Unlurker

"[Rubio] ...calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move..." Bro what. It was the default font in Microsoft for many years thus, it was the default font for most office software for many years -- just like Times New Roman was before. What.

The article says it's better than Times New Roman because it's easier to read for those with disabilities - so of course the government needs to make things worse for them. Wonder if someone could sue over these kinds of changes that are being deliberately made to be less accessible.

This is Michael Scott levels of managerial nonsense, bloody hell. Is Trump incapable of hiring anyone borderline competent?

The only thing these morons understand are surface level appearances. That's why we have so many TV people. - Trump: The Apprentice - Defense: Hegseth: Fox News - Transportation: Sean Duffy: Real World / Road Rules - Education: Linda McMahon: WWE (yes, wrestling) ... I don't feel like going any further, it's too depressing. Edit: I just realized that Duffy is SecTrans because he was on Road Rules.

Hilarious. It could be a Mike Judge script.

"Do I look like I know what a jay-peg is?"

Google is powering a new US Military AI platform (theverge.com)

They year is 2028. Google announces they are discontinuing US Military

I have a feeling to the average user there isn't a major difference between the major LLM chatbots. They've all converged on pretty damn good. Even more fringe ones like Grok. What I'm interested in is who gets the most integration. Google has Android and Search so they have a big advantage and they seem to be the first to roll out a Home voice assistants (early release started in Oct). Beating out Alexa and Apple home. iPhone is still missing a proper Siri but they will still have control of multiple huge platforms. xAI / Grok is stuck in the fringes a bit. Maybe they'll focus on APIs and affordable business stuff, or some social media play. Anthropic seems to dominate in coding and API stuff as well.

Skynet?

OpenAI Is in Trouble (theatlantic.com)

Around May, Altman said to FT that his job was the "most important job maybe in history" (FT: https://www.ft.com/content/a3d65804-1cf3-4d67-ac79-9b78a10b6dcc ). He did come back from brink of death before as well. But steering OpenAI into an "ecosystem" rather than a focusing on the product when you are up against the likes of Google? Seems like cashing in on the hype too early.

I only see three fairly superficial paragraphs. Is there more to the article behind a paywall?

No

There are several published methods for reading Atlantic articles. I don't think anyone can make the judgement call for what you should and shouldn't read. Why not give it a shot?

I didn't ask about what I should or shouldn't do and don't really care about your opinion on what I should read. I was surprised by how short and superficial the article was as originally linked and wanted to know if that was due to a paywall blocking the more substantive portion of the article or whether the article is just three brief paragraphs.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

Italy's longest-serving barista reflects on six decades behind the counter (reuters.com)

I was thinking about robotic baristas the other day and how you might save on costs but you give up so much; If I’m going out for coffee I prefer places where I know the baristas so I get to feel like a part of my community.

This is right, coffee is a lot about people and interaction. It's about being around people.

There are a couple stores around me run by small families, and honestly sometimes I feel like I'm halfway to being part of their family when I visit. They recognize me, greet me by name, and start firing up my order right away. Or they ask me how I'm doing and I do the same, but it goes deeper than "good, you?" - I'm learning currently about how one dude is trying a year living together with his ex again. I'm praying for 'em every day pretty much. We share recipes, stores, etc. We will rue every decision we make to remove humans from interactions imo.

> robotic baristas Coffee vending machines? That’s what’s inside the box, it’s nothing new really… There are very high quality ones too. It’s not a particularly skilled job for a human to do, besides the customer service aspect of course, perhaps I am ignorant in that regard. Indeed, coming from Spain, I don’t really see the lady as a barista, she is the classic bartender that listens to you and knows everybody. Except the bar is open throughout the day, is family friendly, sells all kinds besides alcohol (breakfast, coffee, tobacco, lunch, dinner, newspapers, lottery tickets, snacks and sweets…), and generally acts as the social nexus of the neighborhood. These old school small bars are everywhere in southern EU. Within that context it is less surprising that she would stay working there as long as she physically could.

Working past a 100 is a dream of mine (The barista in the article is 101). I don't think too many people are fond of images of old age in the Western popular zeitgeist - care homes, infirmity, increasing disability. I hope we can cultivate more 'blue zones' across the Planet, such as in Japan and around the Mediterranean. We have the capability to do so.

I'm not sold on the whole blue zone thing... here is an HN discussion on a paper refuting some of the claims that won an Ig Nobel prize last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41738434

Between the lines you can hear the eulogy for a healthy economy and dense social network which have, now, mostly rotted away.

