences that stand out to me are: - Tries to be more purely technical. Generic political or business links are flagged or removed. - Aggressive marketing/self-promotion is moderated: If you join, post three links to your own blog, and nothing else, expect someone to call out if you post a fourth. I know HN does this to some extent, but it is very explicit on Lobsters. - Not "news", not necessarily about recent things. Project/language releases even have a "release" tag so you can hide them systematically. A ten-year-old article explaining some library internals is just as likely to come up. - Instead of "downvotes" there are "flags", which requires choosing a reason. Ideally encourages people to pause and think, instead of scrolling and clicking a down arrow 20 times in a thread. - Weekly community threads of "What are you working on this week?" and "What are you doing this weekend?" which is nice for a smaller community.
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Unfortunately Lobsters might claim to be non political but is actually quite political. Because the moderators and increasingly the remaining community identities with American progressive left values, a pretty common thing to see on the site is political posts along those lines getting upvoted and other political philosophies being flagged as political. It's probably the most deeply unpleasant part about the site IMO. I don't think there's anything wrong with moderators all sharing certain politics. On Lobsters though, there's this hugely disingenuous gaslighting culture where the political ingroup can break rules but the outgroup can't but it's never explicitly acknowledged by the moderators or the community.
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They are also aggressively anti-AI
My main gripe with lobsters vs hn is that lobsters has a lot of specific in the weeds tech articles, like about some functionality of a specific python library. It's way too specific, I find the mix of articles on hn much better from a generalist perspective
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Conversely, hn gets a lot of content which simply isn't intellectually stimulating. Like on the front page atm is pocketbase—a git repo which currently has 53k stars which I've known of for many years, and a surface level article on RAG titled 'So you wanna build a local RAG?' which seems to mostly just exist so the author can plug their company in the first line. As a blogger myself I can't claim superiority—I've done this plenty, but this content just doesn't seem to do well on lobste.rs Edit: though to be clear this is a spectrum with heavy overlap. Just general biases I've observed. Like on Lobste.rs there is an article titled 'Electron vs. Tauri' atm.
Stellantis Is Spamming Owners' Screens with Pop-Up Ads for New Car Discounts (thedrive.com)
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1. Locate cellular modem. 2. Disable it.
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Stellantis makes some of the most unreliable vehicles in the world and charges a small fortune for them. I predicted they'd be out of business a year ago but apparently somebody keeps buying them.
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I bough a new Honda and Mazda within the last year and neither have any of this kind of nonsense. Both are great. I hope people vote with their wallets. I would never have considered anything from Stellantis anyway.
So, what happens if you accidentally drill through your car's LTE modem while doing an oil change?
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It'll throw a code, just like it does if you forget to put DEF in. It's not a malfunction, they just want you to think it is.
I had already scratched Jeep off my car-buying list years ago. Now the bulk of car-buying research is not "how good is it?" but "what are the purposefully in-built annoyances? Can I hack them away?"
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My partner recently bought a newer Subaru. It’s great, and when we looked it up we saw it had remote start. Turns out it’s behind a subscription. When I found that out I essentially wrote off Subaru as a brand for my future car purchases. Catch me driving my 2017 civic into the ground before I pay a freaking subscription for basic vehicle functionality
You won't have any options for non garbage vehicles pretty soon. It's more profitable to sell you garbage and than sell you the maintenance on the above mentioned garbage while getting a steady trickle of revenue for ad impressions. Ford pulled focus/fiesta lineup from US ignoring great sales (despite widely known DCT issues) just so they can focus on selling the garbage SUVs and pickups, highest margin cars. But hey, no CAFE regulations to follow, can pollute as much as you want. Jeep quality is a joke - they would've been sued out of existence with trucks like that in Europe. When I first saw the Jeep Gladiator photo I through it was a joke/meme. Corporations do truly control everything in US. They'll sell you garbage overpriced trucks, convince you to feel happy about them and laught all the way to the bank while raking cash for all "dealer maintenance" required to keep such garbage on the roads. And then they lock down all the maintenance behind encryption so you can't replace a battery without going to the dealer for the unlock code. Please speedrun your late stage capitalism asap, it's getting harder and harder to watch
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Technically you are correct, practically you will get into question of "who pays for the internet in the car?" and if customer refuses to pay (like in VAG case) then you will have just a car without an internet.
