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Sunsetting Jazzband (jazzband.co)
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is it unrealistic to think the companies that benefit from orgs such as this could donate a fraction of a percent of their wealth to keep them going? the responsibility always seems to fall most on those with the least resources.
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The Register post about the Slopocalypse to me feels tongue in cheek while this post seemingly takes it at face value. What's happening on GitHub is a mixed bag. I love what AI is doing to Ghostty.
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What is happening with Ghostty?
Unfortunate. > 60% of maintainers are still unpaid. That's actually not as bad as I would have guessed.
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Yeah, I had the same thought. Expected it to be like 95%.
What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable (mitsloan.mit.edu)
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Thankfully, we can totally trust noneconomic data like the census. No biases, design artifacts or legislative meddling there. Edit: noneconomic not none comic.
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the comment section for this post is a shit show, most of the main comments have been downvoted to gray-land.
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No, the bad, lazy, and outright incorrect takes are downvoted to oblivion. They just have a lot of child comments because HNers like nothing more than rebutting the dumbest opinions.
People in Florida, when I tell them about my background working with data, often scoff and claim that the data can be changed to spread lies. They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus. This is prevalent across all of America, especially after DOGE, who encourage fraud so the data supports their political interests. I think the reliability problem is very bad. It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science. Usually, the public would prefer reliable data, but in this case, Americans seem to prefer corruption just to spite the AI. We're certainly living in a post-truth country. By vilifying higher education, the assumption that Americans can interpret data is challenging. Therefore, Americans are consuming biased information in their online bubbles because their media is comfortable with fraudulent data. A concrete example of what happens whenUS economic data becomes unreliable is employment numbers. At the end of 2025, the government couldn't produce any data because of the government shutdown. Most quants and analysts utilized ADP numbers instead. A few years ago, the ADP payroll numbers and the projections by the government were perceived as aligned. This is no longer the case, and most traders rely more on ADP indicators for things like the unemployment rate. Speculating on what other data is fraudulent, I suspect that real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will become meaningless. It was supposed to be an indicator for economic wellbeing but now best describes wealth inequality. Nominal GDP is a slightly better measure because it adjusts for things like inflation but it's based on government produced data. Lastly, there is widespread fraud in climate data in order to deny climate change. The data feeds into economic models and affects property values and insurance rates. I have personally received gag orders from government agencies from both the US and Europe for publishing environmental data.
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Can you tell us a bit more about the gag orders? I find it fascinating that all the discussion about climate change has largely disappeared after LLMs became mainstream, and the idea that state actors may be suppressing data is equally fascinating/terrifying.
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>They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus That was fake news: In May 2020, Jones was terminated from her position managing the team that created Florida's ArcGIS COVID-19 dashboard after being repeatedly reprimanded for sharing the department's work online without authorization. Jones alleged instead that she was told to manipulate the dashboard's data and that her firing was retaliation for her refusal. The OIG exonerated state health officials, finding her allegations to be unsubstantiated and unfounded. Jones later posted on social media a forgery of the dismissal letter from the Florida Commission on Human Relations, such that it appeared that her complaint had been validated. In December 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement admitting guilt to unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10, 2020, which resulted in her home being searched under warrant by state police in December 2020. The execution of the warrant with armed police, widely referred to as a raid, was due to a 2016 battery charge against Jones by the Louisiana State University police. In 2023, Jones pled no-contest to a 2019 charge of cyberstalking a former Florida State University student. She was fired from both institutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebekah_Jones
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> It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science. When all they see is it being used to push narratives, they'd rather not have it at all. Also, "There Are Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics" dates to the 1800s. This is nothing new.
Wouldn't it be funny if they "fixed" spam calling in order to make it so that the government could call people again?
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the answer is reliable money. how much money would you pick up a verified 1 minute survey from the real u.s. government for? I'd do it for $5. (=$300 per hour) and hope for as many calls as possible. For comparison purposes the U.S. budget is about $20,000 per person ($7t budget, a bit under 350m people), so the government could definitely pay you to answer their "spam" calls. (While mandating that first parties show that it is the real U.S. government and not a spammer.) So it would be your actual first party telephone showing "Answer this real call from the U.S. government for $5 instantly, 1 minute average call time." I think that would be a good way to get good data fast. What do you think? (At the same time, impersonating the U.S. government would remain illegal, and the first party would ensure the payment is real.)
You can tell just from recent TikToks that the price inflation at the grocery stores is being fudged. Many items have 75-100+% price inflation from just a year ago.
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I regularly buy whole chickens (locally raised free range) for $1/lb. With individual cuts comparably cheap (and often BOGO). I live in an above-average, CoL area too.
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I track my grocery spend and even with three growing kids it's gone up 18% the last 6 years. It's not scientific but I don't see how your statement can be true unless by "many items" you're not talking about the bulk of what my family spends
The issue is that this isn't really supply constrained inflation. This is price discovery and discrimination by major retailers. The amount of coupons, conditional sale prices, and member savings has skyrocketed. I have paid rather intense attention to the price of groceries since 2015 when I started purchasing for my business kitchen as we started providing prepared meals. In general, prices are very close to 2015 levels for the important goods. I have some basic guidelines for an acceptable range that are from when I started in 2015. Milk: $2.50 / g Frozen Fruit $2/ lb Cheese $3 / lb Wheat $3 / 5lb Oats $3 / 40 40 oz Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast $2 / lb These are all prices that I am still able to routinely meet or exceed in 2026.
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Beef is an outlier though. $20-$30/lb for supermarket quality is quite a lot.
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The amount of coupons, conditional sale prices, and member savings has skyrocketed. This is a Bad Thing. Sure when I do grocery shopping I keep an eye out for bargains, but I also don't want to have my buying choices overly shaped by the retailer so I end up spending money on stuff I don't really want. I especially don't want to deal with coupons and buy-this-get-that offers. Planning out what to eat and remembering to get what I need is enough mental effort without having to spend time on discountmaxxing which is really just another kind of advertising. acceptable range [...] Cheese $3 / lb I don't know what kind of cheese you're getting for $3/lb but I'm pretty sure it isn't good for you.
This is going to take a generation or two to fix. If we're lucky and work hard at it.
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...and don't vote in more wreckers the whole time
This ratchet effect of partially righting the ship every four years followed by drunken sailors YOLOing further into a reef because the ‘responsible party’ didn’t fix things fast enough is unsustainable. No clue how it ends but it’s so much easier to destroy things than it is to build them, so the builders are always at a distinct disadvantage.