> I tell my granddaughters: work, save, don’t depend on anyone. The world is getting harder. This woman lived through fascist Italy and everything that came after, and then says this about the way the world is going.

I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week (blog.shortround.space)

Here's a copy of the missing article: https://archive.ph/kg3Dw

Because your comment got pruned along with mine, let me repost it so that I can still reply to it, even though it'll live but a few brief moments before likely being flagged: >>It's an incredibly credible comment. >reenorap, and HN in general, is not on my list of credible people to take medical advice from. >>might have an independent mind and (gasp) believe their own lying eyes >Yes, look at me, holding doctors above LLMs when it comes to medical advice. I'm basically brainwashed. >You know what, I'm being enlightened. Engineers are sometimes wrong. Right? So, we should get LLMs to design bridges, airplanes, etc. We could get some layperson to google it after for verification." Here, I'll quote the relevant part of my comment that your inanity ignored: >if you have a need to have slavish trust in authority, be it LLMs or MDs I'll restate this for you: If you blindly believe what anyone or any thing says on the basis purely of authority, be that a pedigree or technological idolatry, you've demonstrated that you are unfit to self-govern. It's absolutely astounding how a nominally educated society can have all the pieces of literacy and critical thinking yet stubbornly refuse to assemble them into any kind of coherent ability to consider or evaluate inputs independently. You can't even read a two-line comment with any degree of accuracy! Look to the beam in your own eye! LLMs are median prediction engines. They transform what they're given into a given continuance of what they've been exposed to before. That's it. It's a giant correlative database. There's no man behind the curtain, just a training corpus. They're not malicious, nor magical. If you use it like it's a mind reader ("I have this rash on my body"), yeah, you're going to get a generic (and wrong)/response because you're receiving the input of a zone of high potential with no actual information (i.e. you're an being mirrored+system prompts). What rash? Where? How long has it been there? How big is it? The color? What correlative events have occurred? Have you taken any new medications or supplements? Etc. etc. The problem isn't LLMs. The problem is you're all unable to think for yourselves. Even if you could wave a magic wand and make LLMs disappear, you'd all just find new idols to blindly follow instead of using the brain and consciousness evolution so helpfully provided you to escape this exact problem of evaluating hearsay. Of course, you and every other dissenting reader won't take this to heart or even really read it. You'll skim it, pretend that's the same thing, look for the no-no words, hammer your keyboard, confabulate a response to something no one actually said, then pat yourself on the back for having slapped down yet another hand reaching out to lift you out of your own ignorance.

Everyone on this website has thoughts on LLM's, not just you. LLM's are heavily biased by leading questions, which is not a good property in a doctor. They also tend to respond in a way to please the prompter, which might be a frustrated parent, not in a way which is impartial and based on good medical practices. They frequently speak with high confidence and low accuracy.

> About 70% of hospital deaths are due to preventable mistakes in the hospital. It's awful that you had a bad experience, but no. Nowhere near 70% of hospital deaths are from preventable mistakes. I would also note that in your experience, you ended up trusting a different doctor (ophthalmologist), not ChatGPT. Second opinions from other qualified professionals is a thumbs up from me.

The author doesn't say don't trust doctors or trust chatgpt. He says don't trust "a single doctor" and look for a second opinion whenever possible.

I would add to your note, that the person that was correct in their care was the actual expert. Doctors are experts in their fields, but until they saw an ophthalmologist, they didn't see the right practitioner. Just like I wouldn't go to my podiatrist to treat a complex case of rosecea, urgent care and GCP aren't for specialized, complex and rare cases.

I think chatgpt can help to argue with doctors and get to the specialist faster.

Django: what’s new in 6.0 (adamj.eu)

Any code or blog written by Adam is worth spending some time on. It will be interesting to see how the tasks framework develops and expands. I am sad to see the great Django-Q2 lumped in with the awful Celery though.

I’m currently stuck with the tech debt of Celery myself. I understand that! Does Django Tasks support async functions?

Why is celery awful?

Because it’s a seducer. It does what you need to do and you two are happy together. So you shower more tasks on Celery and it becomes cold and non-responsive at random times. And debugging is a pain in the ass. Most places I’ve been that have it, I’ve tried to sell them on adding Flower to give better insight and everyone thinks that’s a very good idea but there isn’t time because we need to debug these inscrutable Celery issues. https://flower.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Template partials look good, which is one of the key reasons frameworks like React are as good and popular as they are, because you can reuse small segments of code.

