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Suicide Linux (2009) (qntm.org)
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The name seems a little insensitive.
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Related. Others? Suicide Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41748336 - Oct 2024 (1 comment) Suicide Linux (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24652733 - Oct 2020 (170 comments) Suicide Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15561987 - Oct 2017 (131 comments) Suicide Linux (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9401065 - April 2015 (55 comments) Suicide Linux: Where typos do rm -rf / - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389931 - Aug 2012 (1 comment)
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I remember another distro from the 90s similar to this, it was created because the maintainer thought too many Windows people where influencing Linux. I forgot what it did, but I think it wiped your system out too.
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> I suppose I should finally clear this up: The autocorrect functionality I originally described here was a feature of the first Linux systems I ever used, so I assumed it was how every Linux system worked by default. Since then I've come to understand that it's a completely optional extra doodad. What systems did this? I've never encountered one that I can recall.
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I'm on my phone so I'm too lazy to dig for this, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the bit of shell script that gets run if you type a command that isn't found in PATH. Fedora and Debian will both dive straight into searching apt/dnf for a matching package and ask "do you want to install this?" I imagine you could create a hook that gets run for any command failure, but again I'm on my phone so not sure.
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Anything that ships with a default zsh shell, which is a surprising number of distros actually.
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Zsh can suggest the corrections to commands and filename. I'm not sure if that's what they're talking about, but zsh has been around for awhile.
Ask HN: Companies that advertise being a "best place to work", is it a red flag?
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Marketing cost vs improved hiring, comp, quality of life, etc (which is expensive and hard).
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null signal. totally meaningless.
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Not a green flag. It is pay to play insignia.
Wero – Digital payment wallet, made in Europe (wero-wallet.eu)
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It disgusts me that there's no consumer protection law against 'if you want to use our service you must have an Android or iPhone'. Blue Bikes (rental bicycles) also have this problem and there it's possibly even worse because they used to have a card.
The problems with Wero is that it needs a linked phone number and nobody can answer what happens if you link two bank accounts from different banks to the same phone number (is this even supported? Why do I NEED to link my phone number?). Also, every bank needs to manually support Wero and when you want to pay online you need to scan a QR code with your phone (yes even on your desktop) and approve it inside your banking app which makes it way slower than just using PayPal or Google/Apple Pay. It's astounding how EU bureaucrats came up with "PayPal but worse" over 25 years after PayPal was founded.
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For me, linking the phone number was optional, I had to choose either phone and/or email.
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A phone number (or email) is not strictly necessary [1]. Some banks do indeed require it for the Wero account setup, which in my opinion is a mistake. You only need the additional identifiers if you want to look up other Wero users with your phone's address book to send money directly to them. It's also not possible to register the same phone number at two banks simultaneously. The last registration wins and the associated bank account will switch on the backend when you try this. Also, EU bureaucrats have little to do with it. Wero is the third attempt by a subset of private European banks to establish a new pan-European payment network. [1] https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599201237009-Do-I-have-to-link-a-phone-number-or-e-mail-address-to-use-Wero
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Here where I live a similar thing exists for like 10 years already, and if the recepient has 2 bank accounts from different banks, then the banking app lets you choose which bank you want to send the money to. They also show the recipient's first and middle names (only the first letter of the last name is shown) to make sure you're sending money to the right person. And I've always wondered, isn't it kind of unsafe, if someone gets my number, they can learn where I store my money and what my name is. Dunno about the desktop, but if you're on a phone, there's often a button "open in the bank app". I actually like that you need to approve it in the banking app, it's like a single source of truth no one else but me has access to. Dunno why it would be "way slower", it's just an additional click?
Can anyone explain me exactly why it is a suitable alternative to VISA and Mastercard (and why people were waiting for it). I am trying to understand the full picture here, so multiple things come to my mind. First, SEPA instant payments already exist and are really instant up to a certain amount, and I am guessing that Wero builds on top of that a sort of identity layer, to sidestep the whole IBAN thing. But it is likely more than a SEPA alias, since it was supposedly hard to set-up. Second, VISA and Mastercard are worldwide payment networks (or rather, they each operate payment networks with various names?). But I am failing to grasp what's hard to reproduce here too. I heard that in Europe there were only a few national alternatives, like Carte Bancaire or Girocard, but why? Is it just because banks can't agree on the design of an alternate network? But all the fees associated with using VISA or Mastercard should be a big enough incentive to push something else. (basically what's a payment network?) And lastly, why are all the new (free) digital banks (néobanques as we call them here) relying on either Mastercard or VISA and never on Carte Bancaire for example, while it generally offers lower processing fees (and that they can be cobranded). I think I am missing a lot of context, and I asked LLMs a while ago about these but themselves don't really explain what is the infrastructure needed to operate such a network.
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You should not be distracted by the fact that SEPA Instant payments are used as the clearing mechanism. The Wero (EPI) backend IS the payment network and provides the messaging layer between the customer's bank and the merchant. Payment processors can interface with Wero and provide payment services for merchants in much the same way as they offer credit card payments.
The merchant/processor/issuer network with all the correct incentives is (nearly) impossible to replicate. Visa and Mastercard work more or less, perfectly. The only entities that need/want "instant, non-recourse payments" are fraudsters.
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In the EU countries with local instant bank payments schemes they are much more popular with consumers than credit cards when paying attrusted merchants, who in turn pay around a quarter in fees of what they'd have to pay for cards. No need for expensive credit cards schemes in Europe any more.
> Usually that means scanning a QR code with your bank app on your smartphone where you confirm the amount and recipient, but you can use a physical card reader with your debit card for an OTP This seems to be mobile-centric system that essentially requires a cell phone, and probably one blessed by Google or Apple. The app will probably leak a huge amount of meta data, far more than a credit card (especially a privacy-oriented prepaid one). This kind of "solution" is dead on arrival as far as I am concerned.
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Did you miss the whole part where op talks about using your physical card as an alternative?
How is that better than a card payment? Cards are accepted by far more merchants, have dispute rights, are inexpensive (in Europe) to process, supported by Apple & Google Pay, superior checkout experience, etc.
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1. Credit cards are not that common. People usually have debit cards. Those can sometimes be used online but they're not widely accepted. My debit card is Maestro, which is not accepted in many places. 2. Even with my Mastercard credit card, the process is still inconvenient. For small purchases, it's fine. But for larger ones, there is an annoying second factor authentication, I have to enter a special password, and the wait to receive an SMS. 3. Visa and Mastercard fees. Most of the time these are paid by the merchant. But sometimes the customer has to pay more if the payment method is credit card. Some places don't accept these at all. In general iDEAL is simple, secure and convenient. Not only to pay online, but also for example for splitting a bill with friends. I'm very happy to see this being adopted more widely in Europe.
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The whole flow is so much better than card purchases, where you have to enter all the data (or see your password manager's autofill fail) and then you have to go to your credit card provider's app to acknowledge the transaction. Cards are accepted by far more merchants, The vast majority of Dutch online transactions are done because pretty much every Dutch online shop supports it. Also many international shops through Shopify and Stripe. Many Dutch online shops do not support credit card payments. So iDEAL is the far lower friction option here. And there is no American company in between (at least for most national payments). It's great to see this system, that served us two decades by now finally get rolled out across Europe. They tried it before in the early 2010s, but the non-Dutch banks were fighting turf wars.
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I've never used their dispute rights, and I don't think that holds much value in Europe. At least in Germany a contract is a contract, if I claw back the payment companies will just start the collections process. A process that has teeth and generally will recover the money from me, worst case by garnishing wages. On the other hand Visa and MasterCard are not neutral actors. They have used their market power in the past to pressure merchants to change according to American moral values. And with the current administration I have little faith that this will stay at moral values
So it's mainly a nationalism thing? Is that enough to displace the superior option?
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I don't see where card schemes are inherently superior in the age of NFC payments. There are huge countries (China, India, Brazil, ...) where people moved from cash to mobile payments. Europe has always been in the forefront of this space, Swish exists since 2012, it's about time we get a pan-European solution.
Fyi, Wero only supports three countries: Belgium, France, and Germany.
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Already quite much if we add the Netherlands, yes :)
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With NL that’s fully 40% of the population of the eu states. It’s not great, but it’s not bad either.
Every once in a while, I check it out, and every time I am confused or disappointed. Don't we already have SEPA transfers? What benefits would this add? Why are they completely unable to pitch it to someone who's curious and receptive to the idea?
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P2P transfers are just a convenient feature, using SCT Inst behind the scenes. Pan-European payments are the bigger deal.
Your link is broken for me. From https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599098295313-I-m-seeing-this-error-message-Your-device-does-not-meet-our-security-requirements it seems they don't even support phones with developer settings turned on, much less custom ROMs, rooted or jaibroken phones.
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It works on a Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS.
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If it works, it's by happenstance not officially. According to the link above (official FAQ): > If the operating system is an Android variant (also called a 'custom ROM'), such as LineageOS or Pixel Experience, then the wero app can’t be installed for security reasons.
Which bank? I work in this space for a large european bank and we wouldn’t be able to do this.
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My Volksbank app here in Germany just wants a locked boatloads and no root. Works fine with microg. It's the reason I will never move! Though the Sparkasse is the same actually, unsure about the other german banks
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This is great news if it’s true, these regulations are so hazy it’s maddening. Even tho I’m being downvoted I am actually on the side of removing these barriers I was just sharing what I was made to understand by my bank. shrug
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All Dutch banks for example? I do instant online payments and P2P payments all the time with a degoogled phone. My VISA credit card app (ICS) also works fine.
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You mean via your banks web interface? Or via some tap to pay interface? What i mean is can you use this to pick up a slab of beer in albert hein, or just to transfer some cash to a friend or such?
Aren’t your problems solved by carrying a bit of plastic issues by your bank? Why isn’t that enough?
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We really should try to understand your mentality, if only to understand why after 27 years the EU still doesn't have a PayPal alternative.
I should've been clearer - by Google-approved, I meant that your device has to pass Google's remote attestation scheme. From https://support.wero-wallet.eu/hc/en-us/articles/25599098295313-I-m-seeing-this-error-message-Your-device-does-not-meet-our-security-requirements : > I’m seeing this error message: "Your device does not meet our security requirements". > /../ If the operating system is an Android variant (also called a 'custom ROM'), such as LineageOS or Pixel Experience, then the wero app can’t be installed for security reasons.
