Unlurker

Hurricane category 6 could be introduced under new storm severity scale (livescience.com)

They're just trying to compete with Ethernet.

Last I heard from weather people, cat 6 is not really needed, wonder if that changed recently. With NOAA's cuts, the only way I think cat 6 will be add is Trump wants to be the one to create that level and scientists state it is not really needed :)

we could have had Bernie.

Gore, Obama, Bernie.

Enrollment at trade schools is expected to grow 6.6% a year (finance.yahoo.com)

I've been trying to convince my brother-in-law (who works at a convenience store) to consider trade school for years now, in no small part because I think a lot of the jobs you go to trade school for are safe from automation. For reasons kind of unclear to me, it seems like trade schools have been kind of stigmatized, as somehow "lesser" than university. I don't completely understand why that is; the world needs welders and AC technicians and Practical Nurses much more than we need more software engineers working at a Silicon Valley startup.

University is a path to a more global and flexible career for positions that don’t even exist yet. There is more mobility and more flexibility to future jobs with a university degree like mathematics than with trade.

For the record, I have a bachelors and a masters in computer science and while I didn't finish I did attend a PhD program. I'm not trying to dog on universities as a concept. That said, I think universities aren't a good fit for a lot of people. A lot of people (and I include my brother-in-law in this group) would not be happy with a desk job, and while I think he's pretty smart I don't know that he would do well having to attend four years of a university. I think trade schools are excellent for these kinds of people. I don't have children, but I would like to think that if I did I would try and help them get a career they would be happy with, and "comfortable" doesn't necessarily imply that. I prefer to have a desk job, I like writing software, it's why I spend too much time on HN, but I think a lot of people would benefit from a trade school, and I don't think they should be stigmatized.

I would second this largely, I’m the son of a plumber / handyman / GC. I’ve spent my childhood on service calls and job sites since the age of 5, spent my teenage summers schlepping tools and driving lightning rods, you name it, I’ve done it. I wouldn’t trade my near 20 year software career for the trades, I don’t think. However, the biggest thing I think the HN crowd might appreciate that they have and we lack is an easy path to freedom through self employment - if you want self-employment as a programmer you need the fortune of a novel idea, improvement, or something new in some sense. You might need to also chase the VC dragon. You want to start a plumbing business? Work hard 5-10 years, get out on your own with a van and tools and you have a turn key business idea. Provide good service at a proper rate. End of story.

> we lack is an easy path to freedom through self employment - if you want self-employment as a programmer you need the fortune of a novel idea [etc] See the many software and other computing people who successfully run under a consultant / contractor model. You can absolutely be self employed. Good service at a proper rate (and pretty high too, usually.)

I mean it's not too hard for software people to start contracting businesses. I've done private contracting in the past between W2 jobs, and I've debated trying to do it full time. All it took was an internet connection and a decent laptop.

I’ve tried, it’s far harder to find and succeed in a global marketplace. While I do live in a metro, it’s a small one that cannot sustain an income close to my day job. If you’re a tradesmen you’re never going to compete with Eastern Europe, LATAM, India, or anywhere global.

For junior devs wondering if they picked the right path, remember that the world still needs software, ai still breaks down at even a small bit of complexity, and the first ones to abandon this career will be those who only did it for money anyways and they’ll do the same once the trades have a rough year (as they always do). In the meantime keep learning and practicing cs fundamentals, ignore hype and build something interesting.

>ignore hyp and build something interesting AND don't be afraid to start small! Making a discord or twitch chat bot, quake mod, a silly sound board of all ypur favorite Groot quotes.

AI coding isn't eating the industry, offshoring is. Inflation, end of ZIRP, and IRS section 174 kicked this off back in 2022 before AI coding was even a thing. Junior devs won't lose jobs to AI. They'll lose jobs to the global market. American software developers have lost the stranglehold on the job market.

Section 174 has been restored, thankfully. We’ll see if the damage is done.

