Unlurker|Replay|About
University of Texas limits on teaching of "unnecessary controversial subjects" (texastribune.org)
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Disappointing to see my alma mater gradually self-sabotage into irrelevance.
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>The policy does not define what qualifies as “controversial” or what constitutes a “broad and balanced approach.” I'm sure it will just be "things that powerful people tell us not to talk about".
Ask HN: Can we use AI to make a Hackers (1995) sequel starring the same cast?
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If that world had a chip that could hack into anything and trigger nuclear war... then within a matter of another year that chip would exist again and again and again in many countries. Everyone's dead. Sequel is pretty quick.
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Similar plot thread might be the current use-case of "anonymous entities" betting on Polymarket for things that are happening in the real world to generate/launder money.
Something Is Going on with Colorectal Cancer (hankgreen.com)
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Something I've never seen in these analyses is drinking. Millennials are heavy drinkers. Both craft brews and cocktails were defining generational traits. Not everyone is a drinker but it appears they are heavy drinkers compared to other generations. The theory behind the ultra marathoners is that extreme distance running disrupts the epithelial layer and microbiome in the gut. Wouldn't drinking have similar effects?
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I stopped after the 4th click, I found it irritating to have to click to get 1 or 2 sentences at a time. This would have been just fine as a short article, making it interactive annoyed me more than the revealed content informed.
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Wow, I had no idea there is a 15X increase for endurance athletes. Make me want to dial down the running a bit, which make you wonder where the sweet spot is for distance training.
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It may be the damage of repetitive motion, it may be chemicals released into the bloodstream from endurance athletics. It may be something else. Without knowing the root cause, it's impossible to figure out the "sweet spot"
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i saw something recently that pointed to the fact that ultra runners end up with less blood in their guts while running for SO long its leading to cancers and such.
Micropayments as a reality check for news sites (blog.zgp.org)
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No one reads print anymore. Most people nowadays consume their news either through a Youtube broadcast or a podcast. The news is produced for free and completely paid for through advertising. The folks using this site, we're in the (rather extreme) minority.
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You're going to put all the work into finding the news and doing the leg work. I'm going to make a site called NewsTheft.info that just says "YourNewsSite.com is reporting that <your content rewritten by an LLM>" and it's going to be free and people are going to use my thing. Then I'm going to shut it down when you all go bust. I am a rapacious eater of worlds. You can't stop me and the people love me because, since it's free, I can give them a better experience than you. Information wants to be free.
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The difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is infinite. But I’m really curious how bad the free experience would have to become before people are open to paying a pittance?
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This does not seem to reckon with the many, MANY times this has been tried and failed. (The LinkedIn post at least acknowledges attempts that "did fail in the 90s and 2000s" and quickly waves them away.) There have been at least a dozen serious attempts in the last 20 years that I'm aware of. What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very low demand" Or Flattr. Or Invisibly. Or Pico. Or Brave's goofy crypto token. Or Coil. The Washington Post themselves experimented with cheap "day passes" a few years ago but I guess they didn't work well enough to keep. Arguably Medium's rev share program was another failed attempt. Heck no less a content middleman powerhouse than Apple tried and mostly failed to do a rev share / micropayments scheme with Apple News.
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The trick is market share. I'm not going to subscribe to a NYT/WaPo/WSJ trio because sometimes I want to read Reuters and I'm not going to pay for a partial solution. I was very happy with my Apple News subscription because it has every English-language newspaper I've come across.
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Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future. That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point". That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.
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I think the site is right about the "coins" method. If I had an automatic subscription of $10/month to refill my news wallet, and I could pay $0.05 out of it to read an article, I'd do it, especially if it was a use-it-or-lose it system. In fact, if they charged $0.20 per story if you pay directly, or $0.05 per story if you pay out of your auto-reload wallet, I think that could incentivize users to subscribe. Of course, it would have to be shared across every newspaper, and publishers hate that. Apple News is the closest it's gotten - the app sucks, but you can share articles into it to remove the paywall and that works great.