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It does not say anything about remote attestation, only rooted/unlocked phones. Most likely it works fine if you run GrapheneOS with a locked bootloader. Many European banking apps work on degoogled Android like GrapheneOS or /e/OS fine, as long as you have locked the bootloader and USB debugging disabled.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: Jemini – Gemini for the Epstein Files (jmail.world)
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Interesting stuff! I'm also slowly diving into the whole Epstein thing, mainly focused on a human-curated wiki (at https://corroborators.wiki , still WIP obviously) and I've had some contributors wanting to use AI for basically filling out details automatically. But I'm using LLMs daily for programming, so I know how much they get wrong. So about that specific thing, how do you avoid this particular problems with LLMs getting basic things wrong and basically being a lottery if the answer is correct or not? It's the reason I've avoided (and encouraged others to avoid it to) using LLMs too heavily in the process of reading, understanding and summarizing documents, but clearly you've must have figured out some trick to this?
The Jamazon interface is really nice. I like how clicking on the order number takes you to the email. But I'm not going spend much time on there, after seeing his order for Lolita next to orders for kid toys. https://jmail.world/jamazon
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Along with the orders for kids school uniform skirts a bit later.. tough viewing in context. Makes it unsettling when it then shows orders for books I've also read. Hard to swallow having anything in common with such a person. As a side note -- I would have assumed he got his clothes from much fancier places than Amazon considering his wealth. Altogether his Amazon orders are disturbing, but also somewhat humanizing.
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Interesting. The majority of items seems to be books.
for another angle - depending on the provider, theyre going to train on these queries and responses, and i dont want folks training an Epstein LLM, or accidentally putting Epstein behaviour into LLMs
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Use an abliterated LLM and you can have it act like the worst person you can imagine. I'm also pretty sure these docs are already being used for training, whether or not Jmail / Jemini exists.
Jmail maintainer and co-creator here. Very excited to see that someone finally made Jemini good! Our development process has been interesting. Although just Riley and I first made Jmail, it's been really gratifying to see companies, journalists, and fellow developers like Diego rise to the occasion to make this entire suite of apps as high quality and extensive as possible.
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> Jmail maintainer and co-creator here. Great, I've been looking to be able to contact you somewhere, hardly a better place :) Thanks for sharing the project btw, and for keeping jmail alive, been useful to dig into some stuff. However, there seems to be some "injected" or "fake" emails, that I cannot figure out why they're there in the first place. For example this one: https://jmail.world/thread/55b91b46ef1e4487bee131a8505e14a4?view=inbox For that example, the first problem is that there is no link to the source file from the disclosed files, which is strange, because most other emails have that. Secondly, this almost seems to be a "sponsored" email or something, as it has an ad in the top right corner reading "Sponsored by Drop Site News", but clicking that just takes you to some general page, with no clear information how that's related to the fake/injected email. Also, what does "Verified by X" actually mean, did they verify the authenticity of that specific email? There seems to be a bunch of people confused by those emails and wondering where they are coming from, because it's missing the source link like the others, so there doesn't seem to be a good way to verify those emails. Could you maybe share a bit about what's going on?
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Yeah, those are mailing lists that people signed him up for after he died, including with a joke name. He was a very famous figure in August 2019, and normal people spammed his inbox with emails like the below https://jmail.world/thread/4accfb5f3ed84656e9762740081a4579?view=inbox These are all real emails! We can do a better job making this clear to the user.
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> These are all real emails! Why do the rest of the emails provide a link to the online file (original one hosted at justice.gov) but the "sponsored"/ad ones do not? This for example: https://jmail.world/thread/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016203?view=inbox Has a "View Original Document" which takes you to kind-of-the-source (ideally should have been link to justice.gov but better than nothing I suppose), but for the emails with the Dropsite ad, it seems there is no original document?
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https://jmail.world/thread/07ff1467c0f2bb976664ecafc5829aa4?view=inbox Many Yahoo emails do show you the original source, and the original is just an EML file. These were files directly exported from Epstein's Yahoo account. Bloomberg used these EMLs to confirm that the Yahoo emails are real ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-09-12/epstein-email-investigation-sheds-light-into-crimes-social-network ). We don't tamper with these EMLs, so we currently don't make the EML accessible if the team had to redact any contents of that email. See this for example. https://jmail.world/thread/97d4a52d1df3948368770068262d2aab?view=inbox We can fix examples where there are no redactions yet no EML download is available
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Also, that says "Verified by Drop Site News", not Sponsored by. That's because Drop Site redacted these real Yahoo emails and gave them to Jmail. The original Yahoo dataset, which the DOJ and House Oversight Committee did not release, is stewarded by DDoSecrets ( https://ddosecrets.org/article/epstein-emails ). This Yahoo dataset, which we helped release after launching the first Jmail, also proved Epstein's connection to Iran-Contra (!!). Now immortalized on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Financial_troubleshooter_(1981%E2%80%931987) )
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That’s just a campaign email with “Pedophiles” as the recipient name, right? Anyone can sign an email address up to a mailing list. All of Trump’s campaign emails are these type of overly friendly weird junk.
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Sure, but the email itself doesn't seem to be a part of the archives of Epstein's emails (which would be an issue), it seems like it has been added manually by the admins of Jmail, as it's not coming from the files that were recently released.
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Jmail is a mix of sources. “The Jmail Suite is an interactive archive of Jeffrey Epstein's emails, documents, photos, and more. Data compiled from the House Oversight Committee, Department of Justice, and DDoSecrets releases” If I understand correctly, the emails you’re looking at are from a leak that is only accessible to journalists — so Drop Site News (as journalists) have access and have published some. https://ddosecrets.org/article/epstein-emails
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Correct. https://jmail.world/about explains it all.
How not to answer the salary question (adatosystems.com)
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> "Error establishing a database connection" RIP, looks like the site got hugged.
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It is exactly the point, stay blank if they ask that question!
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It's not hard, just say you're looking for competitive compensation for someone with your experience and expertise and anchor on the high end of the range. That said, what you say isn't as important as what you do. If you're interviewing, you should be interviewing at at least a few places to get comps. You will get lowballed if you don't have comps. Once you have a few offers, do one round of playing them off each other, decide which company you want to work for, and then say you'll sign today if they can beat the current best offer.
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I have helped a lot of people earn more money. The best advice I have for anyone doing salary negotiations: you cannot negotiate without options, so step 1 in any negotiation is to gather options.
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reading comments so far.. seems from people who have not tried how the current situation is. Yes most of these "cant say" worked 3+ years go. But it is harsh employer-driven market now. 100 candidates for 1 position. The question is baked and mandatory in most forms, and there's no "cant say" - only about 20% do not ask it, all else.. have it. And it is the easiest filter for the above 100 candidates, so. Negotiation phase? hah. You are lucky if you get a rejection e-mail. Most don't bother with even that, regardless the importance of the role. And you never know if the number was too high, or completely irrelevant.
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Related ("what is your current salary"), you should know about "the work number" "Talent Report™ Income and Employment Provides verification of employment plus verification of a candidate’s income." https://theworknumber.com/solutions/industries/pre-employment-verification#:~:text=Talent%20Report%E2%84%A2%20Income,a%20candidate%E2%80%99s%20income. Opt out: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
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The author thinks they made the wrong move a few times during their career, and now they're replaying it in hindsight as if their present experience has a measure on previous performance. They are only able to write this post because they did some things badly in the past, but after a load of other steps they got to a point where they could write a post or a book and basically skip all of the hard bits they don't want to talk about. You have to be careful to not be led into this, as if you can follow OP's self-help advice and skip the failures. You will, in fact, fail in a different way. Is this cynical? Yes. But it's how self-help advice works.
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I can’t see how it would possibly work in Polish market. Polish job IT market (at least for Go developers) is very specific. There’s very few companies actually building their own products and plenty of software houses/hiring agencies looking to hire cheaply. I’ve been doing Go for long enough that what I ask for is on the higher end, so much so that I probably refuse ~95% offers because they are significantly below my expectations. Importantly, I’m no public figure nor I’m 10x developer, I’m just a regular guy who chose Go very early in my career, just before it really took off. Now, imagine that I don’t ask for a number nor share my expectations. With 3-4 rounds of interviews, even if we assume 1/10 is in my range, I’d have to SUCCESSFULLY do maybe 30-40 interviews on average to find a job that matches my expectations. Another thing is that benefits in Poland are pretty standard almost nearly everywhere: private medical care, gym card, 20 vacation days, 10 sick days… unless you’re willing to work in the big few companies that just have unlimited money. (If someone in Poland has different experience, please share - would love to hear more.)
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I don’t give prospective employers a number. I just tell them that I pay rent on a 2BR in NYC. Then the ball is in their court.
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I’m not sure this article really applies to my experience. There are lots of companies who have extremely rigid pay ranges, and if you ask for wiggle room on a low salary they just move on to the next applicant. You should apply to jobs because you’d rather work there, and should come in with minimum salaries you’d accept. Thinking you’re going to negotiate 50k more after holding an offer in your hand is a good way to have the offer taken back
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You can set some reasonably high expectation, not as a target but as an aspiration. Case in point, once when I was asked it I was "I read in an study that one gets happier with more salary up until 85K€, so my aim is to go towards that range". In the end I ended up halfway between that and my then salary. BTW, the study was then superseded by another that happiness keeps increasing, just not as fast. Of course your situation might be different, and you could take inspiration for 6 digits, $500K or any other amount that would be perfect for you if accepted because it's higher than what you would have accepted, and you can get something below that that would be a stepping stone. In Spain, at least, salary needs discussing early, too many divergences between some companies and some people expectations on that. So I disagree leaving it for later.
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I don’t want a higher salary, I want a higher net worth so I can not work, or at least not work meaningless jobs that only serve as a high salary. I would prefer $2m in my pocket than a 500k/year ex. tax job.
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The latter is a pretty good path towards making the former happen.
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The sheer amount of information asymmetry is the tricky part here. I think that’s the only relevant part of the equation. The company hires N people per year, you get hired by 1 company every N years. Maybe you work for a company that hired 100 people last year, and there’s someone who’s done analysis for salaries day in and day out. That person has a shitload of information about what the salaries are and what people will accept. So you exploit the flipside of the information symmetry. The company is obviously not telling me all their employee salaries, so I am not telling them mine. I just need enough of a sense of what the range is to figure out if a number I like is in there. The company is not planning to blow you away with some big salary number, but I’ve gotten some pretty good offers. This happens sometimes because you’re stepping up to a higher role at the other company, or sometimes because you’re going to a company which just has higher compensation bands to begin with. Or maybe you just look really good to that company. I’ve gotten offers which were +50% above the number I had in my head, or well above that. It feels like a waste of time and such a song and dance to some people, but the time spent is not wasted, it’s turned into salary dollars.
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The company hires N people per year, you get hired by 1 company every N years. Sure, but the company hires you even less often -- at most once every 2N years and probably even less than that. If you are interchangable with all their other hires... well, that's not a good position to be in for many reasons.