I think the concern isn't so much about the current state of AI replacing software engineers, but more "what if it keeps getting better at this same rate?" I don't really agree with the reasoning [1], and I don't think we can expect this same rate of progress indefinitely, but I do understand the concern. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

You imply the models have been improving in some capacity.

Jevons paradox doesn't always apply (it depends on the shape of supply-demand curves) and it is entirely possible for technology to eliminate careers. For example, a professional translator can work far faster now than twenty years ago, but the result is that positions for professional translators are rapidly disappearing rather than growing. There's a finite demand for paid translation work and it's fairly saturated. There are also far fewer personal secretaries now than there were in the '70s. That used to be a very common and reasonably well-paying career. It may happen that increasing the efficiency of software development results in with even more and even-better-paid software developers, but this isn't a guaranteed outcome.

| "what if it keeps getting better at this same rate?" All relevant and recent evidence points to logarithmic improvement, not the exponential we were told (promised) in the beginning. We're likely waiting at this point for another breakthrough on the level of the attention paper. That could be next year, it could be 5-10 years from now, it could be 50 years from now. There's no point in prediction.

> logarithmic improvement Relative to time. Not relative to capital investment. There it's nearly perfectly linear.

Yeah, that's how I feel about it. People like to assume that progress is this steady upward line, but I think it's more like a staircase. Someone comes up with something cool, there's a lot of amazing progress in the short-to-mid term, and then things kind of level out. I mean, hell, this isn't even the first time that this has happened with AI [1]. The newer AI models are pretty cool but I think we're getting into the "leveling out" phase of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

The main problem with the current technology, to my eye, is you need these huge multi dimensional models with extremely lossy encoding in order to implement the system on a modern CPU which is effectively a 2.5D piece of hardware that ultimately accesses a 1D array of memory. Your exponential problems have exponential problems. Scaling this system is factorially hard.

If software developers wind up replaced by AI, I think it's safe to say every industry's labor will be replaced. Trade jobs won't be far behind, because robotics will be nipping at their heels. If software falls, everything falls. But as we've seen, these models can't do the job themselves. They're best thought of as an exoskeleton that requires a pilot. They make mistakes, and those mistakes multiply into a mess if a human isn't around. They don't get the big picture, and it's not clear they ever will with the current models and techniques. The only field that has truly been disrupted is graphics design and art. The image and video models are sublime and truly deliver 10,000x speed, cost, and talent reductions. This is probably for three reasons: 1. There's so much straightforward training data 2. The laws of optics and structure seem correspondingly easier than the rules governing intelligence. Simple animals evolved vision hundreds of millions of years ago, and we have all the math and algorithmic implementations already. Not so, for intelligence. 3. Mistakes don't multiply. You can brush up the canvas easily and deliver the job as a smaller work than, say, a 100k LOC program with failure modes.

> If software developers wind up replaced by AI, I think it's safe to say every industry's labor will be replaced. Trade jobs won't be far behind, because robotics will be nipping at their heels. If software falls, everything falls. I don’t think that follows at all. Robotics is notably much, much, much harder than AI/ML. You can replace programmers without robotics. You can’t replace trades without them.

There will be millions of meat based robots lining up to flood the market when every knowledge based worker is displaced.

> Robotics is notably much, much, much harder than AI/ML. Are you so sure? Almost every animal has solved locomotion, some even with incredibly primitive brains. Evolution knocked this out of the park hundreds of millions of years ago. Drosophila can do it, and we've mapped their brains. Only a few animals have solved reasoning. I'm sure the robotics videos I've seen lately have been cherry picked, but the results are nothing short of astounding. And there are now hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into solving it. I'd wager humans stumble across something evolution had a cake walk with before they stumble across the thing that's only happened once in the known universe.

Yes, robotics is harder. Here’s some links. Wiki as an intro, and a reasonably entertaining write up that explains the concept in some depth, specifically comparing the issue to LLM progress as of 2024 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://harimus.github.io/2024/05/31/motortask.html Edit: just to specifically address your argument, doing something evolution has optimized for hundreds of millions of years is much harder than something evolution “came up with” very recently (abstract thought).