The most obvious value here is for HTMX, which requires a lot of partial templates.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

ULID: Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier (packagemain.tech)

Interesting article noting how ULIDs solve database index fragmentation caused when using UUIDv4. However, for extremely high-volume writes, ULIDs create "hot spots" at the current timestamp index location, potentially causing contention. The article notes that UUID v7 (newly standardized) adopts the same time-ordered approach, validating ULID's design.

Whenever ULID comes up, I need to remind that it has a sequential ID generation mode in its spec which is prone to conflicts on multi-threads, processes or hosts which kills the purpose of a "universal" identifier. If you need a sequential ID, just use an integer, preferably one that's autoincremented by the database. It's best to stick to UUIDv7 because of such quirks of ULID.

ULID's initial segment is timestamp generated, with a random suffix at the end. This kind of collision you're concerned about is not an issue at all, across multi-threads, processes or hosts.

Not if the same ULID generator instance is used across threads.

That depends on if the specific implementation of the generator instance is thread safe. Highly implausible to use the same generator instance between different threads/processes/hosts because there's no benefit at all and only additional downsides.

> If you need a sequential ID, just use an integer Are monotonic/sequential ULIDs as easily enumerated as integers? It's the ease of enumerability that keeps a lot of folks away from using sequential integers as IDs

You mean someone who wants to attack your system might be discouraged by Base32 encoding?

No, ULID has a "monotonic" feature, where if it detects the same millisecond timestamp in back to back calls, it just increments the 80 bit "random" portion. This means it has convoying behavior. If two machines are generating ids independently and happen to choose initial random positions near each other, the probability of collision is much higher than the basic birthday bound. I think this "sort of monotonic but not really" is the worst of both to be honest. It tempts you to treat it like an invariant when it isn't. If you want monotonicity with independent generation, just use a composite key that's a lamport clock and a random nonce. Or if you want to be even more snazzy use Hybrid Logical Clocks or similar.

I dont think this holds up. Define "near each other" in an 80-bit random space. Further, the likelihood of a potential conflict is offset by the fact that you have much fewer "initial random positions" instead of every single element defining its own random position. And the extra random bits (over UUID7) reduce conflict possibilities by orders of magnitude. I concede I'm no mathematician and I could be wrong here, but your analysis feels similar to assuming 10-11-12-13-14-15 is less likely to be a winning lottery ticket because the odds against consecutive numbers are so massive.

No, the calculation is straightforward and I'm not making the fallacious assumption you say there at the end about a magical lottery ticket number. My basic point is the probability of collision is lower than the birthday bound, there's no need for this, and as comments in this thread make clear people are not understanding this limitation even exists with the specification.

> If two machines are generating ids independently and happen to choose initial random positions near each other, the probability of collision is much higher than the basic birthday bound. But the chance of the initial random positions being near each other is very very low. If you pick a billion random numbers in an 80 bit space, the chance you have a collision is one in a million. (2^80 / (2^30)^2) If you pick a thousand random starting points and generate a million sequential numbers each, the chance your starting points are sufficiently close to each other to cause an overlap is one in a trillion. ((2^80 / 2^20) / (2^10)^2) In that one in a trillion case, you'll likely end up with half a million collisions, which might matter to you. But if you care about 0 collisions versus 1+ collisions, pick the monotonic version.

Right, but the point is there's no reason to accept this limitation. Likewise why hardcode millisecond scale timestamps in a world where billions of inserts per second are practical on a single server? Or if what you want is monotonic distributed timestamps, again, HLC is how you do that properly. So you're embracing this weird limitations for no real benefit. And as you can see in the rest of this comment thread, a lot of people simply do not even know this behavior and are assuming the 80 bit portion is always random. Which is my whole point about having a not really an invariant invariant just being a bad way to go fundamentally.

It's not a "limitation", he's saying there is much, much, much less chance of having any collisions with ULIDs - one in a million vs one in a trillion

You only need to lock sequence if you care about IDs being ordered within a millisecond. That generally only matters when you create a batch of IDs at once, in that case you don't need to lock anything: generate ULID, keep incrementing sequence in that batch either by doing on the same thread, or by moving it from thread to thread. Kinda like creating an iterator and zip'ing it with iterator of thing you need IDs for. I've switched to using UUIDv7 tho. It made sense to use ULID before v7, but now ULID only has one thing going on - smaller string representation. That doesn't matter if your storage can store UUIDs natively (i.e. as 128 bit integer) If your goal is to have global order intact, then neither ULID nor UUIDv7 is going to work for you.