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> The sheer amount of information asymmetry The irony is the information asymmetry exists solely because we, the employees, are taught to believe it's 'cultural inappropriate' to ask each other's salary. Sometimes even by our parents.
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Agree But would you share your salary here right now? If not, is it purely cultural? Or are there other motivations?
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Sharing comp details is the first step to employees working together to organize for a fair wage And obviously the C-suite will do everything in their power to make sure we never take a step down that road
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> The company hires N people per year, you get hired by 1 company every N years Yes, but you can tilt this in your favor (if you find it valuable information) by getting X offers per year.
The least helpful possible framing for this, I think. Refusing to answer altogether has all of the risks of giving too high/low a salary, and none of the benefits of actual negotiation. If you're in a position where you can not answer, you're in a position there's no reason not to give them your desired salary up front and let them tell you why they can't do it. Pick a high number of course! If you're in a position where you can't afford not to answer, you should pick a reasonable number, and take whatever they give you, because you completely lack agency. This is the case where you might screw yourself out of money, but if you need the job that badly, do you really care? A better way to frame this, and this is always what I do if I have the agency to not answer, is to give them the number I'd like or remain mum, but either way when they make the final offer just ask them a simple question: "Is there any way you can come up a little bit from that?". If they say no, you decide based on that first number. But they'll almost always say yes, and you'll get a small effortless raise. I've done this about 10 times across my career and about 70-80% of the time I've gotten a bump in the 5-10% range. Which means that, collectively, about 30-40% of my current salary level is a result of that one question, applied consistently over time. You won't get a raise outside the salary band, but you might move from the median for that band up a notch or two within it, and that absolutely matters in the long run.
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Yes perfect advice -- negotiate from a position of leverage and always ask for that little bump at the end. In my experience, not talking about salary early kind of sets everyone up to waste their time. One time it ended up with a full interview process that went very well for a job I thought would be perfect in an industry that _should_ have outstanding pay, and the resulting offer that was lower than my current role, paid hourly without benefits with a vague promise to later be an FTE; not only did we all waste our time, I was pretty upset about it. When I sent an email to the hiring manager they said "well you never told us your expectations" -- now the guy was dumb, he _knew_ I had a good job already, the comp he was offering was well below industry standard, and he knew my background, but nevertheless that is where a lot of hiring folks heads are at and it makes total sense: they want to get a good deal just like you do. Asking for salary band is good, especially earlier in your career, but to me it's now kind of irrelevant -- for the same reason you will go high, they will try to go low. I have a price I will be happy at, I say a number higher in the beginning but say depending on how everything goes there may end up being flexibility, and that I look at the entire package holistically. This is just to assess: "is it worth us continuing to engage". Not doing this would have wasted a colossal amount of time. I'm now in a position where I know where salaries generally are in different parts of the industry, and I can set a price based on what I expect and what my current role is, and I explain my reasoning. But yes: it depends so much on the situation. Benefits good? Growth potential at a startup good? Do I believe in the mission and that the founder won't abandon for an acquihire and tank my equity? Etc.
"What's your desired salary?" "A million an hour, obviously (haha). But in all seriousness, I'd expect to be compensated commensurate with the responsibilities of the role, keeping in mind that the salary number is just one aspect of a compensation package as health insurance and other benefits are important to me." There are only two reasons HR asks this: 1. possible leverage later in the process. 2. attempting to not waste time if the candidate's expectations are way out of line with the amount the company is willing to pay. Either way, there is no good reason to name numbers prior to the company making an offer with compensation package details.
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> 2. attempting to not waste time if the candidate's expectations are way out of line with the amount the company is willing to pay. Good reason for them to say what they're willing to pay before I bother reading their job advert
Most of the time, I'd just answer "I'm ok with your published range, we can proceed." or similar. But, I've also seen ranges that span hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like "Software engineer: $150k-$250" which is a ridiculous range that makes it almost meaningless. I mean, what are they thinking - any candidate worth their time is going to aim for the $250 end...
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GitHub’s current Senior Software Engineer listings have a range of $124k - $329k
Robert Duvall has died (nytimes.com)
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Loved him in Secondhand Lions.
Don't know about the States, but across the pond from there, THX 1138 is not as well known as it probably deserves. I hope the public here can appreciate this Sci-Fi movie and Duvall is great there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138
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It's known over here (to the degree that it is at all) for being the source of the THX name that Lucas later used for his digital sound system. But the movie is interesting in itself as an early pre-fame Lucas movie.
My dad was a big fan of westerns, so Lonesome Dove was a big deal in our house when I was a kid. Sometimes I think about showing them to my son, but I know there's no way he'll have the patience to sit through it all. I'm worried that I might not have the patience either anymore.
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I recently read the book for the first time. Fantastic story! The best western I've ever read. Then I watched the miniseries with my wife (also for the first time). Westerns aren't her favorite, but she loved it too. Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones were incredible, the whole cast did a great job, and the costumes and scenery were beautiful. We still make jokes about "We don't rent pigs." :) We only watched season 1 because that's the one based on the original Lonesome Dove book. They make some changes, but generally only one that makes the show easier to follow. I'd highly recommend anyone to watch it. If you stick with only season 1 it tells a complete story and it's not too long of a commitment. It has everything. RIP Duvall. You've had many roles, but this is the one I'll remember you for.
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Would you recommend the book or series?
NYT obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/movies/robert-duvall-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MlA.5LIC.JbSiEGzihyVU&smid=url-share
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Thanks - we've switched to that from https://www.newsweek.com/entertainment/hollywood-legend-robert-duvall-dead-at-95-11531295 above.
Why do people like fictional narrative so much? I'm not sure why, other than some platitude like "forming narratives is how people understand the world". But I'm not sure why it follows that fictional narratives are so important to us.
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Because a good story scratches something that's deep and hard to reach. Because fiction allows an escape from the drudgery that real life can so often be. Because sometimes fiction is required to inspire us as to what we consider possible in life.
I don't remember it being a "sleeper"; I recall it stirring quite a bit of controversy at the time. It came out in the pre-Columbine "Going Postal" era. But agreed: it's worth a watch.
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I was very surprised to learn that Joel Schumacher directed Falling Down.
It’s a smaller movie, given the talent involved, but very interesting. The controversy undermined the viability of its popular legacy. Kind of like Passengers (half kidding, but the controversy on this one always felt like an inadvertent bend of timeliness).
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You made me curious, but there are like 5 different films with that title - which one are you referring to?
"I Was a Director at Amex When They Started Replacing Us with $30K Workers" [video] (youtube.com)
The two American political parties are so perfectly shielded by their own ideological blinders to avoid any possibility of national protectionism against offshoring and outsourcing that I don't think there will ever be any kind of movement against this. The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts. And the business owners and shareholders who love to outsource generally aren't true blue voters. The liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers.
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Protectionism may work in some cases, but even when it works, it works by making things more expensive. People don't buy American cars because it's cheaper to make similar cars in Mexico. Fine, so let's force companies to make cars in America. It's now more expensive (otherwise we won't be importing from Mexico in the first place). You add more and more protectionism, it may get some jobs back, but the price is that things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more. (Just think of how much money an American worker needs to have an ordinary middle-class life compared to a Mexican worker.) Now consider how much people were angry over the Covid-era inflation and how it was a major factor in Trump coming back (and looks like it's going to be a major factor in Republicans losing the mid-term election this year). Nobody wants prices to go up. Americans say they want protectionism but what they want is a fairy tale protectionism where jobs comes back but prices magically stay stable. It cannot happen, and if the choice is between some other group of Americans in Michigan getting better jobs and you getting your SUV at a "reasonable" price, people will choose the latter. (I'm not digging at Americans - the same is going to happen everywhere.) It's basically "It's extremely hard to defeat capitalism at its own game." Nobody likes capitalism, but that doesn't mean you'll get popular by defying capitalism.
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liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers. Well, yes, because discrimination on the basis of where someone was born is illegal. The American liberal base is, and has always been, fine with economic discrimination in favor of those in America (without regard to where they were born or their residency status).
It's not extremism. It's plain old American capitalism. Both parties are being funded by the same people, so both parties play ball with the same set of funders.
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Its very obvious, imo they are going to have a hard time signing young men up to fight for this country when they inevitably make everyone so poor they beg anything, even a war. But... They'll use profits and greed to alienate the working class further and further, they'll try to get us to go fight wars to capture resources for the KKKapital owners. My prediction is the only war the American people will be willing to sign up to fight, is against those same KKKapital owners. Probably explains why they love bunkers so much, for the case where this whole experiment backfires on them.
> The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts. Currently, the head of the party is raising and lowering tariffs at will, so I don't quite think this holds anymore.
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Agree. It is harder to manufacture in America when the party leader breaks critical parts of your supply chain with rapid and unpredictable tariff changes. It is impossible to lower consumer prices on a good by raising taxes on it. This is not even mentioning the astounding corruption of a president and his family personally and directly benefiting from these tariffs threats. Does the party not understand the realities of this? Do they understand and are just lying about it because they're afraid of the leader? Afraid of admitting that they're wrong? I believe people are usually rational but I do not understand a rationalization where choosing to harm American manufacturers and consumers on the whims of a visibly corrupt leader is good, actually.
Use protocols, not services (notnotp.com)
Consider - why did Discord or Slack win over IRC? It turns out it's very slow to evolve a protocol. How long did it take for IRCv3 to handle channels having persistent history? How about channel takeovers via network splits? We knew these were problems in the 20th century but it took a very long time to fix. Oh, and the chathistory Extension is still a draft! So is channel-rename! And account-registration? And why is it still so painful to use Mastodon? That's but one of many examples. Consider how the consolidation of HTML and HTTP clients was the only way that we ended up with any innovation in those services. People have to keep up with Chrome who just does their own thing. I want to want a decentralized world governed by protocols, but good software that iterates quickly remains the exception rather than the rule.
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Totally understand, I am all for decentralized world too. In reality tho most ppl just choose whatever works fast and ships fast and more production-ready I guess, no drafts. Would be great if the world sees an opposite example, by far centralised approach just worked better
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All you've said here is that you (and many others) have shown in the past that they've valued convenience and rapid feature development over freedom and stability. That is good to understand, but when that trade starts causing issues, it is important to remember that there was a trade made . We aren't as stuck as we think we are, unless we decide not to reevaluate our past choices.
None of this could happen with a protocol. You cannot require age verification on IRC, XMPP, ActivityPub, Nostr, or Matrix, because there is no single entity to compel. Each server operator makes their own decisions. A government would need to individually pressure thousands of independent operators across dozens of jurisdictions, which is a legislative and enforcement impossibility. And even if one server complied, users would simply move to another. This is wishful thinking. A government would just move to the next layer of the stack and attack the supporting infrastructure, like DNS, payment services or datacenters. To the degree that a protocol is a manner of communication between things (fka services), those things can be made to comply with the prevailing legal authority.