I think this is making an assumption that the number of potential jobs is fixed. I don't agree with that assumption. I think as people learn how to use these tools then more industries pop up to use those tools. ETA: You updated your post and I think I agree with most of what you said after you updated.

New Huawei 96GB GPU (e.huawei.com)

Well that was fast.

If they release the full hardware documentation they will already be ahead of the incumbent in openness, just like Intel and AMD did; and IMHO that will also help gain a following.

Naive question: Are the current (from what I have heard not very effective) export restrictions of HPC GPUs to china truly productive in the long run if the goal is to retain an edge? As in, to me it seems that it just fuels an expansion of domestic capabilities and in the car and solar sector my impression is that china had already proven that it can absolutely perform on par or even better in many different metrics compared to western countries, given time and pressure. So while these chips are not on par with current or even last gen GPUs, I would not be surprised if china would catch up and even have a much higher incentive to do so, now that other countries try to control their access to key technologies. I am not saying whether retaining an edge is good or bad or that I have a different answer if one thought it was good. Just curious what you guys think.

I think it will be effective. This stuff is hard. There used to be many competitors capable of the best process technology: TI, GlobalFoundries, Intel, IBM, Samsung, TSMC. Canon, Nikon, ASML all used to have competitive lithography machines. Now it’s just TSMC and Samsung at the edge, and only ASML supplies the latest lithography machines. China will probably catch up quickly but the pace will be nonlinear and illusory. They will hit diminishing returns just like everyone else has. They’ve probably stolen every bit of semiconductor IP they can through economic coercion or espionage. All they can do now is out-innovate everyone else and that will take a long time. But who knows, their pace of advancement since Mao died has been impressive.

That's assuming they can keep pumping massive capital into every industry that it seeks to circumvent from bans and sanctions. But it appears they have very short runway these days. Just months after the initial tariffs/sanctions from US, Chinese government is enacting multiple tax raising schemes in September to try to stay alive. The first is the mandating that workers and employees cannot opt out of social security contributions. which is around 1500 yuan ($200) per month for one worker. for an average worker that makes 4000 ($600) yuan, it makes no sense. So many companies are deciding to layoff or close up in September. And workers are going back to countryside. The second is the landlord tax that is starting on September 15th. This is due to people not buying real estates anymore and renting instead.

China is racing full speed ahead to win in all these tech domains regardless of export controls. They will surpass us on chips just like they surpassed us on EVs. The leading edge of chip design is very complex so it will just take more time than EVs. But it is inevitable. Even if China could get their hands on all the NVIDIA GPUs they wanted they would still try to make their own as fast as possible.

I would not be surprised if most of us are running Chinese silicon a decade or two from now, unless China invades Taiwan, and I also think recent events have certainly spurned CCP tech strategy and accelerated this timeline. There's a few hurdles for China to overcome first, most notably catching up on high-end manufacturing processes, but it's naive to assume that won't happen eventually. For consumer and prosumer gear that they can get it done is already obvious, cf. people generally having no problem with buying DJI, BambuLabs or Anker.

China will 100% invade Taiwan. This is why both parties in the US are spending so much to get domestic chip production running. I would be astonished if the backroom deal wasn't "If you take Taiwan now, we'll have to stop you, if you wait until we're self sufficient, we won't interfere."

It's considerably slower than RTX 4090, doesn't have CUDA, and you are entirely beholden to whatever sketchy drivers they have. And power consumption is generally also dog shit. There are YouTubers who have bought other cards to test them out, and drivers are generally the big problem. Chinese hardware manufacturers usually only target and test on the hardware/software configs available in China. They mostly use the same stuff, but with weird quirks due to Chinese ownership and modification of a lot of stuff that enters their country.