Not just the ads. They are likely tracking your location, and drive events. These can be sold to your insurance company who may adjust your rates, or even drop you if they consider your driving patterns to be risky. When we got our Ford Maverick, first thing I did was disable this. Kudos to Ford for making this easy. Downside is that we got a recall notice about the software for the backup camera needing an update. I scheduled an appointment, and it took over 3 hours. Asked the service guy why it was taking so long to flash to software, and he said our system needed an update because we had not enabled over-the-air connection with Ford which allows this to be done in the background. Evidently the download speed for this was incredibly slow according to the SG, so it took over two hours before our Mav was current, and they could apply the backup camera fix. Note: I was very suspicious about this claim. I thought it was more likely we were being purposely held captive in the service waiting area -- which has a big screen constantly running Ford ads. I guess that is OK. I had my Kindle, and was into a great book at the time, so I actually was not too put out.
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Nissans have a disclaimer that they spy on your sex life : https://nypost.com/2023/09/06/nissan-kia-collect-data-about-drivers-sexual-activity/
If you consider updates to be zero value, sure.
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For a lot of things, zero value would be a high peak. Often the value is negative. Thus: You don't update anything if it works and it's not connected to internet. If it works and is connected to internet, then disconnect it from internet if possible. For the rest, delay updates for long enough without having heard complaints that there's sufficient confidence on the update not breaking anything.
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"Car won't start because the radio failed to update" and "insurance company tracking and other telemetry" are not just zero value, but net-negative.
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Hence why folks should be pushing right to repair and similar legislation through to prevent this before it happens. Technical hacks are tactical solutions, good policy implementation is the strategic, long term solution.
You're joking, right? The systems are locked up tight. I did manage to hack into my Porsche Macan's system so that I could turn Apple CarPlay on (it's disabled in the Macan, but supported by the system because the unit is shared with the VW Atlas which has CarPlay), but it involved a pretty complicated jailbreak.
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What generation had CarPlay disabled? It works very nicely in 95B.2 and .3, and the pre-facelift 95B models with PCM 3 didn't support CarPlay at all without an adapter, did they? I know full-screen CarPlay isn't supported without a jailbreak, but I don't care about that myself so haven't done it.
AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out (apolloacademy.com)
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The number of use cases for which I use AI is actually rapidly decreasing. I don't use it anymore for coding, I don't use it anymore for writing, I don't use it anymore for talking about philosophy, etc. And I use 0 agents. even though I am (was) the author of multiple MCP servers. It's just all too brittle and too annoying. I feel exhausted when talking to much to those "things".... I am also so bored of all those crap papers being published about LLM. Sometimes, there are some gems but its all so low-effort. LLM papers bore the hell out of me... Anyway, By cutting out AI for most of my stuff, I really improved my well-being. I found the joy back in manual programming, because I am one of the few soon that will actually understand stuff :-). I found the joy in writing with a fountain pen in a notebook and since then, I retain so much more information. Also a great opportunity for the future, when the majority will be dumbed down even more. And for philosophical interaction. I joined an online University and just read the actual books of the great thinkers and discuss them with people and knowledgable teachers. For what I use AI still is to correct my sentences (sometimes) :-). It's kinda the same than when I cut all(!) Social Media a while ago. It was such a great feeling to finally get rid ot all those mind-screwing algorithms. I don't blame anyone if they use AI. Do what you like.
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The economics of the force multiplier is too high to ignore, and I’m guessing an SWEs who don’t learn how to use it consistently and effectively will be out of the job market in 5 or so years.
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I’m sceptical The models seem to still (claude opus 4.5) not get things right, and miss edge cases, and work code in a way that’s not very structured. I use them daily, but I often have to rewrite a lot to reshape the codebase to a point where it makes sense to use the model again. I’m sure they’ll continue to get better, but out of a job better in 5 years? I’m not betting on it.
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> I don't use it anymore for coding I'm curious, can you expand on this? Why did you start using coding agents, and why did you stop?