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The interesting thing about Nostr (vs each of the other options listed here) is that it works perfectly fine over sneakernet. And that has been impossible to block throughout the world, even in some of the most oppressive nations. Since the spec includes identity, content (in multiple formats), and authenticity/integrity, this makes it superior to nearly all alternatives for offline use. Once you know someone’s key, you can verify that content comes from them, however you manage to obtain that content.
cost, and we can create policy (shocker) also what specifically are you worried about these 100 billion chatgpts doing?
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Cost is irrelevant if they get more out of doing it than the processing costs.
14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight (smithsonianmag.com)
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There's something about these Miura-ori photos that gives me strong deja vu — like I'm walking through a contemporary art museum. The visual rhythm of those tessellating parallelograms is exactly what you'd see hanging on a gallery wall. What struck me reading this is that the boundary between "art you look at" and "engineering you use" is genuinely blurrier than I'd thought. Koryo Miura was an astrophysicist designing solar panels for spacecraft, but the fold he invented in the 1970s ended up being visually striking enough to sit alongside Sol LeWitt-style geometric art. The 10,000x strength-to-weight ratio is the headline, but what's genuinely interesting to me is that Miles arrived at this through aesthetic exploration first — testing 54 variants of fold angle and cell size. That feels closer to how an artist iterates on a pattern than how a typical structural engineering problem gets solved. Curious if anyone here works at the intersection of computational origami and architecture. The article mentions scaling challenges (joints, multidirectional loads), but I'm wondering what's actually been deployed at building scale. The space applications are well-documented, but are there real-world structures using this beyond prototypes?
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Don't get hung up on "14 year old". Pay attention to "took up origami 6 years ago". That's 6 years of passionate learning, experimenting and improvement.
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Could concept be applied to submarine vehicles to exponential increase their resistance to pressure at depth?
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This is weight distribution on a flat plain. Think of Roman Arches. On a curved plain, weight distribution of THIS origami falls apart as pressure is added horizontally (not just vertically).
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Fun when these things hold a surprising amount of weight. Reminds me when these two engineers on Lego Masters made a bridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9WT6TB15yE
Where can we read about the other submissions?
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It looks like the top 10% from 6th to 8th grade Society of Science fairs are invited to participate. They are then selected down to a top 300[1] and a top 30.[2] You can find a project name for the top 300 and a paragraph on each of the top 30. [1] https://www.societyforscience.org/jic/2025-top-300-junior-innovators/ [2] https://www.societyforscience.org/jic/2025-finalists/
"Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name (jkap.io)
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Ironically the linked text by this Kellog guy is 100% AI slop itself
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Funemployed right now joyously spending way way more time than 996, pulling the slot machine arm to get tokens, having a ball. But that's for personal pleasure. This post is receeding from the concerns about "token anxiety," about the addiction to tokens. This post is about work culture & late capitalism anxiety, about possible pressures & systems society might impose. I reflect a lot on AI doesn't reduce the work, it intensifies it . https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it The spirit of this really nails something core to me. We coders especially get help doing so much of menial now. Which means we spend a lot more time making intense analysis and critiques, are much more doing the hard thought work of 'is what we have here as good as it can be'. Finding new references or patterns to feed back into the AI to steer already working implementations towards better outcomes. And my heart tells me that corporations & work life as we know it are almost universally just really awful about supporting reflective contemplative work like this. Work wants output. It doesn't want you sit in a hammock and think about it. But increasingly I tell you the key to good successful software is Hammock Driven Development . It's time to use our brains more, in quiet reflection. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/HammockDrivenDev.md 996 sounds like garbage on its own, as a system of toil. But I also very much respect an idea of continuous work, one that also intersperses rest throughout the day. Doing some chores or going to the supermarket or playing with the kid can be an incredibly good way to let your preconscious sift through the big gnarly problems about. The response to the intensity of what we have, to me, speaks of a need to spread out the work, to de-concentrate it, to build in more than hammock time. I was on the fence about whether the traditional workday deserved to survive before AI hit, and my feels about it being a gross mismatch have massively intensified since. As I started my post with, I personally have a much more positive experience, with what yes feels like a token addiction. But it doesn't feel like an anxiety. It feels like the greatest most exciting adventure, far beyond what I had hoped for in life ever. This is wildly fun, going far far further out than I had ever hoped to get to see. I'm not "anxiously" pulling the lever arm on the token machine, I'm just thrilled to get to do it. To have time to reflect and decide, I have 3-8 things going at once (and probably double they back burnered but open, on Niri rows!) to let myself make slower decisions, to analyze, while keeping the things that can safely move forwards moving forwards. That also seems like something worker exploitative late capitalism is mostly hot garbage at too! Companies really try to reduce in flight activities. Sprint planning is about crafting deliberate work. But our freedom and agency here far outstrips these dusty old practices. It is anxiety inducing to be so powerful so capable & to have a bureaucracy that constraints and confines, that wants only narrow windows of our use. Also, shame on Tim Kellogg for not God damned linking the actual post he was citing. Garbagefire move. https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/token-anxiety https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021136
I wish the author had stuck to the salient point about work/life balance instead of drifting into the gambling tangent, because the core message is actually more unsettling. With the tech job market being rough and AI tools making it so frictionless to produce real output, the line between work time and personal time is basically disappearing. To the bluesky poster's point: Pulling out a laptop at a party feels awkward for most; pulling out your phone to respond to claude barely registers. That’s what makes it dangerous: It's so easy to feel some sense of progress now. Even when you’re tired and burned out, you can still make progress by just sending off a quick message. The quality will, of course, slip over time; but far less than it did previously. Add in a weak labor market and people feel pressure to stay working all the time. Partly because everyone else is (and nobody wants to be at the bottom of the stack ranking), and partly because it’s easier than ever to avoid hitting a wall by just "one more message". Steve Yegge's point about AI vampires rings true to me: A lot of coworkers I’ve talked to feel burned out after just a few months of going hard with AI tools. Those same people are the ones working nights and weekends because "I can just have a back-and-forth with Claude while I'm watching a show now". The likely result is the usual pattern for increases in labor productivity. People who can’t keep up get pushed out, people who can keep up stay stuck grinding, and companies get to claim the increase in productivity while reducing expenses. Steve's suggestion for shorter workdays sound nice in theory, but I would bet significant amounts of money the 40-hour work week remains the standard for a long time to come.
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Another interesting thing here is that the gap between "burned out but just producing subpar work" and "so crispy I literally cannot work" is even wider with AI. The bar for just firing off prompts is low, but the mental effort required to know the right prompts to ask and then validate is much higher so you just skip that part. You can work for months doing terrible work and then eventually the entire codebase collapses.
One of my recent thoughts is that Claude Code has become the most successful agent partially because it is more of a black box than previous implementations of the agent pattern: the actual code changes aren't shoved in your face like Cursor (used to be), they are hidden away. You focus more on the result rather than the code building up that result, and so you get into the "just one more feature" mindset a lot more, because you're never concerned that the code you're building is sloppy.
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It's because claude code will test its work and adjust the code accordingly. The old way, with the way Cursor used to be or the way I used to copy and paste code from ChatGPT doesn't work because to iterate in towards a working solution requires too much human effort, making the whole thing pointless.
The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in agent output is working against that goal, not serving it. If they could make it right 100% of the time, they would — and the "slot machine" nonsense disappears entirely. On capped plans, both you and Anthropic are incentivized to minimize interactions, not maximize them. That's the opposite of a casino. It's ... alignment (of a sort) An unreliable tool that the manufacturer is actively trying to make more reliable is not a slot machine. It's a tool that isn't finished yet. I've been building a space simulator for longer than some of the people diagnosing me have been programming. I built things obsessively before LLMs. I'll build things obsessively after. The pathologizing of "person who likes making things chooses making things over Netflix" requires you to treat passive consumption as the healthy baseline, which is obviously a claim nobody in this conversation is bothering to defend.
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At one point, people said Google's optimization target was giving you the right search results as soon as possible. What will prevent Anthropic from falling into the same pattern of enshittification as its predecessors, optimizing for profit like all other businesses?
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I stopped using Google years ago because they stopped trying to provide good search results. If Anthropic stops trying to provide a good coding agent, I'll stop using them too.
> The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive behavior, no matter the optimization target. This applies to Claude
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>Intermittent variable rewards, So you're saying businesses shouldn't hire people either?
Sometimes I will go out and I will plant a pepper plant and take care of it all summer long and obsessively ensure it has precisely the right amount of water and compost and so on... and ... for some reason (maybe I was on vacation and it got over 105 degrees?) I don't get a good crop. Does this mean I should not garden because it's a variable reward? Of course not. Sometimes I will go out fishing and I won't catch a damn thing. Should I stop fishing? Obviously no. So what's the difference? What is the precise mechanism here that you're pointing at? Because sometimes life is disappointing is a reason to do nothing. And yet.
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It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is. Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough that you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. That's about as close to a slot machine as I can imagine. Slot rewards are designed to keep you interested as long as possible, on the premise that you _might_ get what you want, the jackpot, if you play long enough. Anthropic's game isn't limited to a single spin either. The small wins (small prompts with well defined answers) are support for the big losses (trying to one shot a whole production grade program).
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> you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible. I mean this only works if Anthropic is the only game in town. In your analogy if anyone else builds a casino with a higher payout then they lose the game. With the rate of LLM improvement over the years, this doesn't seem like a stable means of business.
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??? I'm pretty sure you know what the differences are. Go touch grass and tell me it's the same as looking at a plant on a screen. Dealing with organic and natural systems will, most of the time, have a variable reward. The real issue comes from systems and services designed to only be accessible through intermittent variable rewards. Oh, and don't confuse Claude's artifacts working most of the time with them actually optimizing to be that way. They're optimizing to ensure token usage. I.E. LLMs have been fine-tuned to default to verbose responses. They are impressive to less experienced developers, often easier to detect certain types of errors (eg. Improper typing), and will make you use more tokens.
I know it's popular comparing coding agents to slot machines right now, but the comparison doesn't entirely hold for me. It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it. (I saw "no actual evidence pointing to these improvements" with a footnote and didn't even need to click that footnote to know it was the METR thing. I wish AI holdouts would find a few more studies.) Steve Yegge of all people published something the other day that has similar conclusions to this piece - that the productivity boost for coding agents can lead to burnout, especially if companies use it to drive their employees to work in unsustainable ways: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163
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> It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it Right but the <100% chance is actually why slot machines are addictive. If it pays out continuously the behaviour does not persist as long. It's called the partial reinforcement extinction effect.