> You only need to lock sequence if you care about IDs being ordered within a millisecond Yes, and that's when sequences are only used. I guess that's to avoid hogging the CPU or emptying the OS entropy pool during high loads. However, that "optimization" is a failure mode if you're not aware how ULID internals work. It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot by blindly trusting ULID will always generate a unique ID across threads without blocking your thread. That's a sneaky footgun. > That generally only matters when you create a batch of IDs at once No, any web service instance can receive requests at arbitrary times, and sometimes in the same millisecond zone. The probability is proportional to the number of concurrent users and requests. > If your goal is to have global order intact, then neither ULID nor UUIDv7 is going to work for you. Agreed.

Agentic AI Foundation (block.xyz)

That website reminds me of the one…where a guy sold pixels on a website for like a buck and people basically bought ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

Yes it does feel a bit grift adjacent.

Forgive me for underestimating but I'd never heard of 'Block' before, and the title "Block, Anthropic, and OpenAI Launch the Agentic AI Foundation" reads a bit funny to me. Plus the bitcoin blurb on their site is also worth a chuckle - "Bitcoin is about access, not speculation. It’s designed to be open, fast, low-cost, and free from centralized control. It’s meant to empower people"

Block is the new name for Square, also of CashApp.

Yeah... Still gonna use my credit card or debit card.

10 Years of Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt.org)

Getting yourself an IP address certificate still seems like an idea that's too crazy to work. I'm actually looking forward to seeing all the things breaking by becoming more secure.

The next steps: 1. Add support for DNS-based persistent authentication: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-acme-dns-persist/ 2. Allow the user to just publish their public key into that TXT record. 3. Cut out the middleman and do the authentication directly in the browser. 4. DANE

Would be interesting to hear what database they are using and how they are doing replication? Is it simple master / slave or multi-master?

My experience was: get 3-year certificate for free, install it and forget about it. With LetsEncrypt, it's always pain, expired websites everywhere. Too bad that american IT mafia put these good CA out of business.

I was about to say that I never encounter TLS errors while browsing, but that's not strictly true. There is one such website, and it's because the webmaster has a stroke and can't maintain it currently. But apart from that rather sad story I can't relate to your issues at all.

Nothing mentioned will help for a website with a Let's Encrypt SSL cert. How can I know with confidence that I can conduct commerce with this website that purports to be the company and it's not a typo squatter from North Korea? A google search doesn't cut it. Nothing in this thread has answered that basic question. It's a non-issue for DigiCert and Sectigo certs. I can click on the certs and see for myself that they're genuine.

Worse than typosquatting is EV’s problem that anyone can register a corporation with an identical name. https://web.archive.org/web/20171211181630/https://stripe.ian.sh/

> Like, yeah, once the secure way is sufficiently easy to use, we can then push everyone off the insecure way; that's how it's supposed to work. The problem is that this requires work and validation, which no beancounter ever plans for. And the underlings have to do the work, but don't get extra time, so it has to be crammed in, condensing the workday even more. For hobbyist projects it's even worse. That is why people are so pissed, there is absolutely zero control over what the large browser manufacturers decide on a whim. It's one thing if banks or Facebook or other truly large entities get to do work... but personal blogs and the likes?

> That is why people are so pissed, there is absolutely zero control over what the large browser manufacturers decide on a whim. It's one thing if banks or Facebook or other truly large entities get to do work... but personal blogs and the likes? Yep. There are plenty of things on the Internet for which TLS provides zero value. It is absolutely nonsensical to try to force them into using it, but the browser community is hell bent on making that bad decision. It is what it is.

How private equity is changing housing (theatlantic.com)

The reasons for high housing prices generally come down to "government restriction of supply, as supported by a large amount of voters". There's no other expense where we talk about it as a market, at least in general layman focused new and discussions. People aren't concerned about the fuel market or the grocery market. They're concerned about fuel prices. Grocery prices. Housing is an exception due to catastrophic historical policy choices to encourage it as an investment. Government restrictions on housing supply will exist for as long as a significant number of people not only have their net worth wrapped up in housing, but who actually leverage themselves and go in to extreme debt to achieve it. Not to mention the attached cultural issues of then wanting "buying a house" to mean "buying an area staying the same". Concentration of residential real estate among fewer owners is the only path that doesn't lead to the future being housing based feudalism where your station in life is determined by if you inherited somewhere to live, and how desirable it is.