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[delayed]
No, no, no! Micropayments are not the way. We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model. You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content. What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model. I'm a former news editor and left the industry because the business side couldn't figure out a viable business model. I realize and feel deeply the loss we experience (especially at the local and state level) when quality journalism dies out, and I would love for the industry to recover. But they're not going to do it unless they recognize that single-site subscriptions (or micropayment transactions) aren't going to cut it.
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I think this is even harder to make work than straightforward micropayments with crypto or paypal or similar. Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.) Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they get paid a lot of money and/or can be assured it somehow will not cannibalize their direct sales. Who owns the customer relationship? Publishers have been burned pretty much 100% of the time they cede that direct relationship to someone else. Also, it's been tried: see Scroll, Apple News, Flattr, Coil, Brave BAT...
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Oh, but don't you know? If our newspaper is on the same subscription as another newspaper which we don't like, then that means we agree with them in all their radical and dangerous opinions? No, no, no, people want to read only one newspaper, which tells them what to think and how to feel on every subject matter. That's why streaming services also failed. Imagine Beatles and gangster rap and heavy metal being on the same music platform? Fans would never accept that!
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We also have PBS as a model.
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Until it gets defunded based on the whims of the administration :(
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[delayed]
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What if you're not a major news outlet? Also, how's the deal between the distributor and the news outlets? Do you get paid according to views or is it a flat fee?
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Centralised billing effectively makes serious journalism impossible. Omnibus subscription services will ruthlessly cut anything that affects the bottom line, and effective journalism is necessarily unpopular.
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Exactly! That's why Spotify doesn't allow any noisy music or music with curse words. The mainstream public would flee from the platform.
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Copying the cable model would favor big media companies over smaller, more local players. A music-streaming style option, where the user's monthly payment is distributed in proportion to the articles they read, might be better. (Although not without it's own issues)
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+1. I come online to discover new things because there's less friction online than anywhere else. What's more, digging through a mountain of content to find something that resonates with you is a form of work in its own right. Micropayments are friction, and if you put friction on top of the work of discovery, I will do something else with my time.
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Apple news is around with that model. Not sure how successful they are though.
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Anecdata: I use Apple News+ for exactly this reason. I get many publications included, and some magazines, and over time it learns what stories I like and surfaces those more often.
YouTube Blocks Background Listening Workaround for Free Users (pcmag.com)
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Who cares about what free users want?
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Whenever I see this particular "feature" being blocked, all I can think of is my own past personal usage of this feature. It was purely to listen to podcasts or whatever while in the car. So by default this feature should just work, and it should be: turn on the source and listen. Instead its disabled to try to extract more revenue out of users, so my personal use case becomes a potential road hazard for people who didn't give in and instead are fiddling with their phone to ensure that it keeps playing. Can't imagine this is even a moment of discussion in 2026 when making the decision to block something like this. my current flow for this if i ever have the misfortune of only having youtube as a source, is to turn on the video, and face the screen away from me in the cup holder. So personally I've found what i consider to be a safe alternative. Can't imagine younger drivers are going to go through the same amount of caution to avoid grabbing their phone or looking at a video playing while they are driving.
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> So personally I've found what i consider to be a safe alternative. A bit more effort, but downloading the podcast and listening to it via a basic audio player app that does not further enshitify itself daily is even safer.
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It seems crazy and impossible now, but imagine this notion: Software should serve the needs of the user. Software that does things the user doesn't want, like try to trick money out of him, waste his bandwidth, or fill his screen with unwanted ads used to have a name: Malware. We've redefined that term to mean when a non-BigTech firm does those things, but the definition used to be functional, not attributional. RMS warned us of this day, and now it is here. You don't control your data or the code that operates upon it. That would've sucked in 1990, but since then, we've migrated our entire lives into that code/data. The degree to which it embodies your very existence is the degree to which you have lost control over your life, which for most of us is total. You lost that control but it didn't disappear; it is now owned by someone else, commoditized and exchanged, redirected and engineered. Enjoy the ride if you can, because you're just in the passenger seat.