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Yeah I'm finding that there's "clock time" (hours) and "calendar time" (days/weeks/months) and pushing people to work 'more' is based on the fallacy that our productivity is based on clock time (like it is in a factory pumping out widgets) rather than calendar time (like it is in art and other creative endeavors). I'm finding that even if the LLM can crank out my requested code in an hour, I'll still need a few days to process how it feels to use. The temptation is to pull the lever 10 times in a row because it was so easy, but now I'll need a few weeks to process the changes as a human. This is just for my own personal projects, and it makes sense that the business incentives would be even more intense. But you can't get around the fact that, no matter how brilliant your software or interface, customers are not going to start paying in a few hours.
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> The temptation is to pull the lever 10 times in a row because it was so easy, but now I'll need a few weeks to process the changes as a human Yeah I really feel that! I recently learned the term "cognitive debt" for this from https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ and I think it's a great way to capture this effect. I can churn out features faster, but that means I don't get time to fully absorb each feature and think through its consequences and relationships to other existing or future features.
Just need to point out that the payout is often above 95% at online casinos. As long as it's below 100 the house still wins.
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He means a slot machine that pays you 95% of the time, not a slot machine that pays out 95% of what you put in. Claude Code wasting my time with nonsense output one in twenty times seems roughly correct. The rest of the time it's hitting jackpots.
This matches my experience using LLMs for science. Out of curiosity, I downloaded a randomized study and the CONSORT checklist, and asked Claude code to do a review using the checklist. I was really impressed with how it parsed the structured checklist. I was not at all impressed by how it digested the paper. Lots of disguised errors.
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try codex 5.3. it's dry and very obviously AI; if you allow a bit of anthropomorphisation, it's kind of high-functioning autistic. it isn't an oracle, it'll still be wrong, but it's a powerful, completely different from claude tool.
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Does it get numbers right? One of the mistakes it made in reading the paper was swapping sets of numbers from the primary/secondary outcomes.
Privilege is bad grammar (tadaima.bearblog.dev)
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It’s because the higher you are in the chain of corporate command, the less time you have to dedicate to each task. You end up with shorter answers to every note because you wouldn’t have time to reply to all notes and do the strategic things you need to do, otherwise. As an individual contributor on a team, you may have to interface at most with 30 people on a weekly basis. As a second line leader you may have 150 people under your purview, and another 50 outsiders you have to talk to. You can’t scale the amount of time you have, so you scale the amount of time you spend on replies.
> My best guess is that comfortable clothes are necessary but you also need something high value in addition I’m just a regular. The point is I’m not signaling anything, I’m just not bothering with a signal because I have other things (namely, being recognized) that will e.g. ensure I get a table even if it’s a busy night. If I go to Vegas I may grab a silk shirt because, yes, my service experience absolutely varies based on that, and I don’t want to have to wait until they see what I order or get to the check-in counter to start being paid attention to. (Which is annoying. And I prefer my t-shirts with cat holes in them. But I don’t like waiting in lines more than I dislike having to do my hair.) (I do maybe counter signal in Palo Alto, where I refuse to wear a blazer or a Palo-Alto-grey hoodie. But that’s less of a power move than me inviting attention as a now outsider.)
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> I’m just a regular. The point is I’m not signaling anything, I’m just not bothering with a signal because I have other things (namely, being recognized) that will e.g. ensure I get a table even if it’s a busy night. it might not be on purpose, but you are signalling that you have status such that you dont need to play by whatever rules other people do to get said table. to signal like a regular person, you would be doing all the same stuff other people do to get the table
> Not having to care is often part of the countersignaling If it’s used to signal, yes. The absence of a signal can be a signal. Or it can blend into the background. My point is wealthy folks wearing ordinary, loved clothes can be either, and in many cases it’s honestly just not giving a fuck and blending in with everyone else by happenstance.
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A signal is a two way street. It remains a signal even if the signaler is oblivious to it but the observers still draw conclusions.
Germany Moves Closer to a Social Media Ban for Those Under 16 (bloomberg.com)
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I can see fragmentation of social media landscape, because children and teenagers will want to have their socials anyway so they will start using smaller and smaller providers or they will be forced to create their own microsocial networks. It might be a business opportunity to have something ready and then sell teens white label application for small fee of server hosting. Or they can go even further and have it P2P decentralized like bitchat.
wild you will be able to drink alcohol before you can have a YouTube account.
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comment made me think! I'm old so this was true since youtube didn't get big until i was in my 30s, so maybe it is a good thing :)
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You need to be 16 to drink beer or wine, so you will be able to do both at the same age.
I guess I kinda get why people hate AI (anthony.noided.media)
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Despite having a very good life, i always had trouble with self-esteem and always felt the impostor syndrome and not having really earned what i have (both professionally and personally. AI users and especially AI boosters are the best thing that happened to me. I no longer felt as an impostor, maybe the opposite. The confidence they gave me got me a promotion and a raise. I still get mad at AI sometime, when someone use it to resolve an easy issue tagged "good first issue" i especially took time to describe for a new hire to enter a very complex codebase, or when i review a fully vibe-coded PR before the person who vibe-coded it, but overall the coming of AI (especially since Sonnet/Opus4.5 and GPT 5.1) is great.
> ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. Odd typo + em dash = "Make mistakes in your output so that people think it wasn't AI generated"
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Author here! I didn’t use AI to write this. Jekyll’s markdown to HTML converter helpfully transforms a series of three normal dashes into an em dash. I did use AI to proofread the article, and implemented its primary suggestion (turning down a dark joke at my own expense that was pretty out of place), but the first draft of this was 100% hand-written.
Once I read a reference to Clavicular, I realized that the very first thing this author should do is stop reading the NYTimes. If the goal is to experience things closer to reality haha.
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I don’t subscribe to the NYT anymore (I cancelled my subscription in 2022). I know who Clavicular is because of social media. The fact that the NYT thought the guy was worthy of a profile is yet another piece of evidence that I should never have given that paper money in the first place.
> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it. But they’re instead saying that it is going to leave me a poor, jobless wretch, a member of the “permanent underclass,” as the meme on Twitter goes. They are marketing it. The target customer isn't the user paying $20 for ChatGPT Pro, though; the customers are investors and CEOs, and their marketing is "AI is so powerful and destructive that if you don't invest in AI, you will be left behind." FOMO at its finest.
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> the customers are investors and CEOs 100%. i have a basically unlimited Claude balance at work. I do not think of cost except for fun. CEO thinks every engineer has to use AI because nobody is gonna just be using text editors alone in the future.
> all white collar jobs collapse Then everything collapses. The carpenter will also be out of work if more than half of his client base cannot afford his work anymore.
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Not to mention millions of ex-white-collars or student age that would have tried to be white-collar rushing to become carpenters and roofers, bringing down the pay and the quality of those jobs way down...
So, what I don't get is, taking it to its logical conclusion, if AI takes all the jobs then who are your customers? Who will buy your stock? Who will buy the software that all the developers you used to employ used to write? How do these CEOs and investors see this playing out?
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Like late-stage capitalism generally thinks of this things: by then you'll have sold your company and living the life... That such a collapse of consumption economy, even just counting white collar jobs cut by "mere" 30%, would also mean a collapse of the stock market, society, infrastructure, and even basic safety, doesn't enter the mind.
You guys can hate him, but Alex Karp of Palantir had the most honest take on this recently which was basically: "Yes, I would love to pause AI development, but unless we get China to do the same, we're f***, and there's no advantage unilaterally disarming" (not exact, but basically this) You can assume bad faith on the parts of all actors, but a lot of people in AI feel similarly.
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"I would love to stop getting your money, but consider the children/China/some disaster/various scenarios. That's why you should continue to shower me with billions".
What does he gain by saying "Yes I'd love to shut all of this down"?
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He gets to pretend to be impartial ("sure, I've love to shut this down and lose the billions coming my way"), and by pretending that he has no option but to "go against his own will" and continue it, he gets to make it sound nuclear-bomb-level important. This is hyping 101.
Its rhetoric - he gains your support. He doesn't want to shut it down.
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You should really step back and think, maybe you've spun a very complicated web of beliefs on top of your own eyes. Yes, maybe everyone is playing 8 dimensional chess and every offhand comment is a subtle play for credibility. Or maybe sometimes people just say what they think.
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"This late night informercial guy is not genuinely believing the product to be amazing, he's just saying shit to sell it" "Yes, maybe everyone is playing 8 dimensional chess and every offhand comment is a subtle play for credibility. Or maybe sometimes people just say what they think". I mean, dude, a corporate head having a conflict of interest in saying insincere shit to promote the stuff his company makes is not some conspiracy thinking about everybody playing "8 dimensional chess". It's the very basic baseline case.
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This is what I think: - Alex Karp genuinely believes China is a threat - I think China is an economic threat, especially for tech - An AI arms race is itself threatening; it is not like the nuclear deterrent - Geopolitical tensions are very convenient for Alex Karp - America has a history of exaggerating geopolitical threats - Tech is very credulous with politics
It's worse than that. It's ultimately a military technology. The end-game here is to use it offensively and / or defensively against other countries. Whoever establishes dominance first wins. And so you have to push adoption, so that it gets tested and can be iterated. But this isn't about making money (they are losing it like crazy!) This is end-of-the world shit and about whoever will be left standing once all the dominoes fall -- if they ever fall (let's hope they don't!) But it's tacitly understood we need to develop this as soon as we can, as fast as we can, before those other guys do. It's a literal arms race.
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> The end-game here is to use it offensively and / or defensively against other countries. Against other countries? The biggest endgame is own population control. That has always been the biggest problem/desire of elites, not war with other countries.
Yeah, if you consider a military-grade AI/LLM with access to all military info sources, able to analyze them all much quicker than a human… there’s no way this isn’t already either in progress or in use today. Probably only a matter of time until there’s a Snowden-esque leak saying AI is responsible for drone assassinations against targets selected by AI itself.
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> Yeah, if you consider a military-grade AI/LLM with access to all military info sources, able to analyze them all much quicker than a human… there’s no way this isn’t already either in progress or in use today. Still wouldn't mean much. Wars are won on capacity, logistics (the practical side, not ability to calculate them), land/etc advantages, and when it comes to boots on the ground, courage, knowledge of the place, local population support, etc. Not "analyzing info sources" at scale which is mostly a racket that pretends to be important.
I think it's a lot harder than it sounds. First, nobody can estimate time well enough to know how long something would have taken without AI. And then, it's comparing apples to oranges - there's the set of things people did using an AI agent, and the set of things they would have done if they hadn't used AI, and the two are just not directly comparable. The AI agent set would definitely have more lines of code, that's all I could really say. Maybe it would also contain a larger maintenance burden, lower useful knowledge in humans, projects that didn't need to be done or could have been done in a smarter way, etc.