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I really have a hard time understanding the analogy of the "responsible party" existing, when it was objectively the Biden administration that did the most damage to the average American.
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COVID damaged the average American. The Biden administration (and the preceding Trump administration) did not perform perfectly by any means, but US inflation was below that of most other OECD countries. Real wages took a serious hit and I understand people being mad about that, but it’s hard to imagine a world where the supply chain disruptions don’t cause real living standards to fall at least a little bit.
The phrase "when US data becomes unreliable" is misleading in one sense: for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up. Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries. Add military (often black budgets) spending without much oversight or accurate accounting. The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.' Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses.
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> Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries. This is a big claim. What other countries? What are their methods and how do they differ?
> our government could do a better job It's no longer your government. It's run largely by Russia and Israel, using vast array of kompromats and bribes. Republicans and Democrats would rather burn the country to the ground that admit wrongdoing and do the time for it.
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Actual evidence of kompromats? Israel? Bribes? We pay them ... If one was to really think about national level bribes then presumably Saudi Arabia would be worthy of mention, given their involvement with the Trump (extended) family.
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You pay Israel because AIPAC paid your politicians?
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We are tightly integrated with Israel, joined at the hip, but you realize we are at war with Russia right? If we were controlled by Russia, we would not be at war with them.
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Are you? You're about to remove sanctions on them, not because they agreed to peace, because you destroyed your own other options (the Persian Gulf).
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Many parents that nominally "control" their children might take issue with this claim. I don't have a particular position on the actual "controlled by Russia" claim.
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You would think...
Your comment is broadly misleading. In fact, I would say that "shadow stats" guys like you have enabled the destruction of the system by creating the space to cast doubt on the valid methods used by BLS. BLS unemployment metrics have a valid basis and where they differ from Eurostat those differences are minor and with rational basis (such as 16 vs. 15 year old starting age).
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It is tough, though, for me to fully buy labor statistics when it has become the norm recently for them to be revised down. This spans back into Biden's term as well so it isn't one party either. With a valid measure I would expect a roughly even distribution over time between underestimates and overestimates. For a valid measure worth considering I'd also expect the stat to be released later when revisions are less likely because more actual data has been collected
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That is a reasonable position, however the assumption that it is the administration that is gaming them vs other motivated parties is open for discussion.
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I don't say stuff like this very often, but are you actually blaming a victim for dealing with the reality of government bsing its own stats instead of the government that allowed this bs to continue? BLS had only one thing going for it and it is mostly that it was used for long enough time that changing methodology would prevent us from being able to compare it prior time ranges. That is it. Otherwise, the methodology itself is seriously flawed ( and likely was from get go, but these days, it is absolutely the worst possible mix of options ). Honestly, your comment made me mildly angry. That said, can you say why you believe parent's comment is misleading?
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Do you have a substantive complaint to make about the BLS methodology? So far all I see in your remark is shadowstats vibes.
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I've never met a single person willing to attest to filling out a BLS survey. Not once. If their methodology is built on that + unemployment data from State Unemployment agencies + data from payroll processors, anyone not collecting state unemployment benefits is invisible to the system, and half of the payroll is actually not even consituted of U.S. Citizens. Admittedly, if I could find a single instance of someone willing to vouch or share insight on having filled out a BLS survey, that'd cure a healthy chunk of skepticism. There's still be the other distortions in the data to account for, but I'd at least have an instance proving that yeah, there is somebody filling out these surveys and it isn't just something they say they do to make their magic unemployment number sound legit. Note, I'm in a massive sceptical shit phase at the moment. Last decade has burned my optimism hard. So when it comes to my ability to assume benevolent intent right now, there's a heavy bias against doing it, and a heavier bias in the direction of "what would be the easiest way to keep the System limping along?" The answer to that is "say you do one thing, in reality do another, and as long as no one comes lookin', it's gold." The finance industry runs on Trust moreso than anything else, and there ain't much to be said for Trusting anything you can't verify these days. Not from other humans.
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I can't tell if you are serious or not. Lets assume for a moment that there was once a benefit to BLS survey methodology ( I would argue otherwise, but w/e ). Is it a good methodology today? So my main argument ( and frankly the only argument that should matter ) is that is a bad fit for the goal of estimating values ( even though we do know its failure modes ). Is that not enough?
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You made the argument and provided zero supporting evidence. As it stands, it's merely an opinion, and appears to be an uninformed one until you prove otherwise. That's what people are asking you to do.
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What are the alternatives, and do other countries labor statistics agencies use them?
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Alternative is to build something better. Just about anything is better than the current survey system. What I would propose is something akin to "derived real-data unemployment system". All this data exists now, but is distributed. It can be stitched together, but if one was so inclined. << do other countries No, it doesn't mean I am wrong.
I agree. The super rich have been in "prepper" mode for a long time now https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff > They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
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As a statist, I personally always found it as a fascinating way to look at the future. They are actively preparing for a collapse they themselves are ushering.
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I recently saw “Mountainhead”. Apropos.
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Exactly: The 0.01% Elite bleeding out the planet and their biggest worries are: 1. How do I keep my doomsday bunker servants in line? 2. Or is a ticket to Mars the better option?
The frustrating thing about the empire collapse is that it doesn't need to happen. There are still tons of highly energized and ostensibly disciplined and competitive people here. It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands and the aesthetic and moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued, for reasons unclear.
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> It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands It wasn't. You are conflating "production" with "manufacturing." They're not the same. The US, for better or worse, produces a lot of value. > moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued I'm not sure America was ever a "moral project," considering the many many dark parts of its history. Nevertheless, at the moment moment, it seems to be on a quest find the bottom of the pit of depravity.
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I would argue the empire already collapsed, about a year ago when DOGE was tasked with killing every form of soft power that were put in place to present the country in the best possible light across the world. Even with tons of talented and well-intentioned people and everyone fully aligned to re-build everything broken, it'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.
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The first sign many Roman citizens had that their empire had collapsed is when a bridge near them fell down and nobody showed up to repair it. America's been in that mode for a long time.
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> It'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks. There is some truth to this. Other examples of crossing the line and breaking long-term trust would be: To Canada: Statements about Canada last year. To Europe: The idiocy around Greenland earlier this year To the Middle East: Current events.
Sure, but thetes a sizeable diffetence when skewed data becomes no-data. Context has power. Removing it is thining the herd of power.