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What a shitty plot. Here are the sins I count: 1. No y axis label. 2. It supposedly plots a “rate”, but the time interval is unspecified. Per second? Per month? Per year? Intuitively my best guess is that the rate is per-year. However that would imply the second plot believes we are very near to 100% adoption, which I think we know is false. So what is this? Some esoteric time interval like bi-yearly? 3. More likely, it is not a rate at all, but instead a plot of total adoption. In this case, the title is chosen _very_ poorly. The author of the plot probably doesn’t know what they’re looking at. 4. Without grid lines, it’s very hard to read the data in the middle of the plot.
Aside from financially-motivated "testimonials," there's no broad evidence that it even works that well for coding, with many studies even showing the opposite. Damning with faint praise.
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I think what’s clear is many people feel much more productive coding with LLMs, but perceived and actual productivity don’t necessarily correlate. I’m sure results vary quite a bit. My hunch is that long term value might be quite low: a few years into vibe coding huge projects, developers might hit a wall with a mountain of slop code they can no longer manage or understand. There was an article here recently titled “vibe code is legacy code” which made a similar argument. Again, results surely vary wildly
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It feels like it's creating economic activity in the tech sector the same way that walking down the street and smashing everyone's windshields would create economic activity for local auto shops.
One announcement from a company or government can suddenly change the derivative discontinuously. Derivatives irl do not follow the rules of calculus that you learn in class because they don't have to be continuous. (you could quibble that if you zoom in enough it can be regarded as continuous.. But you don't gain anything from doing that, it really does behave discontinuous)
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Person who draws comparison from current situation to derivatives points out that derivatives rules don't apply to current situation. Awesome stuff.
Meta hiding $27B in debt using advanced geometry (stohl.substack.com)
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This have been covered by FT a while ago: https://archive.ph/zs7ul ( https://www.ft.com/content/d0344253-b0a2-4c6d-8b97-520243678afd )
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I once hid $27 in cash using a fiber bundle by stashing it exclusively within the vertical subspace of the total space, V⊂TE, such that their position vector mapped precisely to zero under the differential of the canonical projection, dπ(v)=0, rendering them geometrically imperceptible to any observer constrained to the Riemannian structure of the base manifold.
Serious questions: won't banks and ratings agencies simply treat this as Meta's debt since it it effectively Meta's debt? What changes if this was on their "official balance sheet"? How does playing with the wording actually help Meta overall?
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The crux of this article is that they won't treat Meta's debt as debt, because Meta intentionally structured this debt to circumvent the agencies' definition of "debt." Should they change their definition of "debt?" Maybe, but what incentive do they have to do that, is any formal definition bulletproof to circumvention, etc. What's very interesting to me is what happens when Meta doesn't exercise those lease options. If there isn't some kind of penalty for declining the option, well...
Soo they just borrowed money from themselves to pay for their data center? Nice.
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No, the capital comes from someone else. IIUC, private credit.
Is it dumb for tax reasons?
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Yes. 21% CIT + 15-20% LTCG for the owners. RE throws off much income. It's also difficult to transfer the RE to another entity without realizing gains.
The 2008 crash was in part caused by inaccurately rating synthetic bundles of subprime mortgage debt as extremely low risk (e.g. AAA). Subprime borrowers had a much higher risk of defaulting than a AAA rating implied. On the other hand, Meta has great creditworthiness. And guarantees this vehicle. So... it's not the same.
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Enron had great creditworthiness, too. They are, famously, a very rich and powerful company today.
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That's not accurate. This is debatable but subprime loans were mostly accurately rated. They were rated very low. That low rating was the ultimate precursor to the crash, because it means banks carrying those poorly rated vehicles needed to balance them with different highly rated vehicles to keep their own rating high enough to qualify carrying and lending other financial assets on their books. There were so many of these shitty loans that they had to repackage them to dilute their value/rating against their other highly rated assets, because there are limited number of highly rated assets any given bank could acquire at a moment. That dilution was called a credit default swap, which is bundling under the guise of an insurance vehicle. This magnified the problem for two reasons: First these shitty assets can now be traded in large bulk and secondly any given bank can now carry more of them before further eroding their value. That proved catastrophic because this toxic debt could not be moved fast enough by anybody that held them. Its like hot potato or musical chairs, like Bitcoin. The only real difference between those credit default swaps and Bitcoin is only that everybody knows Bitcoin is intrinsically worthless and only exists as an instrument of speculation while many people actually thought these credit default swaps were real financial assets and that they were insured.