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This sounds like lowering expectations with extra steps!
The recent developments of only the last 3 months have been staggering. I think you should challenge your beliefs on this a little bit. I don't say that as an AI fanboy (if those exist), it's just really, really noticeable how much progress has been made in doing more complex SWE work, especially if you just ask the LLM to implement some basic custom harness engineering.
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> The recent developments of only the last 3 months have been staggering. What developments have been "staggering"? Claude 4.6 vs 4.5? ChatGPT 5.2 vs 5? The Gemini update? Only the hype has been staggering, and bs non-stories like the "AI agents conspire and invent their own religion".
> It's a bit more useful than it was 3 years ago. It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore. There's no way that your comment can be taken seriously. It's 99.9% a troll comment, or simply delusional. 3 years ago the model (gpt3.5, the only one out there basically) was not able to output correct code at all. It looked like python if you squinted, but it made no sense. To compare that to what we have today and say "a bit more useful" is not a serious comment. Cannot be a serious comment.
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> It's comments like these that make me not really want to interact with this topic anymore. It's a religious war at this point. People who hate AI are not going to admit anything until they have no choice. And given the progress in the last few months, I think we're a few years away from nearly every developer using coding agents, kicking and screaming in some cases, or just leaving the industry in others.
Yes, it's been odd to observe the parallels with the web3 craze. You asked people what their project was for and you'd get a response that made sense to no one outside of that bubble, and if you pressed on people would get mad. The bizarre thing is that this time around, these tools do have a bunch of real utility, but it's become almost impossible online to discuss how to use the tech properly, because that would require acknowledging some limitations.
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Very similar to web3! On paper the web3 craze sounded very exciting: yes, I absolutely would love an alternate web of truly decentralized services. I've been pretty consistently skeptical of the crypto world, but with web3 I was really hoping to be wrong. What's wild is there was not a single, truly distributed, interesting/useful service at all to come out of all that hype. I spent a fair bit of time diving into the details of Ethereum and very quickly realized the "world computer" there (again, wonderful idea) wasn't really feasible for anything practical (I mean other than creating clever ways to scam people). Right now in the LLM space I see a lot of people focused on building old things in new ways. I've realized that not only do very few people work with local models (where they can hack around and customize more), a surprisingly small number of people write code that even calls an LLM through an API for some specific task that previously wasn't possible (regular ol'software build using calls to an LLM has loads of potential). It's still largely "can some variation on a chat bot do this thing I used to do for me". As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create. I mean "Hamster Dance" was it's own sort of slop, but the first time you say it you engaged with it. Snarg.net still stands out as novel in it's experiments with "what is an interface".
For me I would ask it to do a simple thing and it would give me the tutorial code you could find anywhere on the Internet. Then you ask it to modify it in a way that you can't find in any example online, it will tell you it's fixed everything, but actually nothing has changed at all or it's completely broken. I think if someone's goal was just the tutorial code, it would have been very impressive to them the AI can summon it.
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this is what I've been using freebie gemini chat for mostly, example code, like reminding me of c stdlib stuff, javascript, a bit of web server stuff here and there. I think it would be fun to give googles agent or cli stuff a spin but when I read up here and there about antigravity, I'm reading that people are getting their accounts shutdown for stuff I would have thought was ok, even if they paid for it (well actually as usual the actual reasons for accounts getting zapped remain unknown as is today's trend for cloud accounts). I'm too poor for local llms, I think there might be a 2 or 4gb graphics card in one of my junk pcs but thats about it lol
macOS Tahoe Finder Bug Underscores Apple's Slipping UI Polish (macrumors.com)
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Finder has always been pretty garbage. Which view will the finder show this folder in? I never know, because it's always inconsistent. Another bug, I'd been running the beta macos Sequoia 15.7.4, and if I'd search for all the e.g. PDFs in my ~/Downloads, then move them to the trash, they'd still show up in the search, but if you clicked on them, the filepath would show trash. I doubt they will, but I hope they keep updating sequoia with security fixes for a while longer.
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FTFF has been a mantra since … the first release of Mac OS X?
I'm staying on Sequoia for the foreseeable future. Hopefully macOS 27 gets its act together.
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When I can't run Sequoia on my personal Macs anymore, I'll be done with macOS. I'll keep using the latest for the work provided laptop. For my next job, being able to use Linux will be a definite plus. For most other software so, Linux is the 'better Windows' in many cases. I'll keep another with stripped-down Windows 10 around for other software for as long as it gets updates.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Looks: A Halide Mark III Preview (lux.camera)
Not true. Phone sensors are amazing even without any processing. The difference is not as large as you might think.
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Really depends on the environment. Low light and nighttime are much worse than you might think, anything else isn't so bad. The lenses are also different and direct lighting can cause annoying internal reflections. I don't know this area as well, but lenses are more important than sensors for photos.
As a person who has an expensive phone and a professional camera, let me retort by saying that the difference is larger than you think. On some level, it's basic physics. You get fewer photons, etc. Apple hasn't unlocked the secrets of optics or semiconductor manufacturing that are out of reach for Canon or Nikon. So if they keep making sensors and optics that are many times larger and bulkier than in a phone, there's probably a reason for it.
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I like to think I have some experience in this area. I have an app on Android that records RAW video (MotionCam Pro). We've compared large expensive cameras to phone sensors many times (you can see it on our YouTube channel if you like).
In 2020, when the sky turned orangish-red in California due to massive wildfires, Apple's phones were unable to accurately capture it (I read Android too, but I use iPhones). It was very frustrating. The camera app kept overcorrecting the images. I remember reading that people using Halide's app were able to capture correctly and seeing examples on blogs and such. Thank you Halide for making high-quality software, even if I'm not in the target market.
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All cameras behave this way because of how auto white balance works. Phone camera apps are just always in AWB mode. I asked a phone camera engineer about this once and they told me that shooting through windows also causes issues, but I don't remember why.
Love Halide, and Pro Raw and Nitro, and pay for these even the iPhone's looks grid + RAW meant I didn't really have to. This could bring me back, the B/W with shoe-black blacks is lovely. Hopefully some folks using the preview ask to dial back the grain. In the blog post there's a comparison of grain in the Oculus. The Apple multi-exposure is, as expected, plastic. The first grain example is perfect; then the author cranks it and is happier. The app behaves like the exaggerated grain. As a T-Max and Ilford photographer, I'm blown away by finally getting blacks in B/W on an iPhone, but the exaggerated grain is not cool. Here's hoping they dial it back, or offer a slider in settings. (Not per photo, this is likely to be an overall B/W pref.)
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Grain will definitely be tweaked! It landed late in the release cycle, and I want to give it more love before the final launch.
Show HN: Maths, CS and AI Compendium (github.com/HenryNdubuaku)
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Also I’m not sure if this is well known but Gemini has a nice quiz/test mode that you can use for learning. Ask it to quiz you on a subject and you can increase/decrease difficulty and keep going. I pair it up with textbooks as a learning tool; not in school or anything just for my own enjoyment.
Hey I wouldn't argue with this guy maybe he has a degree in Physic
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Using your logic, then chemistry should be shortened to "chemy"? Biology should be shortened to "bioy"? I'm going to my bioy class? We shorten chemistry to chem, just like we shortened mathematics to math because we are just taking the first few letters of the word. "Mathematics is a field of study..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics Is A field of study. Mathematics isn't a "plural" even though it has an s at the end.
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It's just a regional thing. Neither is correct or wrong. You may as well yell at a french person that the word is "cheese", not "formage". From the very article you linked: > In English, the noun mathematics takes a singular verb. It is often shortened to maths or, in North America, math.
iOS 27 'Rave' Update to Clean Up Code, Could Boost Battery Life (macrumors.com)
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Reminds me of the "Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367460 or "NoTunes is a macOS application that will prevent Apple Music from launching" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40426621 There are so many annoyances allover already. Not Windows 11 level, but noticeably bad.
For a long time I thought my typing and proofreading got worse. I am glad to hear more and more from others where the iOS keyboard also does funky stuff. I haven't had "in" to "inn" but I have had the keyboard replace words in the typed text right when I am submitting a text message.
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I just don't think to proof my texts. Usually it's type, send, and realize autocorrect makes me sound like a ~balloon~ buffoon.
I'm shocked to see this as the top comment. My entire household is on Apple devices. There are over a dozen products with keyboards (physical or virtual) and no one has ever had in replaced with inn. Where does it even happen? Can you create a keyboard shortcut or solve it with some LLM help?
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"in" to "inn" is just one of the numerous words it LOVES to replace for me. (But it is one of the most common) Just this afternoon it also replaced "for" with "fire", and it loves censoring me with "ducking". One time it got me into hot water when it corrected "tacos" to "Travis". "I picked up Travis on the way home" isn't the message your wife wants to see after being dropped off at the airport. Just my iPhone 13 mini does this my iPad isn't as bad. It has persisted between iOS updates and has been an ongoing issue for a few years.
Literally all I want from Apple is a year (or multiple) spent laser focused tackling tech debt and improving software performance.
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Software bloat is not a failure for Apple. It is a mechanism that drives the hardware upgrade cycle.
UK Discord users were part of a Peter Thiel-linked data collection experiment (rockpapershotgun.com)
What I find quite interesting is that the internet was kind of the wild west in the early 2000s, it was exciting and vibrant, a kind of diaspora. Then in the late noughties early teens we saw massive consolidation through market forces, everyone moved onto Facebook, everyone moved into walled garden social media platforms and even the social networky ways of discovering organic content died off (Digg redesign, death of stumble upon etc.). That was.... bad, but it wasn't a moral decision it was kind of just market forces. The market means that no one can run a taxi company anymore, you're just kind of all employees of uber or whoever your local monopoly is. Not great, and arguably the way they got there should have been under more scrutiny but it was more or less pure market forces. What is happening now is not market forces. What is happening now is rich people telling the government to institute legislation that hands power to rich people. Whether it's Elon Musk's public funded, privatized space programme or Thiel's public mandated, private enforced age-gating. All of this is corrupt. There's not really another word for it.
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The biggest change imo is that in the aughts, the idea that children should have unfettered access to personal computers, phones, and the internet was unthinkable. Now we have millennial parents seriously arguing their kids should have smartphones in class. But all this deanonymization garbage is downstream of that vibe shift. I don't think it's responsible to blame any specific person or company, but I certainly can't excuse the Googles, Apples, Samsungs, Facebooks etc of the world. They manufactured a culture driven by putting as many devices in front of as many people as possible, using them as much as possible, while knowing as much about them as possible to monetize their attention. The careless disregard for how that affected the developing brains of two generations of people now is irresponsible and ugly. It seems like no one is asking the real question here, which isn't why Roblox/Discord et al need to verify the age of their users. We should be asking how in the fuck there are so many children with unsupervised access to devices that this is a real problem.