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I say removing skewed data forces people to confront reality as it actually is. Instead of "This economy sucks!" "Yeah, but look at the data, it's getting better..." Now we just have "This economy sucks!" "Yeah"
Depending upon which party controls the White House, numbers seem to be released to support a predictable narrative, then adjusted later. But that's probably just my lying' eyes.
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Oh yeah? Like when inflation numbers were very high under Biden? Please give specifics. Otherwise this is just grouchiness.
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this admin is different
I’m curious how you would respond to the arguments in this video. https://youtu.be/9KJTWmRrneo?si=I9mvSPfDnhkckb9n
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This chart: https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-vs-inflation/ And Case-Shiller is based on price-per-square footage, so the argument that houses are bigger is moot.
I honestly think that the idea that this is what’s happening is almost entirely propaganda. I think people have an overly rosy view of the past and an overly negative view of the present. What has changed more than anything is we all have the 24/7 instantaneous news cycle, and algorithmic propaganda delivery. Every election year zillion of dollars get spent convincing you the country went to hell in a handbasket because of the other party. Which is not to say there are not issues, or even some new ones, but I don’t think the present is significantly worse than the past in many ways, and it is significantly better in several
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This is overly optimistic and a "it hasn't happened to me yet so who cares" view. World War 3 has started and DHS is killing Americans and rounding up people in the street because one side was able to convince the country that the only thing to do was destroy and hurt a lot of people including themselves. That's not better than my past and it is significantly worse in a lot of ways. I haven't even received a cost of living increase in my salary in the last 5 years, let alone watch things and places I enjoy in life be dismantled so someone can make money off the attainment of bread.
It may be unreliable to you. I see the life of most people around me getting better. Even people that are somewhat poor (not dirt poor, but free lunch poor) have homes, three squares and snacks, PS5, mobile phones with cellular data, and cable tv. The biggest life issues I see are usually strongly related to substance abuse and mental health. Transplanting to even just the 80s would be a culture shock for most people.
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There is huge variation in what the US trend looks like from the ground that varies by region, age, income level, industry, and demographic. EI think if you’re a professional class baby boomer the trajectory has looked fantastic through your life. If you’re a 35 middle income living on the coasts (where at least 100 million Americans live) you may have watched affordability collapse and QOL decease significantly over the last decade.
It’s amazing and terrifying watching an empire die
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I spent a fair bit of time in the former Soviet Union, what happened there is instructive for what comes next. I think we will see, across the West broadly, to varying extents: - peripheral states flipping (e.g., Baltics) - widespread looting of public assets, a new oligarchal class minted - total destruction of the middle class, particularly those with ties to government and NGOs (I'm in this camp and miserable for it) - at least one civil war, lots of territorial disputes kicking off, separatism - breakdown of law and order, local gangsters as local authorities - mass ex-migration, ethnic cleansing - weak governments, coups, demagogues, vassalage - hyperinflation and scammy get rich quick scams (watch crypto)
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> peripheral states flipping (e.g., Baltics) This is already happening with trade (e.g. soy beans) and with military purchases. Canada is moving quickly with moving trade elsewhere.
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There will be no "peripheral states flipping" in the USA. Secession is not an option here.
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This is only true as long as there is money for the military. When money is gone, the military is gone. Money goes easily when a country has a large debt and need other countries to continue to buy into that debt.
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The collapse of the Soviet Union was ahistorical in many ways. It's rare that collapse of an empire can be pinpointed to a single day. And what you saw was a result of shock therapy imposed from the outside. I doubt that would happen to the US. It's unlikely collapse will be felt as a singular, apocalyptic event. More like a slow, steady loss of influence and excess wealth. Countries on the periphery stop considering the empire's perspectives before making their own decisions. Other trading partners emerge. Bridges stop getting maintained until they're no longer usable. And soft power declines. Imagine a day when the biggest pop star in the US, someone on the scale of Michael Jackson or Madonna nationally, is virtually unknown outside of its borders. There are reasons to believe the American empire is in decline, but I maintain this will look more like Britain. It could take 50 years before American fully realize it. Thankfully, that means there's plenty of time to reverse or mitigate the trends, or to make a decision to strengthen the Republic over the Empire.
The US is the best 400 mil population country in the world
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What does "best" means? Which population size would you consider comparable to the US (i assume you don't meant it in a way in which Germany would be the best 83,6 mil population country in the World)?
Why is there always a both sides-er in these discussions? FWIW, one party generally deferred to nonpartisan commissions to draw boundaries to avoid gerrymandering. So one “side” did far more than propose a solution, they did the right thing even when the other side wasn’t. Gerrymandering is the worst example to pick when you’re pushing both-sides-bad.
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Great! So please explain what algorithms are used by these "nonpartisan" commissions?
Sorry, did I miss the period when economic data was reliable? EDIT: - GDP is a construct - CPI has been overhauled many times - Unemployment has always been politicized wrt what to count - Trade data misses entire segments ie services, transfer pricing, digital - Job creation is a black box - The Fed - The lag between monetary/fiscal/trade/regulatory policy
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its a measurement process of a large and complicated system. some of the things you cite are actually signs that the system was actually kind of working. CPI is a basket of indicators, there is no way that's ever going to capture the whole picture. the best we can ask for is apolitical appointees whose goal is to improve the process and transparency about how the data was collected, publication of the raw numbers, and publication of the methodology used to synthesize it. my understanding that the appointment process has been corrupted, but do we know to what degree transparency has?
1900 to 2024 for the US. For Iran, China, USSR, for example, you had to back in estimates from observable benchmark information uncontaminated by dictatorships. You didn't have to do that with tbe US.
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Can you address any of the points the commenter made instead of retreating into an ideological non sequitur?
I have been a nay sayer on LLMs/GPTs in general having tried many, but recently Ive been shepherding a fairly complex code build through the latest opus model and its quite impressive. It still gets things wrong occasionally but the time its saved me has been substantial. Im starting to enjoy it.
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I recently built a reasonably-complex embedded controls project using codex and an esp32. Starting with systems stuff like "Set up vscode with whatever it needs to work with codex and talk to an esp32," and ending with "Now add a web interface with persistent tunables that always runs in both AP and station modes," my prompt inputs were very terse. And it'd just kind of go forth and just do it. It'd even design and run its own tests. I never once looked at the code. For all I know, the code doesn't even exist. And it works. I'll be using it in the field (in the proverbial middle of nowhere) all next week. I have every expectation that it will behave itself. (I did spend a lot of time defining and refining some ground rules with AGENTS.md, but in theory I get to re-use that effort for the next go.)