You can't seriously expect a new GPU manufacturer to create a perfectly useable ecosystem on day one. The drivers will surely get better over time and support for integrating the compute stack that they use will come if the incentive is good enough. I really hope this doesn't turn out like HIP in AMD Radeon cards. That is absolute dog shit and has been dog shit for ages. It's really sad that an AMD card from 2017 is useless for compute while an equivalent Nvidia card from the same era is just now getting dropped by the latest CUDA versions.

Interesting approach of taking 2-3 comments from reddit and posting a comment joining them together here, with a brand new account no less. https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1n46ify/finally_china_entering_the_gpu_market_to_destroy/nbip09q/

That is creepy and I do not like it.

Feels kinda like AI?

Maybe the Chinese can break the CUDA monopoly? They're the ones writing most of the open source AI code.

Extremely large and fragmented community of AI researchers and developers in China. CUDA competitors in China face the same hurdles as those in the West.

Because it's not just "CUDA" by itself, it's the whole ecosystem. Most AI developers don't actually use CUDA directly, they use programming libraries like PyTorch that use CUDA under the hood to communicate with the GPU to run tasks in parallel. CUDA is pretty much the standard and is supported anywhere it's relevant. Just creating an alternative is pretty meaningless if it isn't actually supported anywhere. Adding support isn't easy, and there's also stability issues, bugs, etc. People want something that works and is reliable (= CUDA, since it's battle-tested). That's the same flawed argument that people have used to expect Huawei to replace Android/EUV.

So… five to ten times worse TOPS/W compared to NVIDIA, if I’m reading this correctly. It wouldn’t have a market if it wasn’t for the tensions between the USA and China, unless it’s super cheap.

> It wouldn’t have a market if it wasn’t for the tensions between the USA and China, unless it’s super cheap. It is super cheap, compared to what's available if you want 96GB for ML inference in a single card (ignoring the other aspects one might care about). I'm seeing it on Alibaba for 1200-1500 EUR which is like 7-8 times cheaper than I can buy a RTX Pro 6000 for locally.

Why? I'm a human and I like competitive markets and hate monopolies

What's your opinion on being tortured by a machine for eternity?

Ok doomer

But the price !

Which is?

I wonder if Huawei are making any money off this, or are they trying to get a foot in the door first.

Affiliates Flock to 'Soulless' Scam Gambling Machine (krebsonsecurity.com)

Mandatory reminder that YC itself has funded and is promoting ( https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/yotta ) a company that not only lost people's "savings" (despite fake promises of FDIC insurance - which didn't actually cover their predictable failure mode: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/21/synapse-collapse-nearly-109m-in-yotta-customer-deposits-vanish.html ) but is now promoting an outright gambling scheme that is operating a well-known game typically seen in unregulated Eastern-European casinos: https://members.withyotta.com/moonshot/ .

Any person or site that asks you to send money in order to “verify” yourself is a scam.

Point taken, but USPS asks for $2 for an address change for verification.

There seems to be an analogous concept of the Second Law of Thermodynamics - everything in society will tend towards scams if not actively opposed.

Scams definitely seem to be more entropic than honest enterprise.

This is like a fractal scam, you've got gambling against the house (already a scam) with crypto (avoiding what little regulation keeps regular casinos somewhat honest) and then instead of waiting for statistics to take their course they just run away with the money.

Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to Price Anything (wsj.com)

In the end it's the biggest leopard ate my face moment ever: China has very high growth momentum that surpasses American living standards soon, and not long before it will surpass American security standards too. China's purchasing power is probably more comfortable than most western countries, with extensive housing and high speed rail and electric cars etc. When a country becomes rich, inevitably other countries ask for their help. That's why China's growth must be curbed, fast > tariff them to their death or so. But I really don't think it will work at all. And personally I don't even think it's a good idea at all to begin with.

The craziest thing about all this is that Chinese exports to the US aren't even that big a part of the Chinese economy (3% or so). Sure, it'll hurt and there's multiplier effects, but the entire rest of the world is more than happy to take up the slack. So the tariffs really are the US cutting its own nose off to spite its face.