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Would it be better if youtube removed the free, ad supported version entirely, and only allowed paid users?
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It would be better if there was a better value proposition, instead of “pay to get what we removed”. It’s not as though free users listening with the app in the background is somehow an additional marginal expense as opposed to them listening with the app in the foreground.
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Such a poor management team at YouTube lately.
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No, this is the enshitification phase as laid out by Cory Docktrow: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/ They are now in the phase of making everything worse in a vain attempt to increase ad (or subscription) revenue streams.
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“Last year, video watchers using them were greeted by longer video loading times and increased buffering on YouTube.” Ah yes, the Five Second Gaslight. “Experiencing interruptions? Find out more!” when it’s the site intentionally shoving a 5 second delay in and getting people to blame their ISPs for connectivity issues when YouTube was the one dicking around.
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"using ad blocker? your video is delayed 5 seconds, ad viewers receive a considerable amount more suffering!"
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Some alternatives recently discussed: NewPipe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020218 PipePipe: https://pipepipe.dev/ As recommended by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020412 I haven’t used any of these alternatives myself.
IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup (theregister.com)
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They can always learn a new skill like programming.
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AI audits for everybody. Of course they're going to do it.
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It always sets off my spidey sense when people say 'leadership' because too many conflate management with leadership, and that is unfortunately not always true. Few managers are actually leaders. Many are trumped up scribes. And many leaders are not managers.
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Feels terrible to be an American rn, I'm preparing for major errors and delays in the processing of my tax return.
I hope when someone else owns the whole government the beast becomes the us military.
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Nah, it won't because ANY cuts to DoD will be met with "Don't you support our troops" Which is completely unrelated but it works very well as an attack line
Isn’t that a completely bizarre metric though in this instance??! It is specifically the revenue generating arm of the government. If it wasn’t running at a “surplus” that would be very concerning indeed.
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No the point is that if the IRS was at maximum efficiency, more funding wouldn't increase revenues because tax law is tax law: you can't market it or expand the customer base. But if every new dollar currently produces much more then a dollar in returns, it means it's underfunded because taxes that should be collected, that by legal analysis would be planned for in budgeting, aren't. And that matters for a great many things, but one reason is that if you pay taxes and want a tax cut then one reason you're not getting it is because actual revenues are lower then they should be due to uncollected taxes. AKA tax fraud steals from the honest tax payer.
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I did no verification on whether that metric is correct or not, but I would suspect the metric would be only measuring the amount of revenue the IRS "generated" from doing manual work like audits. The regular, I owe 1,000 in taxes, and I paid 1,000 in taxes. Wouldn't be considered +1,000 in that case, it would be excluded from the metric altogether. Only the additional "findings" from audits would be counted.
Is there a single private sector more removed from market incentives than healthcare?
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And yet all countries with socialized systems pay less per capita for healthcare than we do and pretty much all have better health outcomes. Further privatizing our system will only make it more dis-functional. Healthcare isn't a normal marketplace. * When you really need it, you can't shop around. * There is a knowledge asymmetry built in. * A civilized society can't just let poor children die of preventable causes.
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I’m going to drop my doctor this year because he abuses appointments. I call in about an issue and he charges me $75 for telehealth. Then he wants me to come in to run labs for the telehealth call. Another $75 at least. Then another telehealth call for the results. And another one for the results from the radiology department. I told him I have a high out of pocket and he says “I’m sorry to hear that.” Then books me for a follow up. Doctors do not care about the healthcare system one bit.
It's not the IT department's fault, but it makes one wonder if the IT department needs to actually be that large, since customers need to do so much on their own. Per capita the UK has 2.5x the IT workers in tax collection compared to the US (~25 IT per million vs 65 IT per million). But, those tax collection IT workers help create a system which means UK citizens don't spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year just to file their taxes.