This is an downright evil take on the current situation. The supply chains are so complex that no single country is capable of replicating them entirely. It starts with the fact that the required natural resources are distributed around the globe in a way that no country has access to all of them. The production chains from resources to finished machines are downright byzantine. And this becomes recursive with the need for specialized tools and their own production chains along the way. You need trains amd trucks and ships to be able to build semiconductors, for example. Except for maybe China pr India, there is no country that has the manpower to cover all of this domestically. The supply of workers and training falls far too short. Any Western strategy that sees this as both "us vs. them" and also pursues reduced international collaboration is bound to lose bitterly in the long run. The result is either a silent collapse of that country's economy or the start of an ill-conceived war of conquest to gain by force what the country cannot supply itself.
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> Any Western strategy that sees this as both "us vs. them" and also pursues reduced international collaboration is bound to lose bitterly in the long run. The problem is that Europe does not have a choice here. The Greenland steal crisis is on hold, but not fixed. America clearly shown it will abuse any ties there are - it will lock accounts to tech to bully and get what they want. It will use tariffs to bully countries to make laws, release presidents friends criminals from prisons, you name it. Meanwhile, America seems to take Russian side in Russian expansion. Meanwhile, America is just cause major oil issue and potentially triggered next refugees crisis. Meanwhile, America clearly shown it does not even pretend to care bout war crimes and international law at all. It is sponsoring afd and other fascist parties all around the Europe while openly insulting Europe. Maybe it is too late for disconnect, but not trying would basically be a suicide for Europe. It would be great if it was not "us vs them". But it is "us vs them". Trust toward American made Europe super vulnerable.
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The US isn't the navel of the world. It is one country that is slowly removing itself from international trade and the international scientific community. The European Union has many friendly trading partners left in the world and is also receiving an influx of previously US based talent. The trade decisions of the US aren't forcing the EU into isolationism. This is where your argument goes wrong IMO. The US government has announced that it plans to actively support extreme right wing parties in the EU. If this comes to pass, it is a direct attack on political freedom in those countries, separate from any economic policy decisions. I don't know how well EU countries can defend themselves against this in the short amd medium term. Some counties have better defenses than others. But I see virtually all of them struggling.
You really do not understand how interdependent everyone is. The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example. The US kneecapped itself for no reason.
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> The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example. Yeah, the EUV photolithography machine, but not much else. American companies like Lam Research and Applied Materials are the leaders in thin film deposition and etch, KLA Tencor is the leader in metrology, and Synopsys and Cadance are the leaders in EDA (though there's also Germany's Mentor Graphics).
People tend to choose extremes. Either a total globalization or zero-sum games only. Everything in between bears risks of a cognitive overload so should be avoided at all costs.
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> People tend to choose extremes. Corporations, along with greedy, selfish people and also perhaps ignorant people too, tend to choose extremes. The rest of us are remarkably good at compromising and finding common ground.
On that topic, how many presidents in the past have had merch stores after elected? I can understand fundraising during a campaign, but after winning or losing, the fundraising usually stops.
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Merch. NFTs. Playing cards. Crypto coins. A phone. It's like we have Dennis Duffy as POTUS. If it were 40 years ago it would be like Reagan starting his own MLM.
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And the worst part is, I don't think we will ever close this door. Even if the Democrats are in charge of the next presidency, the temptation of easy money will be too strong to resist. It wasn't done in the past, because it was assumed that the people would push back severely, but now that it is clear that they won't, it is full speed ahead.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The $2 per hour worker behind the OnlyFans boom (bbc.com)
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Related: in Germany, there currently is a huge scandal surrounding the company "Fanblast", where you could purchase the supposed "whatsapp phone number" of various "celebrities" and, allegedly, the chats were also run by random freelancers [1]. [1] https://www.comicschau.de/news/fanblast-aloa-me-klengan-kritik-707718/
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I am still amazed that prostitution is legal when done online, and these teenage sex workers are allowed to continue selling themselves.
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It's not prostitution, and while prostitution is illegal in the US it's perfectly legal in the UK and many other countries.
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> She would be set targets to earn the model hundreds of dollars worth of sales of pictures and videos during her shift. So lets assume $300 per shift, so with an 8 hour shift, that would be about $37.50/hour of merchandise per hour. So the workers makes about 5.3%. Google says standard for sales workers paid on comission normally get 5-10%. So its possible this is within what would be normal for a low end non-salary commision job, but it depends on what "hundreds" really mean. Of course i think normally for commision only sales jobs you move much more expensive product to make it worth your while. Otoh they probably deserve a lot higher than normal sales commision given the nature of the job and all the stuff they undoubtedly have to put up with.
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Average wages in the Phillipines are around $360/month USD, so $2/hr isn't too bad for an easy job. BBC is playing rage-bait arbitrage with that headline.
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How is this not fraud, or at least false advertising? If I'm paying money to chat with a specific sex worker how is it even legal to let some random dude in a third world country pretend to be the person I'm supposed to be talking to? I've never personally engaged in these types of systems, but I don't think there's a problem with them as long as they are run honestly. It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.
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I wonder to what extent the clients care. Either way its still paying for a fantasy.
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There is probably some lingo somewhere clarifying that you pay for the "experience" of her and not for her in particular.
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Do we know if onlyfan is already training their own models with their user's content?
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That's why China ban this service outright? But hey, America is a democratic and freedom land.
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But then.. how is it any different from Amazon saying automated stores while a human is watching cameras or waymo having humans operate in some circumstances. If there are no rules, you can't expect corporates to govern themselves in a way that does not benefit them..
Let me complain about how I'm being exploited at my job while voluntarily choosing said job over literally every other job available to me.
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That's how exploitation works: The exploited don't have another choice. That doesn't make doing cruel things to them wrong and (hopefully) illegal. For example, someone could compel people who are starving to do all sorts of horrible things for food, and then say 'well, they chose to do it!'.
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This is true, but I also think that the information in the article alone is insufficient to make a judgment. This salary is over the Philippines minimum wage. It's a legal job like any other. The people interviewed are not super happy about the content of the job, but none of it seems to be anything more than it being pornography-related. Nobody's really seeming to cross any lines of illegality as described in the article. This doesn't come close to the kind of conditions faced by Meta's contractors in Africa spying through Meta glasses in private homes. I would equate this type of job to any type of job that has aspects that some people would never be willing to do. E.g., I would never be willing to be a window washer. I'm too scared of heights. Same deal with tower construction. But there are plenty of people doing those jobs who don't feel exploited. The plus side of jobs like this are that you can do this work at home, you can be physically disabled, there's often some level of flexibility of hours, and there's no manual labor. I'm going to guess that the only scandal here is that the Philippines is 80% Catholic and possibly more conservative than people in the countries where OnlyFans generates its income.