Let's literally kill millions of people so that the Bad Red Guys can't be a more successful nation than us. I mean, obviously there's no way we could possibly improve and compete, we're already the best it's possible to be, which is why we need to kill all the people who are doing better than us. Do you even hear yourself? Because everybody else in the world hears what Americans like you are saying and see the truth behind your psychopathic nonsense. Literally, kill people, destroy an economy and country, just because they're out-competing you? Are you for real? You know what, let's just go whole hog. March into China, start shoving people onto trains and dump them into death camps. When one camp fills up with too many bodies, just leave them to rot and set up a new camp a few yards over. We'll have plenty of free land in USA2.

> Literally, kill people OP never literally called for killing anyone.

What numbers are you seeing for the surpassing living standards? Their gpd per capita flatlined in 2024 at $13k. That's with only 80M of their citizens making above $2000/month. The bulk of their citizens make less than $100/month, and there's a declining middle class of around 200M that makes around $800/month. But they have high youth unemployment rate (>40%), there's a massive layoff wave coming in September with the mandatory social security payment from companies, and their recent factory wages have plummeted to $2/hour, barely survivable in first tier cities. Before everyone jumps in with GDP per capital with PPP, what quality at that low price means is tofu dreg buildings, cancerous food items, waist high flooding every summer in cities, ghost buildings, and unsafe water (recently one of the most prosperous city, Hangzhou, had sewage seeped into the water for weeks, which the local government denied responsibility).

> GDP per capital with PPP China’s ‘25 GDP per capita on a purchasing-power parity basis is $29k to America’s $90k [1]. American real GDP per capita grew at 1.7% a year from 2015 to 2025 [2]. (American PPP GDP/c grew 4.5% a year from 2014 to 2024 [3].) From 2004 to 2024, Chinese PPP GDP/c grew 7.4% a year [4]. If China and America keep growing at their respective rates, we wouldn’t expect convergence for 20+ (40, using America’s PPP GDP/c) years. That’s too long for our if condition to be expected to hold. There is not a strong argument for Chinese GDP/capita, PPP-adjusted or not, approaching America’s within a generation. There is a risk China’s economy becomes bigger than ours in aggregate. > what quality at that low price means is tofu dreg buildings, cancerous food items, waist high flooding every summer in cities, ghost buildings, and unsafe water (recently one of the most prosperous city, Hangzhou, had sewage seeped into the water for weeks, which the local government denied responsibility) Your comment loses credibility with this rant. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA/ [3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=U [4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=CN&start=2004

I’d like to lay out an argument about why tariffs are good. The only businesses that are derailing with tariffs issues are those that import goods to sell. The argument against tariffs is that they make goods more expensive. Of course, this argument is true. But that’s not the end of the story. Because prices are higher for imported goods, demand for domestically produced goods increases. This increase in demand leads to increased demand for labor, which can increase wages. Additionally, the money multiplier effect is higher when money is kept domestically vs paid to offshore parties. Finally, I think it’s ridiculous to expect that this nation can maintain its wealth without producing anything. We act as if the producers of food are fungible cogs that businesses can swap out. But I think we’ll find that management is the fungible part. Anyone can sell a quality good. Knowing how to make it is what’s important. I’m surprised that mindset doesn’t resonate more with software engineers.

How about direct orders from retailers in foreign countries of products that aren’t made domestically (and are so specialized and small market in the US that there’s no world where they manufacture here)? I’ve already been burned on specialty products just suspending shipping here due to tariff uncertainty in addition to the various postal services suspending to the US, like JP Post.

Sure, a cogent policy would be ideal. But you can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. America was getting their lunch eaten well before Trump. At least the tariff policy is an attempt at rectifying the situation.

Lunch eaten by whom? Who was eating the world's richest country's lunch? The only lunch eating going on is the American rich eating the poors', something that's only accelerated under Trump. The tariffs are a tax that is most disproportionate on the poor. And they are in no way, shape or form actually intelligently designed to help them. It's just stupid madness.