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I don't think this is the current administration to fix the IRS, given the whole Social Security scam SNAFU.
If you're not asking, "how many of these people did nothing?" you've never worked in the public sector.
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This is just the lazy comment of someone who believes all the right-wing propaganda about government. In my experience, government employees take pride in doing a job worth doing and doing it well.
They could also simplify tax law and they wouldn't need so much enforcement. There shouldn't be 5000 types of taxes spread all over the place. Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that. Just have one income tax. It should be the sigmoid of your income normalized to the median income in your zip code, then scale it so that the total of everyone's taxes added up makes up for all the other types of tax that we're getting rid of. The IRS should then distribute whatever is needed to the states. The states are part of the country, their hierarchy is not my problem; give me one number to pay. My tax return should be no bigger than a postcard. Done.
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Ok what about for the people that mainly earn their living not from an income paid by a job; ie the richest people in the country?
The reflex when people hear "complex" in this era: "Can we use AI for it?". Next month's headline: "IRS signs 200-million dollar deal with Grok to use AI to analyse tax returns, determine who gets audited".
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You’re thinking too far behind. They can just use the AI to generate what your taxes would’ve been. Just have a script with “what are the taxes owed by $name” and print the output I’ll take $5M now and you can own 50% of my startup: GenTaxAI
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Half-joking but this is genuinely the trajectory. The problem is that tax analysis requires understanding intent behind complex structures — is this a legitimate trust or a shell game? That's adversarial reasoning, not pattern matching. The real risk isn't that AI can't find anomalies — it's great at that. The risk is that the people creating complex avoidance structures will use AI too, and they'll iterate faster than a government system updated on procurement cycles. You end up with AI vs AI where one side has a 3-year upgrade timeline and the other ships weekly.
It's not "going after" the poor. You have to be out-right negligent to end up with any penalty at all, and the penalties involved are relatively small (20% of how much extra you owed them anyway). The vast majority of these low-income audits consist of "hey, we know you made money X, you didn't report it on your taxes. Fix it".
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‘We know you’re trying to survive in your low income, but we want to extract more money from you so the billionaires don’t have to pay as much tax’
I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.
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Everyday I am more and more pleased with our company's (or at least our company's tech department) to effectively ban AI.
The part I don't understand is why can't they wait for the efficiency gains to materialize before firing people? Better pay a few people for a few months extra than be wrong. If AI is going to bring in all this efficiency, this would be peanuts.
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Its like the "throw him into the deep end" method of teaching kids to swim. (I don't endorse it, but it has worked for many people.)
Phone and chat support has already happened, robotic law enforcement is the future. Now pick up that can citizen.
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Notably that isn't an accurate reference. The Combine officer is not a robot, so no robotic law enforcement happened.
The thing that makes me nervous is the statement that they plan to use AI. AI? The thing that is mathematically incapable of perfection, on finance information, for which perfection is table stakes? Not to mention all the privacy issues (although that boat has sailed).
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I thought I would give the Treasury the benefit of the doubt for a moment and check whether they meant LLMs like we're all assuming, or possibly a more specific finance-focused type of AI. Like how we have specialist neural net AI helping with radiology. Looking at their official info document[1]... "a secure AI-based chat solution"... "AI-assisted code development"... Okay they mean LLMs, carry on. [1] https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury-AI-Strategy.pdf
California's new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report themselves (blog.adafruit.com)
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> The state should prosecute people who make illegal thing, not add useless surveillance software on every tool in every classroom, library, and garage in the state. This is analogous to requiring text editors to verify that a document does not contain defamation, fraud, incitement, fighting words, child porn, etc., before it saves the file. In first amendment terms that led to the conclusion that prior restraint on publication is incompatible with the amendment. The same doctrine should be extended to the second amendment for the same reasons: the alternative is intolerable surveillance.
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It's highly misleading to call a bill that was introduced a couple of days ago by one Assembly member "California's new bill". Bills aren't laws and most bills go nowhere.