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Once you make this job illegal, what do you think she does then for a job? By taking this job she has revealed that this is her best option. When you make the job illegal, you're forcing her to take a worse alternative.
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Please do enumerate these other jobs that are available to the Filipino currently performing this job for... checks notes ... $2/hour?
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Please say what you think the hourly average wage is in the Philippines and how you conclude that this isn't the woman's best option despite her revealed preference that it is.
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I don't think you and I are disagreeing here? The article explicitly states that she only took this work because she couldn't find other work, and that she dislikes the work intensely (... but has no better job prospects)
We could free this poor soul from wage slavery by just banning pornography.
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you couldn't because someone who sexts people for 2$ an hour is always going to engage in wage slavery, and if that is what offends you, you could just ban it directly. We all know it's not the point though, you're just offended by porn, if she was cleaning floors for two bucks you wouldn't care. In fact her chatter job, on account of her doing it, is likely better than a lot of other work.
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So your position here is that we should take away their job, leaving them to suffer in abject poverty, while simultaneously banning wealthy Westerners from looking at shocked gasp tits?
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You can never tell for sure on the internet - but i would assume the person you were replying to was being sarcastic.
Now this is almost entirely automated anyway, there is a big adult ecosystem here in Cyprus and i talk to a lot of people. No manual work is used there anymore, "chatters" are a thing of the past. Now they are well on the path to automate OnlyFans models themselves, there are plenty of hybrid sites where known live models are attracted with good terms to bring in the users, and then slowly switched for AI ones, and it WORKS. Adult industry is so competitive and fast-evolving because there are few deep moats, it shows the way for everyone else, in fact.
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That's pretty smart.
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Does that mean that people do not recognize that some of the content is AI? Or do they simply accept it?
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A little bit of real content goes a long way toward getting people to pay for something unknown, which then turns out to be AI-generated. Even if they are not satisfied, that counts as AI content making a sale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke
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There's enough people on both camps I'm sure.
God that's depressing. Even when you _pay_ for human connection you're being fobbed off onto an AI
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It's going to kill the software industry as we know it! We're literally killing our field by making the devices and internet so repulsive that people are actively unplugging. You can't hear about this online because the bot generated content is filling the gap and the people doing it aren't online to tell you about it. Children are getting addicted to everything because the internet has killed any sense of self-stimulation and they are growing up into gamblers with cards, sports, and prediction markets or rage-addicted media consumers. There is plenty of free human connection to be had out there, it is free, and all you have to do is put down the phone or computer. It is getting extremely compelling as an alternative for increasing large groups of people. The tech industry is energetically strangling its golden goose.
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There will be some interesting game theory studies in the aftermath.
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To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill. At OnlyFans you're paying for a video feed, and computers are pretty good at producing convincing video feeds now.
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What do you mean by "human connection"?
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It appears a lot of people using OF are using it as a parasocial medium, not strictly for porn. They want to believe they're actually in touch with the performer and part of their lives to some degree.
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What does "para-" mean?
Bet you had some really deep human connection with that guy chatting to you from the Philippines.
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You betray your ignorance of how parasocial OnlyFans and their ilk get. Yes, people get real connection out of it, whether its with who they think they're talking to or not. I think that connecting those people into a chat bot instead of a real human is depressing, and a bad thing for society, but you're welcome to disagree with that
UBI Is Your Productivity Dividend – The Only Way to All Share What We All Built (scottsantens.substack.com)
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The goal we all seek - liberation - is a distant one. That said I’m skeptical that UBI is the right way. UBI assumes and requires an elite ownership class and a powerful state to force them to share their profits. But as we’ve seen, such class members will organize to penetrate the state and contort it for their own ends. Thus any successful UBI will be a compromise or it will be dismantled by the powerful class that owns the economy. In my mind, only community ownership of the means of production can truly achieve what we desire. Of course with all distant goals, it is hard to see how we get there. And to be clear I do not mean state ownership. But I am curious, on my basic point of elite capture of the state, does that make sense? I am struck that TFA’s title says UBI is “the only way to share”, amusing to me since literally directly sharing is another way. I understand we all have spooky ideas of what that means, but think for example of the concept of library economies. You borrow what you need, but you don’t own it nor have the right to destroy it. We share.
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> UBI assumes and requires an elite ownership class and a powerful state to force them to share their profits. It makes no assumption about an elite ownership class at all. It merely assumes profits, and rearranges how those profits are distributed (away from shareholders, towards labor). There is no need for community ownership of the means of production (though that might have some different benefits, along with some different disadvantages). You need high marginal (or maybe not even marginal) corporate taxes and a committment to the concept of UBI. Who owns the companies, from the perspective of UBI, is immaterial. Community ownership does not share the productivity in sector A with workers in sector B. UBI does.
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instead of UBI, we could just reduce working hours, while keeping the same pay. Easier to manage shifts than to upend the whole economy. Something like 3 days a week, with a german approach to sundays (everything closed).
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UBI is good on paper but far from enough. Without Universal Ownership of the State, UBI is easily removed by inflation. A better yet more difficult model is universal basic resources (food stamp to exchange for packages, social housing, etc.). People can work X hours on these social projects after reviewing some training (e.g. training of plumbing to maintain the social housing apartments). This also gives them some meaning in life. Of course this will degrade in the future if there is no ownership of the state by the people, but I think it’s going to last longer.
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> UBI is easily removed by inflation Source? A $20k UBI wouldn’t likely secularly increase food costs on a per-calorie basis. Those folks are already eating. There will just be supply-chain friction as the system adjusts to their newly-expressable preferences.
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If you believe UBI can work, why do you think communism failed?
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I'm not sure UBI would work. But what's that got to do with communism? Communism failed (IMO), because it was incompatible with human nature. People form social hierarchies and like to own property. Would UBI prevent that?
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What if we build UBI but we turn out not to need it? Thats my worry. AI might possibly be “just another technology”. If we put in UBI we may disincentivize labor from adapting to an economic shift. The real solution is to regulate the industry and break up monopolies. UBI is the modern equivalent of Walmart workers on Medicaid and food stamps. It’s raiding public funds for private profit.