This article is poorly written. It’s so desperate to be clever and edgy that it’s hard to get the facts out of it. ChatGPT isn’t really a solution because the source is both low quality and has questionable motives. Going to any of the other good articles on the subject that have been linked in this comment section is much better.
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Don't say "I'm critical of AI", say "I have questionable motives"!
Not even deceptive. This is relatively normal business practice. It’s easier to think of this as “project risk” as opposed to corporate risk overall. This isn’t different than creating a subsidiary to embark on a new program, with its own debts and assets, collateralized by a parent company. It’s effectively the same as what happens every time a major movie studio starts a new film project.
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Usually subsidiaries’ debt is not also debt on the parent company, especially when said parent is publicly traded and subject to accounting/disclosure rules.
Why would the CEO have the personal liability here and not the board? Does Sundar Pichai have to personally guarantee loans for Google? That would be weird since the CEO could be fired.
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No, but this person’s LLC is not capitalized quite as well as Google, and the bank is adjusting the loan to account for that fact.
You can if you are Meta and are willing to litigate the hell out of it.
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More like if you are Meta and are viewed as a lucrative business opportunity by the bank.
LOL "The entity is named “Beignet,” presumably because “Off-Balance-Sheet Leverage Vehicle No. 5” tested poorly with focus groups."
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"A Love Letter to Enron" would sound really bad in the deposition.
Don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to (2016) (blog.plover.com)
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Setting a capability on the perl executable seems like a very bad idea. That effectively grants tha capability to everything that is able to invoke perl (without being restricted to NO_NEW_PRIVILEGES).
BTW, the author "mjd" is the author of the excellent book "Higher-Order Perl" which is available online at https://hop.perl.plover.com/book/
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I love mjd! He once replied to me on an HN thread and it lives forever in my memory :)
(Let me start clarifying that this is not at all a criticism of the author) I am usually amused by the way really competent people judge other's context. This post assumes understanding of: - emacs (what it is, and terminology like buffers) - strace - linux directories and "everything is a file" - environment variables - grep and similar - what git is - the fact that 'git whatever' works to run a custom script if git-whatever exists in the path (this one was a TIL for me!) - irc - CVEs - dynamic loaders - file priviledges but then feels important to explain to the audience that: >A socket is a facility that enables interprocess communication
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I mean, the title is a quote from Buckaroo Banzai. Lack of context is part of the fun!
Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft? (dub.uu.nl)
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I am sure UK universities cannot go without Microsoft. I believe the absolute majority rely on it. And I can see how they rely more and more on it, by stopping using non-Microsoft/local solutions and switching to Microsoft's ones.
I completely support not being dependant on a foreign company (or any company at all, standards FTW) and I don't think there should even be a shadow of possibility that an organization like the ICC could be cut off from services due to a foreign directive, but while I have seen it repeated many times, I think the article's opening assertion is not true; https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/ It is very distressing how many organizations have become dependant on Microsoft and the US cloud for core services. I hope that an unintended consequence of the current US administration's approach is that this becomes less so.
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It's not strictly true, but the distinction between the truth and the assertion is small enough that the ICC itself draws the conclusion that Microsoft didn't yet: https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-international-criminal-court-is-ditching-microsoft-software-for-an-open-source-alternative
Does China actually "force" things to be done? As far as I can tell, in the realm of technology at least, the government mostly just sets direction and then lets private capital do its thing, albeit without letting power concentrate in a way that subverts government.
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Yes, see Great Chinese Firewall. Providing a VPN access to civilians is a criminal offense in PRC. This is not the same as forcing companies to use domestic software, but to illustrate the ability of Chinese government to implement draconian limitations in general.
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When they want something to be done, it just gets done. I guess that is the point; I was working in China when one year there were 0 electric scooters; the next year, only. Gas scooters were forbidden overnight basically and that was that. Try doing that over here...