Owned by Russia? How'd you reach that conclusion? Just take a look at the sanctions imposed on them and the US support for Ukraine in the war. Also: it seems you've fallen into the "Russia is our enemy" propaganda trap.
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As long as russia bombs apartment buildings and terrorizes a soverein nation while waging hybrid war against a multitude of others, it's going to be the enemy. I hope russia crumbles, and people like you stop pretending that russia is innocent.
And he was in the Epstein files, allegedly meeting with Russian officials repeatedly at Epstein’s place. One of which is a handler for assets of their intelligence service.
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We should not be doing business with people mentioned that many times in the files.
What does “linked to” mean? And why are you using such moralistic language?
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Some peoples actions make them evil.
He is also linked to ycombinator which owns hacker news. If we are that reductionist, would you say that hacker news sends data to Palantir.
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This sites ties to Thiel and people like him are problematic yes. However, HN isn’t asking for our ids yet.
This is the part that loses me, my understanding was that this was only supposed to scan things offline, not collect any PII. Are they lying about not collecting the face scanned data?
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There is no reason to trust them, and many not to.
What your Bluetooth devices reveal (blog.dmcc.io)
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Ring: thank you for the idea, "Introducing Ring Face-Off, face masks covering faces during a break-in is no an issue for Ring, we will track the thieves until they reveal their face to our Ring network."
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you said " blocking ads network-wide with AdGuard". It's better to block it with a Pihole.
> We’ve normalised the idea that Bluetooth is always on. Phones, laptops, smartwatches, headphones, cars, and even medical devices constantly broadcast their presence. The standard response to privacy concerns is usually “nothing to hide, nothing to fear.” I guess anything you send out can be used to profile you. Some of my friends live on a farm near a semi busy road, however far enough from other farms to not be able to receive their wifi. They showed me their router logging all the wifi accesspoints that appear/disappear. There where A LOT of access points named "Audi", "BMW", "Tesla" etc. similar to those devices leaking bluetooth data. We had a discussion that it would be easy to determine who was passing by at what times due to these especially when you can "de-anonymize" the data for example link it to a numberplate. I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at.
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You can do this for much cheaper - all four of your tires are broadcasting a unique ID to report tire pressure, the radio to pick it up is cheap (because cars), and TPMS has no facility to randomize or otherwise secure this.
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> I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at In the EU this is forbidden unless they explicitly ask your permission. They can still gather aggregate stats but they cannot build a profile on you .
> We had a discussion that it would be easy to determine who was passing by at what times due to these especially when you can "de-anonymize" the data for example link it to a numberplate. You could also read the numberplate directly with OpenALPR. It can be finicky to set up a camera to do this reliably in all conditions (particularly at night and high speed) but once done you could detect any car passing, not just ones with wifi access points. When the law requires us to have numberplates, I think this just has to be considered public information for anyone who is nearby or can leave a camera nearby. It's not ideal to leak it in additional forms that might be easier for people to grab (say, with an ESP32), but it's a matter of degree rather than of kind. But yeah, I'm with you on some of these others, particularly the medical devices. That's not great.
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There's a difference between public and Public. I go outside with my face visible and I don't mind if my neighbors see me. I do mind if my neighbors stand outside my door with a notepad sketching faces every time they see me or anyone else, especially if they're selling the data. Systematic tracking that isn't subject to the constraints of human memory and apathy fundamentally changes the equation.
iBeacon. They know what shelf you're standing in front of. What products you touch and read. Ever been in an Apple store? Look up. In the dark voids between the edge-to-edge backlit ceiling. There are secrets there. Watching you.
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Macys pioneered it before there even were Apple Stores. Back when most people didn't even know their phones had Bluetooth.
Don't worry about Tesla's being tracked. Via Bluetooth this has existed for at least 7 years [1] (was mentioned on HN as well). Tesla know (also for 7 years), Musk doesn't care 'since license plates can also be tracked'. I used it in train stations, and get hits when passing highways via train or bus. Esp. fun if you stand still due to traffic lights or traffic jam, since you can try to get a visual. The only lesson to be learned here is that it allowed one to learn in 2019 Musk is overrated. But you can also learn that lesson from the book The PayPal Wars which predates this by 15 years. > I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at. Not allowed in EU. [1] https://www.teslaradar.com/
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> Not allowed in EU. I'm surprised, I know for a fact that some stores definitely have the ability to do that on their hardware.
With iOS the easiest way to make sure it off and stays off is to build a shortcut to cut off wifi/bluetooth. Otherwise it's typically off until you get geolocated as being back home/work and wifi comes back on. I have a "store mode" button that just kills wifi/bt that I hit before I go into any store.
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what do you gain doing this?
I was wardriving my neighborhood and realized my elderly neighbor's CPAP machine is broadcasting some type of BT signal 24/7. I imagine it's transmitting some important stats, but it did make me have a 2nd thought about medical devices being IoT or BT enabled.
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CPAP machine is broadcasting some type of BT signal 24/7 A lot of them also have cellular modems. It's marketed to the patient as a way to send data to their doctor. However, the most common use is for the health insurance company to make sure they're being used because the insurance company doesn't want to pay for something that is gathering dust. If it doesn't connect for a certain amount of time, the insurance company will send a letter to the patient threatening to stop paying for the machine. You can get the insurance company off your back temporarily by turning off the cellular connection and claiming that there's no service in your home. But you'll have to bring the SD card to your doctor every six months or so, so the insurance company can see it. /Works in healthcare
The Sideprocalypse (johan.hal.se)
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I mean just because it's easier to write software doesn't mean you can't have success building a business around software. You'll just need to build more features at a higher level of quality. When everyone has access to these tools the net effect will just be to elevate the overall quality of software which is good for everyone.
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I always got the impression that the only way a relatively average software developer could make a “successful” SaaS is if they built something weird and niche that appeals to an audience of <1000 paying customers. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter if your competition is better at SEO since your competition never even thought to build something like this, never cared, and not to mention that the market for this thing is so small that SEO is arguably a wasted skill. You’ll need to acquire these people by finding them directly or through word of mouth. This blog post seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of solo-developer SaaS, but then again arguably mostly software developers also fundamentally misunderstand it.
You're overstating the case, but I think there's a strong possibility people will prompt AIs to produce bespoke apps that solve their niche use-case rather than paying a developer to do it. I pay for a SaaS app that tracks my finances, but it's not that great and missing some features I would like. Very soon I expect I'll be able to get a better, local-first replacement tailored to my needs by prompting Claude & Friends.
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I doubt it. I’m publishing a very simple app with very little human written code and so far 90% of the actual work has had nothing to do with development. Most of it has been the “business” stuff, especially since the app stores have a lot of compliance and setup requirements. Your example of a financial app is perfect: maybe one day grandma will be able to vibecode a budget app but then how is she going to set up the integration with banks? Publish it to the App Store? Keep it updated with bug fixes and resolve security issues? Maybe you’ll say that one day the AI will just handle all this but we are also talking about competing with something that is already available for around $5/month. Even making grandma put in a few prompts here and there is going to result in enough wasted time to say “screw this, I’ll just pay $5 a month for Simplifi.”
> This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy I’m not so sure about that. It’s very easy to take your own knowledge for granted. Most people can’t do what we do. Most of my customers couldn’t even express what they wanted.
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Exactly. Software development is 20% of what your average software developer does. Figuring out what to build is a skill some don’t even realise they are doing every day, and it’s an incredibly valuable skill.
Ask HN: What happens after the AI bubble bursts?
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Possibly AI hysteria heads into the plateau and people can finally start using AI as an amazing instrument rather than hyping about it. I think local models will become productive and cheaper to run but clearly I don't see people abandoning tech completely :)
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I think, the cost of running and training models is going to fall due to Moore's law and friends. That also meas that the worth of today's computers declines rapidly and all the money invested in compute power with it. Compute is basically what the AI VC money is spend on. That money will be gone in a few years due to the hardware being worthless. On the other side running a model (locally) will become cheaper and cheaper to the point that Ai stuff becomes a everyday commodity running on cheapo devices everywhere. Then there are optimizations too. Which lowers the cost. So it's not going away and it's not going to be expensive for the consumer in the long run. My 5 year old rtx 2027 runs models those output would have been state of the art a couple of years ago. In a few years something running on the level of today's top models might run under your desk if that progress goes on at this pace.
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The gartner hype cycle is still as relevant now as it was during the dot com boom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle At the moment we’re at the peak of inflated expectations - we might stay there for a quite a while. And to confuse things more, different people/groups go through the cycle at different times/pace.
> Because if a tool like Claude Code (or any other LLM) suddenly cost $1,000 a month to reflect what it actually costs to run, would people keep paying for it out of pocket? Would their companies? I wouldn't find it hard to personally justify $200/month or $300/month for the single best LLM tool available to me. Right now I have $100/month spread out over a few different tools and it's a bargain.
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I don't think I'd want to pay that much since my personal use is limited and not serious/important. Employer pays for work usage. I'm curious why do you keep many subscriptions around? Asking because I do too though don't have a good reason to keep anything other than Anthropic/Claude.
Your assumption is wrong. The LLM companies are profitable on the current gen models. Inference is profitable, rather than subsidized. They are raising the biggest chunk of capital to buy data center compute that will come online ~2 years from now and be an order of magnitude larger. The bear case for the labs is that they're Cisco, not Pets.com.
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I can go on Gemini, claude, mistral, (and even chatgpt) for free (even through a VPN), so they are definitely not profitable for me as they are not getting anything from me. are you saying subscriptions are subsidizing me?