Unions the actual solution, and is well understood enough now to know that most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods. Unfortunately, with regulatory capture at near 100 percent and electoral capture almost as bad, there is no incentive structure with sufficient influence to make it happen. Wealth will continue to be funneled to the top, and taxation schemes that act as a de-facto sales tax create incentives that favor even more centralized systems. But wouldn’t it be great? An interesting aspect is that I am constantly observing innovators with significant technical and technological skills that are employed in fields outside of their expertise as a “temporary “ measure that often becomes permanent if they get further encumbered, simply because they can keel out an existence while trying to build the next cool thing. So we are wasting probably trillions of GDP in talent because people need to go work in a labor job to support their wife and child instead of continuing his very promising project in training data for humanoid robots, which could easily net 100m+ in the next decade. (Actual example. I offered him $1000 a month to keep on it, but he unfortunately needs more to survive and he has eaten through his savings over the past two years of working on it.)
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> Unions the actual solution No, they are not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co . Changing the table stakes is what needs to happen: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation for a counter example. Unions just create an us vs them mentality. The fact that the NUMMI plant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI ) was not reproducible is a pretty strong indicator of that.
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If its an easy 100m do a startup and get funding
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> most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods What are the falsehoods in complaints against police unions?
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Police unions aren't the same thing as other unions. Most unions exist to equalize labor negotiation through collective bargaining, and police unions tend to include and align with the leadership in the organization that a union would traditionally be negotiating with. In practice they're a lot more like a military contractor than a union (in that their role is to prevent public accountability)
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This is correct and the proof is that police do not strike with labor they fight labor on behalf of capital The core premise of a union is that you have solidarity primarily across unions which is actually how you get collective-bargaining at larger scales
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> most of the arguments against it are moot points or simply falsehoods. Ah the “I am sure we can all agree … that I’m right” argument. In actuality, there are plenty of very good arguments against unions. That you don’t like them changes nothing
Communists shared alright 110 years ago in Russia, tens of millions of people failed to cope with that much prosperity and wellbeing, and then even more with unbearable freedom and peace.
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I think folks may not realize that communism was more popular in the early 20th century US just because of how desperate a lot of the population became without any safety nets at all provided by the government. Educated proponents genuinely wanted to improve the plight of other folks. But, where it was practiced it became just a worse kind of power and resource monopoly - concentrated in the government instead of among a minority of robber barren types. I think the learning is you have to never stop pushing for no entity to have too much power - not the government and not private sector monopolies.
I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it. Obviously if you're living in poverty, anything is better than nothing, but would the average middle class person be better off? As far as I can tell no country has ever tested true UBI (unconditional and for all residents) so its all theoretical. Musk's idea of a Universal High Income (where money is no longer necessary because robots and AI give us anything we want) sounds great too until you consider scarce resources like land. Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor? What if you want, say, a human hair stylist or therapist: who would do such a job if they don't have to? We would lose the human touch in our lives, and that sounds awful.
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This is kind of like social security, medicare or the 5 day work week, if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it.
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So there are two basic versions of UBI: 1. The right-wing UBI is a tool to dismantle the social safety net. The idea of the likes of Milton Friedman is to replace all social safety programs with UBI. This doesn't make sense because, for example, being disabled in today's society makes everything more expensive; and 2. Left-wing UBI would seek to have everyone share in the wealth they create by supplementing social safety programs with UBI. UBI becomes a form of super-progressive taxation because it can be viewed as negative taxation. As for your inflation comment, you have a point, to which I'll say: UBI alone isn't sufficient. You need economic reform and planning on top of that. A good example is the US military. If you live off-base you get a housing allowance (ie BAH). Now around military bases, in the US and overseas, all the landlords know this so you'll find that weirdly all the houses to rent cost pretty much what BAH is. So a more equitable economic system, including UBI, needs social housing . That is, the government needs to be a significant supplier of quality, affordable housing so landlords (private and insitutional) can't artificially drive up prices, as is the case now. A prime example is Vienna [1]. Housing simply can't be a speculative asset in a healthy economy. If you wnat to see what an equitable planned economy looks like, look at China. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY
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It depends. On its own, UBI puts a downward pressure on the value of money. Some other things (e.g. setting low interest rates) also put a downward pressure on the value of money. However, some things (e.g. taxes) put an upward pressure on the value of money. So it comes down to how all of those factors balance out.
Doesn't matter at all how much it is. It'll be (almost entirely or entirely) eaten by landlords. I am a landlord. I am setting prices for renewal. I have come to learn that 100% of my possible customer base now has $200/mo more to spend. I raise prices $200/mo with absolute certainty that I will find a renter. Congrats, mission accomplished.
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That extra 200 will also allow some people to move to a rural area, decreasing demand, which means you won't find a renter.
How do you control what other landlords do? Why won't any undercut you by $200 and get your tenants?
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Because tenants are not scarce. If you cut your prices, you lose $200/mo forever. If you simply follow the maximum market price and wait, someone will fill your room eventually and you have them locked into a higher rate forever. Competition doesn't work for necessities. Someone will rent your room at any price because it's necessary for survival. One of the major crises of our time is the fact that there are more people who need housing than there are rooms to rent to them. Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price. Getting tenants in rooms a few months earlier at the cost of lower rent means you make less money, and are less competitive as a business.
Unless of course that UBI is funded by a land value tax.
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How does land value tax help in particular here? Landlord pays land value tax, which is distributed via UBI, and then paid back to the landlord in higher rents (in the above scenaro).
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This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents. https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/PPI-Will-LVT-raise-rent.pdf
Because the subsidies aren't on top of base income? The subsidy isn't the problem per se, it's the net increase in income. It is obviously self-evident everywhere that high incomes create high cost of living, which can be traced through higher costs all the way down to the land rents (the rent someone is willing to pay to have market access to the high local incomes).
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I don't see why UBI would necessarily be an increase of income for everyone. It could be that, but it could also be a decrease in hours worked, or a more equal distribution of wealth, or any combination of these. I don't want a higher income, I want to benefit from the productivity gains I and everyone else made happen by having more time to do things I like.
The whole purpose of UBI is to increase the relative purchasing power on the left of the bell curve. But inflation (sum total) is a moot point if total supply of dollars for total demand stays the same. Prices might temporarily increase for staples, such as shelter and food, but that should incentivize sellers in the economy to supply more staples, and fewer luxury goods. The additional supply will eventually bring prices down, but end result is more people have more of the basics.
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I don't think that line of reasoning has worked our particularly well for shelter.
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Just because supply of shelter in certain locales has not kept up with demand for that specific locale, and/or is affected by numerous legalities regarding things like eviction and zoning codes and fire codes and animals, does not mean invalid the theory of higher prices incentivizing sellers to increase supply.