Even assuming that there were no other federal, state or local YoY differences [1] that could explain this change (and that the numbers are right as presented in the first place), New York City private sector employment is nothing like most other parts of the US: it's the largest city in the US by a large margin, it has a concentration of employment in a few major industries (finance, fashion, publishing, software) that aren't represented elsewhere, and...it hasn't been a manufacturing center since the victorian era. You can't wave this away with "NYC is a leading indicator for the US economy". To the extent that it's true at all, you could say it about any large city in the US. [1] Like, say: interest rates, the business cycle, AI, the slowdown in software hiring, or the minimum wage increase that NYC implemented on January 1, 2025.

Yes, a tariff can be a good measure. But for that the tariffed goods need to be selected carefully and rationally und not whatever the heck the Trump administration is doing. For example you can tariff bananas all you like, that won't spark widespread banana production in a climate that can't grow them.

Doesn't insurance normally work by protecting rare instances whose cost is amortized over the base? This would be a claim by a large amount of insurance clients at once

> would be a claim by a large amount of insurance clients at once You’d insure against a specific product from a specific country being hit with a tariff. Tariffs are going up and down, sometimes in a way that may as well be random. (India not recommending Trump for a Nobel prize.) On its face, this doesn’t seem uninsurable.

That is measurably untrue and it took me about ten seconds of searching to find it. https://www.billmeridian.com/articles-files/inflation.htm and many others. Historically I know you tend to argue pretty dishonestly but this was pretty easy to find and so either you're lying or didn't bother doing any research past reading Ayn Rand. Also, prices spiking up from incompetent threats of tariffs and not coming down are categorically different than regular inflation. This is obvious and shouldn't need to be explained to you. ETA: Just realized that the source for the one I posted was pretty dubious (Bill Meridian is apparently a "financial astrologer", whatever that means), so here's a more reputable one: https://northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/the-war-of-1812/

We’ve also been running deficits since the birth of our nation [1]. Perpetual deficits are a post-WWII thing, not post-Fed. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/021115/how-long-has-us-run-fiscal-deficits.asp

Yeah but that doesn't align at all with the "1914 Federal Reserve is Evil Boogeyman". A lot of libertarian "bad guys" tend to be pretty reductive, or just outright lies.

Are we decentralized yet? (arewedecentralizedyet.online)

One of the nice things about mastodon is that the total lack of centralization and the absence of the dreaded algorithm means you don't have reputation farmer accounts posting bloviating nonsense the whole time. Its really great there. Mastodon is social like a quiet pub. Twitter and Bluesky are social like a crowd at a concert.

Well git was not really an attempt at decentralization so there is that.

And in many ways it actually is remarkably meaningfully decentralized - or perhaps "effectively" decentralized - in terms of every node having a full working copy of entire repositories that can be trivially cloned to another provider or stood up on a self-hosted server.

I’d say the opposite. Git is defacto centralized. And I’d go further and say that attempting decentralization is the biggest problem with Git. It maybe makes sense for Linux. But for 99.999% of projects it makes everything so much worse.

> except tracker sites There are loads of different tracker sites. Many private. If one goes bad, others pop up to replace it. This is decentralised - there is not one player that strangles the ecosystem.

> There are loads of different tracker sites Not to mention the mainline DHT. Not impossible or even very resource hungry to run a scraper/crawler/listener and be able to search via it, like bitmagnet ( https://bitmagnet.io/ ) that has some fun pipe-dreams like federation of indexers and something like an decentralized private tracker.

Everybody else is telling you you're wrong and you're doubling down and insisting that respectable journals are morons who don't understand anything. You should stop, reflect on this fact for a moment, then go pick up a goddamn book

You should take a deep breath and calm down

one important correction is that blacksky is not hosting their own appview, they host their own PDS for users to join and a soft-fork of the official client

Ah, apologies, thanks! Lemme edit.