People talk about the market for assets: cars, precious metals, collectibles, and houses are examples. They are not normal expenses because you have something after the expense, unlike fuel or groceries. Assets often function as stores of value, and housing is unique in that it performs an essential function, is comprised of material that generally rises in cost, has sentimental value, and is fixed to a specific location that may or may not rise in value but does in general (you see very little written about the non-housing shortage in Baltimore or many rust belt cities where land is very close to free, or even less than that in some cases). Residential real estate is one of the most fragmented investment classes in existence. We're so far from feudalism that it's not even worth talking about. If you want housing to be less expensive in your area, you need to be like Baltimore and reduce demand or remove the disincentives from building and allow an increase in supply. Most people prefer the latter.

I agree with you general point, however in the long term, I don’t think this will financially end well for those betting on housing as an investment. At some point, if a loan essentially spans the course of a borrower’s lifetime, it’s no longer a loan, it’s a rental. Therefore the lender will not be made whole when their debt serf dies. That seems to place an upper ceiling on the growth of the investment side.

Good luck trying to mass build in this financial and fiscal environment. Governments could cut as much red tape as they'd like now to stimulate housebuilding and the market will still continue to build higher priced homes because that's the only game in town now to deliver an attractive ROI. A fundamental issue no one is truly engaging with his the concentration of where people want to live which has been a combination of where jobs are and the development consumer activities in those locations have fostered to keep them attractive places to live. They're too many people trying to live in too few places and thats subtly due to necessity related to where employment is. Remote working should have eased that more sustainably over the medium term but society decided it was better to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to that & productivity issues etc.

I think you're misreading his intent. It may not be the case for those you rented from, but over the last 15-20 years, the standard practice for them has increasingly become "Form an LLC". In most cities, when you rent a detached house from a corporation, it's really one individual behind it. These people are likely not the minority.

> those "individuals" The context is my anecdotal experience. Within that context, their intent was spelled very precisely.

Let's be honest, it's not even that. It's more like "relative to historic trends, many people want houses [in desirable areas] who can't afford the current prices." Building tons of new houses outside of the hot areas that all these people want to live would still elicit cries of a shortage and an affordability crisis. Because there are currently affordable places outside of hot areas, but not very many takers. It's a really tough nut to crack. Because how do you reorient the demand to those areas that have the supply? It's not easy. We can't seem to do it currently, and there's no real plan to do it if even if we could somehow build even more housing. We'd have to build lots of housing only in hot areas. Which sounds easy enough until you realize the economics don't make sense and even on the off chance that you could, it would only generate more demand. First order of business however should be to find a clever way to stop abuses like the ones outlined in the article. The housing that would free up in the hot areas would not be near enough to meet the demand, but if we stop that nonsense at least we're not "digging the hole deeper" so to speak.

Exactly this. There's something about housing which causes so many people to think its an easy thing to solve by just building more and that's not actually true

What is this special depreciation corporate owners get? IIUC any landlord can use depreciation to lower their tax bill. Wouldn't the depreciation from a new purchase also apply to the rents from that new purchase? Somewhat more outrageous is the 1031 exchange. Sell VTI at a profit to buy VOO and the government hits you with a capital gains tax. Sell your primary residence for $250k more than you bought it - same thing. But landlords are a special, privileged investor class to whom these rules don't apply. They can sell a house and pay no taxes on gains as long as they buy another property.

Depreciation is mandatory, your cost basis declines while inflation slowly pushes up the value, which leads to a type of phantom gain. There are abilities for individuals to lower their tax bill as there are breaks. But for a Mom & Pop small landlord the tax situation can be tough. 1031 exchanges are tricky for small investors as you have to exchange into a situation with the same mortgage. A big real estate corp can borrow against their total equity, rather than taking a mortgage on the new property. So they can roll their equity into the new deal tax free. This is especially lucurative to buying cheap, rennovating and then selling to another corp. And what isn't discussed is there is a huge amount of "carried interest" deferred profits. That tax break was intended for high risk venture capital investments but in the 80s and 90s it became used for speculative and even day trading. https://www.pgpf.org/article/what-is-the-carried-interest-loophole-and-why-is-it-so-difficult-to-close/