"Solve the problem" probably not, but trigger inflation, probably not, since the amount is so low, it will have very little impact on the behavior of the richest, but it would have a massive impact on the behavior of the poorest, and their purchase habits generally don't impact inflation as much. UBI is just a band-aid on not taxing the rich, though.
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The purchase habits of the poor impact the products purchased primarily by the poor quite a bit. Cheap rental properties. Basic phone plans. Cheap food. The poor buy vastly more ramen noodles than the rich.
Show HN: Learn Arabic with spaced repetition and comprehensible input (abjadpro.com)
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Saw a couple of words that (as far as I know) aren't "modern standard Arabic" is there any bias towards a dialect or another?
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Are the vocalisations of the letters synthetic? Edit: If I wasn't acquainted with arabic script I'd probably not be able to make out the difference in vocalisation between some letters.
Arabic language learning resources are few and far between. Thank you for building this. Do you know which Arabic this teaches? Koranic? Modern Standard? Levantine? Gulf?
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At least the videos sound Levantine
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I was unable to listen because I'm at the airport but I was really curious. Thank you!
An Ode to Bzip (purplesyringa.moe)
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imho: the future is a specialized compressor optimized for your specific format. ( https://openzl.org/ , ... )
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That is an interesting link. Does gmail use a special codec for storing emails ?
This seems as good a thread as any to mention that the gzhttp package in klauspost/compress for Go now supports zstd on both server handles and client transports. Strangely this was added in a patch version instead of a minor version despite both expanding the API surface and changing default behavior. https://github.com/klauspost/compress/releases/tag/v1.18.4
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About the versioning, glad you spotted it anyway. There isn't as much use of the gzhttp package compared to the other ones, so the bar is a bit higher for that one. Also making good progress on getting a slimmer version of zstd into the stdlib and improving the stdlib deflate.
Bzip2 is slow . That’s the main issue. Gzip is good enough and much faster. Also, the fact that you cannot get a valid bzip2 file by cat-ing 2 compressed files is not a deal breaker, but it is annoying.
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> the fact that you cannot get a valid bzip2 file by cat-ing 2 compressed files TIL. Now that's why gzip has a file header! But, tar.gz compresses even better, that's probably why it hasn't caught on.
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tar packs multiple files into one. If you concatenate two gzipped files and unzip them, you just get a concatenated file.
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Ah okay, I thought gzip would support decompressing multiple files that way.
bzip and gzip are both horrible, terribly slow. Wherever I see "gz" or "bz" I immediately rip that nonsense out for zstd. There is such a thing as a right choice, and zstd is it every time.
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lz4 can still be the right choice when decompression speed matters. It's almost twice as fast at decompression with similar compression ratios to zstd's fast setting. https://github.com/facebook/zstd?tab=readme-ov-file#benchmarks
Bzip2 is great for files that are compressed once, get decompressed many times, and the size is important. A good example is a software release.
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So is xz, or zstd, and the files are smaller. bzip2 disappeared from software releases when xz was widely available. gzip often remains, as the most compatible option, the FAT32 of compression algorithms.
Online astroturfing: A problem beyond disinformation (journals.sagepub.com)
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This is notorious in platforms like reddit, with people jumping in to suggest no name products in response to questions. It doesn't help that reddit allows private profiles, thus allowing astroturfers to get away with it. Also, another case is LLM astroturfing, we're bombarded with doomerism and obituaries about programming, some of said opinions are subtler, short comments, the most dangerous ones, because little by little they jab you, though the most conspicuous ones are easy to identify. And then there's the political astroturfing. In my country smokescreens are the defacto tool, but it is suspicious of the amount of high quality edits and memes that came out about the Epstein files, essentially cementing him as a "meme" and not a monster that abused minors.
We have a massive poisoning of the commons catastrophe coming, driven by further authoritarian government overreach and control. I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem. I don't just mean half solutions like tor or social protocols that let you in and out of walled gardens. There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to come up with or design technical safeguards, but eventually this problem will move past the realm of what's easily solvable and out of our hands, and into policy makers hands. A big part of me feels like that window is already slammed shut.
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If you can point me at someone that would fund such projects (not VCs), would be happy to apply. Projects like NLNet aren't keen on funding larger scope projects. At least if you do not have the thought leader influencer clout.
It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being astroturfed on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread. It's hard to distinguish who's a bot, who's a narrative pusher and who's an enthusiast. Which is exactly what you'd want from an astroturfing campaign. There's a clear benefit: people in the industry are reading this, and in doing so they're granting mindshare. There's one way that can prevent inauthentic support campaigns - personal key signature. But judging by how afraid people, especially in the US, need to be of their government surveilling them, this isn't going to catch on.
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>It feels like "Autonomous Coding Agents" are being astroturfed on the daily on HN. The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread. Isn't this what exactly you'd expect in a connected world? The best arguments from both sides proliferate, thereby causing "The same arguments and tropes are echoing through every thread".
so what you're saying is that the US government is an illegitimate regime and everyone can fully justify destroying it as an enemy of the people?
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The CIA is not the US government.
Philosoph Jürgen Habermas Gestorben (spiegel.de)
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Habermas was truly a giant. Regardless of your political outlook, some engagement with his texts is time well spent. For an accessible on-ramp to his work, I recommend: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#PublSphe
Europe also has a non-trivial problem with both Islamic terrorism and cultural clash between indigenous Europeans and newly settled Muslims. That reduces empathy towards other Muslims quite significantly.
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that has nothing to do with it. you can see the same thing in other conflicts. it's just more convenient to look away.
The majority of Germans is completely biased towards Zionism because of their history, so it's more of a cultural than a personal thing.
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Berlin perspective: It really doesn't feel that way. Germany's official political stance is very much "pro-Israel" and somewhat intentionally deaf and blind towards what is happening in Palestine (though not completely). Public opinion and discourse is much more nuanced though.
I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories. But it looks like he was explicitly critical of postmodernism and other counter-enlightenment movements. RIP.
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"Frankfurt School Critical Theory" went through several generations with different commitments and each of those generations was quite politically and theoretically diverse. The only true statements that hold for all writers at all times are largely uninteresting. What can be said with confidence is that Frankfurt School theorists were not "counter-enlightenment". Adorno and Horkheimer were explicitly trying to explain why the ideal of the enlightenment - greater rationality in social and political affairs and a fuller realization of individual moral autonomy - had not been achieved in their time. They saw themselves, rightly, as more faithful heirs to the tradition in their attempt to "rescue" it than those who insisted it did not require rescue. You may disagree - many within the tradition of critical theory have - but I don't think readings of their texts which see them as "counter-enlightement" can be sustained. "I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories." With all due respect, this sentence betrays a complete unfamiliarity with "postmodernism", "the long march through the institutions", and "identity politics". It wildly anachronistic to conflate these. It makes about as much sense as saying that Mitterand was an Avignon pope.