EU politicians are just too dependent on keeping the status quo of the last decade. The status quo is how they got to their position so they have no incentive to change anything (Starmer, Merz, Marcon, Von der Lyen. Yuck). By the time they finally get the shove they need to rapidly decouple, e.g. when America invades The Hague* to rescue Netanyahu from war crimes charges, it will be when they're already on the edge of the proverbial cliff. *: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law
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The EU has - just like the US - a generation of boomer senators and presidents in (voting) power for more than 2 decades at this point. In the coming decade, that will change. Hopefully for the better.
The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan. Now they are invading continental Europe? As I said, still licking the car battery.
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Most European countries barely have a standing military to defend themselves, they're completely dependent on the USA for defense through NATO. And their leadership is so docile and complacent that I can't see them being able to muster up a strong resistance to any incursion, most likely if there was an actual invasion of The Hague they would let America do what they need to and try to return back to business as usual as quickly as possible. Again, they're not the types to think beyond the status quo.
Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.
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The problem is , there are very few Europeans or EUans. There are French and Germans and Spanish etc; they all want their country first and sure open markets but their country first. That is how they vote (certainly these days). Most people do not feel EU unfortunately. Language is one thing: it is getting better but having language not unified (English, Spanish, Mandarin; pick one) is a massive and real issue keeping people's minds and efforts local instead of, at least EU wide. It is slowly getting better but the EU should made easier accessible and far higher funds for pan EU projects. Currently it is a serious pain to get access to EU funds and many just get eaten by the few massive consultancy corps who have dedicated teams going for any funding and tender in any locality and language.
I can guarantee some dutch banks are also locked into MS. Maybe not the big ones that actually need to care about tech, but the ones that don't care about tech went head-first into Microsoft Suite these last few years. Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.
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We switched completely to Microsoft/Azure a couple of years ago. My previous employer as well. There was no stopping it, I'd tried and they looked at me like I'm crazy. "Everybody else is doing it" is a very strong argument. At the same time, a very popular open source security package that I wanted to use was deemed a security risk because the maintainer has placed Ukrainian and Palestinian flags in the readme.
Where do I find money to fund my rewrite of Kerberos 5 in Rust, removing the dumb options and Kerberos 4 compatibility and eventually create Kerberos 6 + AD that will solve a metric buttload of issues in Linux and knock a major peg of MS off?
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Memory safety or type safety are the least of Kerberos' issues. The protocol itself is fundamentally flawed.
What kind of obscure insecure defaults are there?
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Check out the Microsoft baseline security guidelines for Windows 11. It's about 400 entries. 400 settings that Microsoft themselves recommend to change from the defaults to achieve a baseline security.
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Everything on by default in general has plagued them, because they don't want users to complain it doesn't work.
That might be your feeling, but it isn't reality. It comes instead from EU companies not even being in the same galaxy as US ones when it comes to revenue, size, and market impact. There is literally no comparison. It's not like the major leagues compared to the minors, it's like the major leagues compared to tee-ball. https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/Comparing-the-Largest-Companies-in-the-US-Europe-and-China-4100
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I think we're comparing different things. While you appear to be talking about financial size, I meant in terms of technical capability. Financially, yes. American companies are obviously larger. How else would they be acquiring all the European companies? In terms of technical capability, European powerhouses like ASML doesn't even have competitors from America as far as I can tell. It's entirely possible to argue they don't have competitors at all. For certain categories of products (EUV), they literally don't!
> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it. Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.
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I agree with you but until we speak the same language, this is going to take a while. I am Dutch, speak Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese (and Mandarin) rather well, but I speak mostly English to prove a point as I believe we should pick a language (does not have to be English but seems the most obvious). I won't see this in my lifetime, nor my childrens or grandchildren. With easily accessible and massive funding by the EU for issues like this would get a lot of uniting done without more federating. I easily can point out 1000s of people who would spend their time working on EU sovereign/open source office 365, ai, aws etc etc the rest of their working lives and beyond, but it needs to make money and there is no money. Both investor money and EU money are incredibly hard to secure here for these type of efforts. Not impossible but very hard.
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