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It's legal to manufacture your own firearms. Putting limitations on 3d printers just makes people who want to this's lives harder and stifles innovation.
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It's legal insofar that if you want to exercise your rights expect to sit in Jail until your lawyer can take it to the Supreme Court. At which point CA will slightly reword the law to intentionally circumvent the Constitutional rights of its citizens.
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I have no idea about CA but this is absolutely the case in NYC.[] Dexter Taylor is sitting in jail for a decade for making personal use firearms without a license . No other alleged criminal activity and they never even left his house . During trial, the judge said "the second amendment isn't allowed in my courtroom."* His lawyer knows they are going to lose all the appeals in New York but basically he has to sit in jail for 3-4 years through the state court system until it can hit federal courts where there is a good chance his case will eventually get overturned. [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter_Taylor * Response to below (my comments are throttled): The argument/reference in his defense, not actual guns.
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Of course the second amendment isn't allowed in his courtroom. It's literally not allowed in any courtroom in the country. It's a courtroom . The only people permitted to have guns in a courtroom in the US are the bailiffs and the judge. Was that a reading comprehension issue, or are you just trying to rile people up? Sports Arenas and Jails are two other places you might be surprised to learn don't allow the second amendment.
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The full quote is. >Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York. This is not about guns in the courtroom. This is a claim that the 2nd amendment of the constitution does not apply to the state of New York.
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I think this isn't about guns but more about seeing and controlling what people are printing. Guns is just the excuse to monitor. "Hey I see your printing a replacement part for you washer. Well that is a patent part and you will need to pay to print that."
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California is no longer progressive.
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Most "progressive" policies are, and have always been, scams aimed at tricking people into allowing the state to consolidate more power to use for ulterior purposes. A great deal of regulation is sold to the public in the name of "safety", "equality", etc., but actually functions to entrench vested interests or inhibit competition in various industries. Political solutions to social problems will always be turned to the advantage of whomever has the most political influence -- and that's always some narrow faction, and not the public at large.
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I wonder how "significant technical skill" will be interpreted in practice. That phrase likely means something different to the average HN reader than to the average congressman.
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The definition carve-out for "additive manufacturing" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. CNC mills, laser cutters, and waterjet cutters can all produce the same end result but fall outside the statutory language. So the bill doesn't regulate the capability — it regulates the specific manufacturing process. Which means it's trivially circumvented by anyone who actually wants to make something prohibited, while imposing DOJ-reporting requirements on every hobbyist, educator, and small manufacturer running a $200 Ender 3. This is the pattern with most hardware regulation attempts: the compliance burden falls on the people already operating in the open, while the actual threat model (someone with intent) routes around it by switching tools or buying across state lines.
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Requiring people to drive to Nevada to buy a real 3DP? I'm a long time shooter of all kinds of firearms (bolt actions to full-autos). What people don't realize is that gun control works, but only when it's very controlled - i.e. full registration, deep checks, mandatory training, strict storage, no handguns, etc. You need to do it across the whole country, as a real customs border can cut guns significantly, but in the US you can do still do a private party (person to person with no dealer) transfer in many states, making gun running pretty trivial. None of this will happen anytime soon in the US, and the ghost guns, etc. thing will keep happening.
Yummy yummy user 3D model data
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Hey if we can train LLMs to generate 3D prints I wouldn’t have to struggle through CAD and could just vibe-CAD what I need…
Price surge for old 3d printers ;)
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Thing is you can make a 3d printer; it's basically CNC stuff with a different tool. I suppose that will need to be outlawed.
"3D Printer" is a broad term. Would this apply to HAAS automated CNC machines? They can "3D Print" things from billet.
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> (d) “Three-dimensional printer” means a computer-aided manufacturing device capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a three-dimensional digital model through an additive manufacturing process that involves the layering of two-dimensional cross sections formed of a resin or similar material that are fused together to form a three-dimensional object. https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-civ/division-3/part-4/title-21/section-3273-60/ I expect someone to get around this by modifying the slicing software to use a different algorithm that doesn't rely strictly on layering 2D cross sections.