Actually it doesn't look like I'm able to edit anymore, so I'll upvote your comment.

The honest truth is that: Nobody outside tech cares about decentralization or federation. At some point, everything converges to centralization. No amount of Mastodon servers or any fediverse self hosted instances spun up will change that. There is a reason that mastodon.social is the biggest instance and that they couldn't close registrations to promote decentralization. Hell, I would even say that threads is the biggest mastodon instance.

I agree that many people do not care, but I don't think this is a tech problem. In the real world, you can ask people if they would prefer to live in a town with all bespoke mom'n'pop businesses or just a few big box retailers and chain restaurants identical to the ones in the next town over. The intuitive expectation might be that most people would prefer the bespoke stuff because it offers a more personalized service, but it turns out that many people really do want to have the same experience as folks in the next town over. Even among folks who claim to be free thinkers or unique personalities, even among folks who have xenophobia or express a chavinistic sentiment, there is still an impulse to seek the exact same experiences that folks outside of their community are also having. Why is that? I am sure there are various psychological and perhaps even physiological reasons why people are drawn to homogeneity, but the bigger problem is that bad actors can find ways to exploit these reasons to amass power. Once those actors have the power to shape society, then it becomes a feedback loop where perhaps in the abstract a person might not desire exactly those experiences that are provided by the central authority, but because the structures in society are now pointing toward that being the "best" option, then that's what people come to believe they want. I suppose the philosophical question is if people come to want to be exploited, is it still okay to exploit them? Personally I think it's not okay. I think it's a worthy goal to present other options. In an ideal world, perhaps there would be structures in society that define open standards that allow people to find the homogeneous experiences they value while still ensuring that no central authority could take ownership over the delivery of those experiences. Perhaps there should be some assurance that those who deliver the experiences aren't also using other levers at their disposal to engineer the desire for those experiences in the first place. Which is all to say that perhaps social media should be better regulated, and as nerds we might think that one way to do that is build it into the base technology as decentralization or federation. But one would hope that people outside of tech could at least understand the value, since the tech is just a model of real-world systems.

> We haven't seen a distributed Google https://yacy.net

You can index your own stuff and propagate that index to others. This is what people would have thought good when Gopher was a thing.

What do you mean by unimportant? I mean from the user's perspective: when I open a thread, I expect to instantly see the entire discussion happening across the entire network, with the paginated data coming back in a single roundtrip. Moreover, I expect every actor participating in the said discussion (wherever their data is stored) to see the same discussion as I do, with the same level of being "filled in", and in real time (each reply should immediately appear for each participant). It should be indistinguishable from UX of a centralized service where things happen instantly and are presented deterministically and universally (setting aside that centralized services abandoned these ideals in favor of personalization). With ATProto, this is clearly achieved (by reading already indexed information from the database). How can you achieve this expectation in an architecture where there's no single source of truth and you have to query different sources for different pieces on demand in a worker? (To clarify, I did read the linked PR. I'm asking you because it seems obviously unachievable to me, so I'm hoping you'll acknowledge this isn't a 1:1 comparison in terms of user experience.) To give a concrete example: is this really saying that replies will only be refreshed once in fifteen minutes[1]? The user expectation from centralized services is at most a few seconds. [1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615/files#diff-6dc6e5fe84dacdb226ddb665f9b837adaafb3c3bc94f0079311ebf51049e88e4R97

I'm not very interested in arguing over the ins and outs of "user expectations" and Mastodon vs. Bluesky, sorry. I would suggest you try it yourself and come to your own conclusion about whether this is a usable system :^)

I'm arguing that "not really consistent" from the grandparent post still applies, and therefore your "this isn't correct" isn't correct. For realtime discussions (like this one), I don't think we can call it consistent if it takes multiple minutes for each back-and-forth reply to propagate across instances in the best case (and potentially longer through multiple hops?) because you'll see different things depending on where you're looking and at which point in time.

> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter. One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to. I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.

Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.

I think what they are asking is: if I run a my own BlueSky AppView, how do I integrate with the bluesky.app so that users signed in on my AppView can interact with users on the the main AppView and vice versa? This is how most of us think about federalisation.

That's already the default behavior. You don't need to do anything special for that to work, it's what ATProto is designed for. Everything is always operating in a shared space by design. When people "post", their posts go to their PDS's, which means that every AppView ingests data generated by every other AppView by default. There is no way to tell who's using which AppView — in fact, you can log into any AppView and your profile will be there with all your posts.

The Rise of Hybrid PHP: Blending PHP with Go and Rust (yekdeveloper.com)

The one thing I don't like about PHP is that the whole application is bootstraped (and autoloading and the configuration is re-evaluated) in every single http request. Sure thing there's cache and all, but it just doesn't feel right (compared, to, for instance, an http server written in golang)

This is one of the best things about PHP IMO. It makes it very easy to scale out.

> In short, the modern PHP ecosystem gives us the best of both worlds: the ability to build quickly and confidently in PHP, while still having powerful options (C, Rust, Go) for performance-critical parts. This hybrid approach lets us stay productive without sacrificing speed where it matters most. I understand this for a large codebase where rewriting is not feasible. But if that wasn't the case, a C# APIs achieves both speed of development and execution in my experience. You'll rarely need to reach for C++ or Rust. PHP is great but the language still doesn't allow things like typed arrays. It will happily accept string in a array of dates, for example.

I would never use a Microsoft language since they discontinued VB6. Open Source languages are the only sane option.

And still nobody outside of Meta cares about hack. The niche I think PHP had back in the day has largely been supplanted by Python. Maybe it’s better now, but after moving on from it to basically anything else after a 25 year career, I don’t miss it.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by mentioning Hack. At this point it's diverged from PHP to the point that it's basically a different language, is (IIRC) actually slower than PHP 8, and the HHVM doesn't even support PHP any more. As such, it's not a huge surprise that relatively few people outside of Meta give it much attention. I also moved on from PHP several years ago, and don't miss it. That doesn't mean I don't recognise that there are still perfectly legitimate reasons to choose it.

> I think you really have to decide based on the complexity you need I don't really agree. I think the goal should be to reduce complexity where possible, but not if you're inevitably painting yourself into a corner. If you want the simplest and most scalable way forward, write static pages and avoid server-side rendering.

How would you be painting yourself into a corner with PHP more than with JS? If you use PHP, you can just serve/use JS later. But if you use JS, you will have a hard time serving HTML from PHP later. Aside from both languages kinda being painting oneself into a corner, I don't see how one would do more so with PHP than with JS, out of all the things.

There's a firm foundation in Javascript. The choices aren't choices I'd make but they're choices I understand. Brendan Eich knew what he was doing and it shows, indeed if it was made simply of bailing wire and string it'd have been replaced. For PHP on the other hand - even when I started writing PHP3 - so certainly not the very beginnings, it's clearly just cobbling together whatever works from unrelated half-understood parts and so there's no coherent centre to it, when I last worked on some PHP earlier this year it still felt like bailing wire and string.

Do we need to post that JS' weird things link here? Of the basics of JS, few things are sound. The "firm foundation" idea doesn't really work for JS. It might even work better for PHP, and I am saying that as someone, who doesn't want to do PHP ever again.

University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test (planning.e-psychometrics.com)

I mean, a quick look at the flynn effect would indicate that's complete fucking nonsense. we won ww2 with an army a solid SD below today's 100.

Are you Russian?

So the NBA is discriminating by using physical tests that require height? Any kind of skill-based testing is obviously racist. Thanks for teaching me.

The NBA doesn't discriminate by height. They have chosen players that are 5'3" over players who are 6'6". You're welcome for me educating you.

Sorry, this test has too many users right now. Please try again later.

Or is that message the first challenge of the test...