I find this to be vile political posting, moving responsibility for Trump's rightwing fascism to a social theorists is just misguided, banal and does not belong here. Don't you have X for that?
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In all honesty that’s not even the worst part. He signed that “never again” letter, completely buying into the exceptionalism of one group over all others… They kind of threw the baby out of the water and moved into Heidegger territory quickly. They seemed to put “who” over “what” very, very hastily. One would expect an enlightened mind to understand the difference and maybe phrase his concerns a bit more “inclusively”. But let’s be honest, it wasn’t a mistake. Anyway, we’ll take the good parts and move on. RIP.
Montana passes Right to Compute act (2025) (westernmt.news)
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I want a right to compute without having to identify myself, or otherwise give any information about myself to the computing system itself. I was hoping for that as a reaction to the current tyrannical movements worldwide to end anonymous personal computing.
"Datacenter water usage" is a comment I'd expect to see on Reddit--not a VC forum with allegedly intelligent people.
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I live in New Mexico. I do not consider Hacker News to be a VC forum. For what it's worth (which is very little), I was employee #2 at amzn if I need some sort of credentials to get you to respond constructively to my point rather than with some hand-wavey ad hominem.
Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that. We would all be stuck working on farms today, because we didn’t want to allow tractors or other machinery because it would take away farming jobs. Instead of banning tech to save jobs, pass laws that make sure tech prices in externalities (tax carbon emissions), and find other ways to assist people who lose jobs (UBI, good social safety nets, etc). Don’t stifle progress just because it makes us have to work less.
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> Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that. The US has continually set up protectionist policies to preserve a local workforce. Automotive manufacturers, more recently the shipbuilding industry, etc.
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Right - fix the economy instead. Why should increasing efficiency cause people to have less resources - that makes no sense.
I can't respect that opinion. It's full of holes.
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What are the holes? There are places today with no government - perfect free markets. If you think perfect free markets are awesome, you can move there and do business there. It's a bit like telling someone who loves communism to go to China.
This is literally why America was founded. Too many people stifle innovation. Move to Europe if you want to be stuck in the 20th century frankly. That doesn't mean we can't take care of folks. But the ludites need to get the fuck out of the way. You're all exhausting.
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America was founded because rich people didn't want to pay taxes.
Ask HN: Have you successfully treated forward head posture ("nerd neck")?
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When I have those kind of issues, I sleep directly on the floor for a few hours or a night or two. It’s worked for me many times for many years. But that’s me, not anyone else. And it feels uncomfortable for a while, but forces my muscles to relax.
I was in PT, but the real results came after getting a HM Embody without a headrest. It was uncomfortable for the first six months while my entire body adjusted, but my posture is pretty excellent now, I no longer have sciatica, and my neck muscles are once again capable of supporting the weight of my head without getting stiff or tired. I'm not a big or heavy guy, and I've historically been athletic, but after a back injury and sitting in bad (yet comfortable) chairs for hours a day over a decade, I didn't notice how deleterious my routine was to my general well being. The problem for me was muscle weakness that led to overcompensation - a few muscles were doing most of the work, and the auxiliary supporting and skeletal muscles weren't able to do their jobs. Couple that with some regular light full body exercise, and give yourself time. Don't think of posture or neck pain as a targeted problem. Everything that connects is related, especially if you hunch or your abdominals are engaging more than your back.
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Concerningly similar story except it was a leg injury that led to a downturn in my posture. Love my embody to bits and pieces, the first week with it was rough but its been bliss ever since.
I was hoping to find a video for this exercise, and instead got a video on Peter Thiel. Is that intentional?
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Whoops https://youtu.be/gMWBoy3t77k?si=8ACTNYmSQT9uDoE5
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Much appreciated!
XML Is a Cheap DSL (unplannedobsolescence.com)
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XML makes for a pretty good markup language and an ok data interchange format(not a great fit, but the tooling is pretty good). but every single time I have seen it used as a programing language I found it deeply regrettable. For comparison JSON is a terrible markup language, a pretty good data interchange format, and again, a deeply regrettable programing language. I don't know if anyone has put programing language in straight JSON (I suspect they have shudders ) but ansible has quite a few programing structures and is in YAML which is JSON dressed in a config language's clothes.
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So I was part of a company that did this. They used XML as a programming language, then built apps to manage the "code". This was all done to create mobile apps for old Windows Phone devices back in the Windows Phone 5 and 6 days (before iPhone). Because of the tooling, you weren't actually writing the XML either, you used a custom built editor (a tree view with a property panel). It all sucked. I was looking at the thing trying to figure out if I could create an intermediate language with my own "compiler" to get around the xml editors they build. Anyway, every developer hated it. All of them. Well, everyone but the guy that created the monstrosity anyway.
A lot of people dislike that decision not to include comments in JSON, but I think while shocking it was and is totally correct. In a programming language it's usually free to have comments because the comment is erased before the program runs; we usually render comments in grey text because they can't change the meaning of the program. In a data language you have no such luxury. In a data language there's no comment erasure happening between the producer and the consumer, so comments are just dangerous as they would without doubt evolve into a system of annotations -- an additional layer of communication which would then not be standardized at all and which then would grow into a wild west of nonstandard features and compatibility workarounds.
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> In a programming language it's usually free to have comments because the comment is erased before the program runs That's inherent to the language specification, but it isn't inherent to the document. You have to have a system with rules that require that erasure. Nothing prevents one from mandating a system that strips those comments out of JSON. You could even "compile" JSON to, I don't know, BSON or msgpack or something. Just as nothing prevents one from creating tooling to, say, extract type annotations from comments in a dynamically typed language.
Ah, such youthful ignorace. You just classified probably every single bank in existence as "unserious organization"
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[delayed]
If you do not go with DTD or XSD, you are only doing XML lookalike language, as these are XML mechanisms to really define the XML schema: a compliant parser won't be able to validate it, or maybe even to parse it. Thus people go with custom parsers (how hard can it be, right?), and then have to keep fixing issues as someone or other submits an XML with CDATA in or similar.
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What if we just formalize some reasonable minimal subset, and call it something else?
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