Running My Own XMPP Server (blog.dmcc.io)
I'm the founder of both the Prosody and Snikket projects. Sorry about triggering alarms :) I can try to explain... Prosody is a popular choice of XMPP server software. It's used for all kinds of stuff, from self-hosted chat servers to powering Jitsi Meet, to Internet-of-Things applications. Prosody is extremely flexible, and has a bunch of configuration options that allow you to adapt it and extend it however you want. For some people, this is ideal. Those people should continue using Prosody. Snikket has a different scope. It is specifically an answer to a question like "How can I easily make a self-hosted WhatsApp/Signal for my family/friends using open-source software?" - Snikket contains Prosody, for the core chat part. But it's Prosody with a very specific configuration, and the configuration is part of the project, it's not intended to be modified by the person deploying Snikket. They only need to provide the domain name. - Snikket also includes additional components that a modern chat service needs. For example, it includes a STUN/TURN server to ensure that audio/video calls work reliably (again, preconfigured). - Snikket provides its own apps, which are tested and developed in sync with each other and with the server. This avoids the common problem of incompatibilities that occur when you have an open ecosystem such as XMPP, where different open-source project developers may develop features at different paces, leaving users to figure out which ones support which feature. It also solves the discoverability and decision fatigue for users (searching "Snikket" on an app store will get you an app that you know is compatible with your Snikket server, you don't have to go through a list of XMPP clients and figure out which one is suitable). - Snikket servers are not designed to be open public servers (these are an administrative nightmare). Instead, your server is closed and private by default. As the admin, you choose who signs up to your server by sending invitation links. The invitations also serve to simplify the account setup process - no need to prompt users to "choose a server", etc. They just need to provide a username. Projects such as Conversations differ by running a single public server (conversations.im) and guiding people to sign up on that server, or choose one of a long list of free public XMPP providers. In some cases that's all what you want. But onboarding a group of people that way is not fun (for example, they all have to share their addresses with the group add each other to their contact lists one-by-one - Snikket makes discovery of contacts within the same server automatic). Beyond these things, Snikket is all open-source and XMPP. But there is a focus on making a good polished and secure "product", if you like, rather than supporting the entire diverse XMPP ecosystem which includes a range of software of varying quality (weekend projects and more recently, 100% vibe-coded clients). For example, Snikket servers require certain security and authentication features which some older codebases that have fallen far behind modern XMPP standards (think Pidgin, etc.) simply don't support today. > it’s actually all based on prosody and conversations? As mentioned, I develop Prosody. I also collaborate with the Conversations developer and other XMPP projects. There's nothing shady here. The goal is just to make a best-in-class XMPP project that solves one particular use case (and it was primarily my own use case to begin with of course - I wanted to move my family off WhatsApp).
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I am the current lead developer of Pidgin, and would like to reinforce the level of collaboration in the XMPP world. Even with Pidgin being very far behind in XMPP (and everything else) everyone has been very helpful as we're trying to catch back up and answering questions about the prosody instance we run ourselves.
Correct, but that means you cannot share that domain securely with, let's say, a website. No ?
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TBH I am not well-versed into DNS and certificates and security, but I guess you have to trust your provider with a certificate for `example.com` if you allow them to manage JIDs of the form `anything@example.com`, indeed. Again, I am not very knowledgeable about the subject, so take this with a grain of salt.
Depends if you mean just the technology or using it in the small federated spirit. Google Talk and Facebook Messenger were XMPP all the way through and worked with vanilla XMPP clients. Slack wasn't XMPP but supported it via a gateway until it was dropped. Not sure how popular the small federation was back then, but I know Mac OS X Server touted an XMPP server and that was a first-class feature of iChat.
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> Google Talk and Facebook Messenger were XMPP all the way through and worked with vanilla XMPP clients I remember this, it was great to connect to absolutely every chat platform with bitlbee and pretend that all my chats were just DMs on some irc server somewhere
Same! Pidgin was such a great piece of software
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We're still here... https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/news
I've been hosting a ejabberd instance for a few people for almost a decade now. It just works, takes close to no resources and needs almost no maintenance - just some trivial config checkups when migrating to newer major releases. Around the same time I tried hosting a Matrix server with Synapse, but quickly stopped. It consumed a lot of resources when doing almost nothing, and it stopped running after an upgrade with some non-obvious error message, so instead of reanimating it I just abandoned it and moved to matrix.org with my personal account.
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Ejabberd is a bit overkill for a few people though. Prosody one could easily set up in 15 minutes or less. Also the config doesn't break when migrating to new releases.
> Most of my contacts made the switch, and I’m now at roughly 95% Signal for day-to-day conversations Years ago, I set up a Matrix server. I got some people to migrate, but ultimately even my husband stopped using it because the UI and accessibility of all the applications was so poor (and he has very bad eyesight, so this was a dealbreaker) Looking for another alternative, I ended up with Telegram. It was pretty open, easy to work with, had great UI and even a ton of funny stickers and emojis, so I got nearly all my friends to migrate. I did NOT go for Signal because I do not need end-to-end encryption all the time, and having all the same conversations available on my desktop as well as on my phone was important, and still is. Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo. So yeah, I'm not really sure what to use now.
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Telegram is very much more about IRC / Discord public chat rooms, rather than private group chats.
How are you framing this? It’s an Electron app so it exists but doesn’t integrate or perform great. Last I recall you still were required to provide a SIM to sign up & you needed an iOS or Android primary device to even use the desktop client. Can you use a standalone, fast desktop application like you can these other protocols? I would say no, so “support” has shades of gray to it. This is how I got kicked off LINE… they had a Chromium app that I could use tethered to an app, they disabled support for LINE Lite (which had light/dark theme, E2EE, texting, voice/video calls, debatable trackers (Firebase), even stickers & sending a location @ 8MiB instead of 200MiB+ of the “heavy app”), I refused to “upgrade” as it was a downgrade to me, & since I was no longer registered with a “primary” device, I was booted from the network. I don’t think I want these mobile-duopoly-required apps to be my primary means of communication with folks—especially now that my primary phone isn’t Apple or Google (luckily Open Whisper lets WhisperFish exist).
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The other downside of the Desktop is that it requires periodic re-verification with the device you used to set it up. Desktop users are definitely second class citizens in the Signal ecosystem.
Can I use it without iOS and Android though?
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No[1], but that wasn't what I was trying to get clarification on, or disputing for that matter. 1 - https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360008216551-Installing-Signal#install_desktop
Not GP but I've also had issues with the Signal Desktop app (installed from the Arch repos). Its overall a little sluggish in general (like most Electron apps though, in fairness) and occasionally clicking and dragging images onto the application will cause it to freeze and eventually crash. Plus, the general usability issues present in all variants of the signal client (like no easy way of restoring previous messages on a new device). It's not terrible or anything, but it's just a solid 6/10 application. I personally wish they were more open to 3rd party clients, so I could have something that integrates with my desktop environment a little better and is snappier, like my Matrix clients.
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I'll have to try clicking and dragging images onto the Signal application and see if I notice any difference. I usually actually click the button to add an attachment and then browse to it. I'm also on Win11 but I would hope the experience between OSs wouldn't be too drastically different.
Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database (legalcheek.com)
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2 tiers.
I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be. An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behind it were impressive enough that they eventually were brought in to improve gov.uk.
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Hansard is a great example, because originally parliament did not allow publication of its proceedings; to get round this "Several editors used the device of reporting on parliamentary debates under the veil of debates of fictitious societies or bodies. The names under which parliamentary debates were published include Proceedings of the Lower Room of the Robin Hood Society and Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia."
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Yeah, this is a common problem with these kinds of issues. Data can be open, data can be available, but if it's not easily exploitable and parseable by anyone there will always be a third party that would do so for a premium. Data has to be ready for consumption when shared by the state. That's why one of my very strong objections that we divide datasets by year on a continuous registry. It should be one dataset with a single column that tells you the year the row corresponds to.
> The AI should decide That is a great recipe for systematic discrimination.
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The whole goal of a hiring pipeline is to create a system to discriminate from a ton of candidates to good people to hire.
So you’re all for photos on job applications then? That’s information about you.
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Yes, I think that could be effective. The way people dress is correlated to the group of people they associate with which influences how they think and behave. If someone properly grooms themselves or not for such a picture provides more signal for the AI to pick up on.
> Justice is provided by the courts. Indeed. And as far as I know, "courts" is not an alternative spelling of "AI".
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The scenario we are talking about is AI having access to court records. The courts make rulings and then the AI works off of those.
> I think it should be removed from consideration. Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. The timeline for this can be based on severity with things like rape and murder never expiring from consideration. That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.
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> I'll make that call myself. This is why this needs to be regulated.
>That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself. Thanks, but I don't want to have violent people working as taxi drivers, pdf files in childcare and fraudsters in the banking system. Especially if somebody decided to not take this information into account. Good conduct certificates are there for a reason -- you ask the faceless bureaucrat to give you one for the narrow purpose and it's a binary result that you bring back to the employer.
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> pdf files Please don't unnecessarily censor yourself for the benefit of large social media companies. We can say pedophile here. We should be able to say pedophile anywhere. Pre-compliance to censorship is far worse than speaking plainly about these things, especially if you are using a homophone to mean the same thing.
Arrests being a matter of public record are a check on the government's ability to make people just disappear. But the Internet's memory means that something being public at time t1 means it will also be public at all times after t1.
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You can have custody information be open for query without exposing all of the circumstances, and without releasing mugshots to private sites that will extort people to have them taken down. You can do something very simple like having a system that just lists if a person is - at that moment - in government custody. After release, there need not be an open record since the need to show if that person is currently in custody is over. As an aside, the past few months have proven that the US government very much does not respect that reasoning. There are countless stories of people being taken and driven around for hours and questioned with no public paper trail at all.
Because we as a society decided it creates externalities we don't want to deal with. With a list of exceptions where it actually is important because risk-reward balance is too much.
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We as a society have decided no such thing, it is in fact legal to refuse somebody a job for having a criminal history, and will remain so.
And what about the kids who get recruited for gang activity and do some pretty messed up stuff as kids? Should that not appear on a public record? This is where the problem lies, you essentially can only ever make it an all or nothing approach as it gets a lot harder to determine what should or shouldn't be apart of a public record. Especially since as you reflected in your comment, this becomes and opinion thing on whether someone thinks it matters or not what crime they did as a kid. The problem that is happening in most Western countries is that criminal organizations take advantage of the fact that minors get reduced sentenced and that their criminal records are usually kept sealed (unless tried as an adult). Whether it be having them steal cars, partake in organized shoplifting operations, muggings, gang activity, drug dealing, etc... Your reasoning for why this information shouldn't be public record seems to boil down to the fact that you don't agree with other peoples judgement of someone's past crimes. You'd like to see more forgiveness, and you don't think others will show the same forgiveness, so you want to take away all the access to information because of that. To me that seems like a view from a point of moral superiority. I'd rather people get access to this information and be able to use their own brains to determine whether they want that person working there. If you were involved in shoplifting at 17 years old, and turn 18, I think it would be very fair for a store owner to be able to use that information to judge you when making a hiring decision. To me it doesn't make sense that you turn a magical age of 18 and suddenly your past poor decisions vanish into a void.
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I think we can at least agree that children recruited by organized crime to steal cars, break into homes, assault people, and so on, should be treated differently than a kid who stole a pack of gum from a store. Whatever the solution is, it has to take into account the seriousness of the crime, and it has to discourage this binary criminal / not criminal thinking.
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