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-resin or similar material Or just start printing them out of something useful like metal
The irony isn't lost on me that it's the USA, the country with some of the most permissive gun laws in the world, that's imposing these draconian rules on 3D printed guns - or is this pressure from the gun manufacturing lobby?
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> that's imposing these draconian rules on 3D printed guns This is a bill with no votes - the first committee hearing is in March. The purpose of the bill seems to be have some controversy & possibly raise the profile of the proposer. The bill is written very similarly to how we enforce firmware for regular printers and EURion constellation detection.
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It’s pressure from the anti gun obsessed nonprofits on the left like Everytown. Bloomberg has nowhere else to waste money and there are legislators willing to present bills authored by Everytown blindly. But in many cases gun control bills are known to be unconstitutional and pushed through anyways. It takes years for laws to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and even if they are, states like Washington or California or Oregon will just pass the next Everytown authored unconstitutional bill with a slight variation. The real fix is that we need to get rid of immunity for legislators. When they violate the civil rights of the constitutional rights of citizens through their actions, they must be held personally liable and must go to jail.
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> The irony isn't lost on me that it's the USA, the country with some of the most permissive gun laws in the world, that's imposing these draconian rules on 3D printed guns - or is this pressure from the gun manufacturing lobby? It's like saying "I am baffled by Europe, look at what Hungary is doing ..." For example, some states don't need any permit to open or conceal carry, some have no minimum age requirements to buy guns, and the majority don't have any mention of 3D printed guns. Federal law applies then about untraceable guns and or arms that cannot be detected by metal detectors. But those predate 3D printers as we know them today.
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This only benefits expensive proprietary enterprise 3D print makers..
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It's not the most "permissive gun laws in the world". In Norway you can buy a suppressor off the shelf with little to no paperwork. If you live in CA and don't want to experience permanent hearing damage from shooting, you'll catch a Felony for simply possessing one. It's a big middle finger like the rest of California's gun laws.
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I mean on Amazon you can buy them too, you just might have to look for something like a "lawnmower muffler for 9mm exhausts".
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I think the current government of California would significantly regulate firearms if they could. It’s prevented from passing more restrictive laws due to the US constitution and a Supreme Court which takes an extremely broad interpretation of the rights derived from the second amendment.
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It's the anti-gun lobby. Bloomberg's band of morons who believe a government monopoly on force is good. These bans are almost exclusively in states with already extremely strict (high rated by the gifford's law people) gun laws. So far, there is zero evidence in the last 30 years more strict gun laws have curbed crime. The states with the strictest laws conveniently have the highest proportion of gun crime. The same people writing these laws don't understand what "per capita " means. Nor are they willing to confront the reality of what the data shows. The calculus for these petty tyrants has changed from banning guns wholesale to lawfare. Make owning and purchasing firearms so burdensome the market dies, and with it, the rights. This is just another play in that strategem. Fun fact: More people died last year putting foreign objects in their rears than by AR-15s. That is how insane the anti-gun lobby has become. They are literally barking at their own shadow these days.
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Do you have a reference or at least some hard numbers for your "fun fact"?
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No amount of FBI stats about how often "assault" rifles are used will change people's minds. They don't like them and so want to take them away. I don't know how to square the same people saying we're living under a tyrannical government also pushing legislation that makes sure said tyrannical government is the only one with guns.
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I can't square people who think owning a gun will stop or prevent a tyrannical government. Especially when the tyrannical government just leverages its supporters as a vigilante force.
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Can you redo your "fun fact" but include all types of guns?
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In the US there is a certain class of politician that considers poor people being able to exercise their rights a problem that needs to be solved.
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It is both the USA and California . California doesn't allow most guns that other states allow and there is a lot of friction between CA and the USG.
This is a reaction to the inability to accomplish anything at the federal level in the "we have to do SOMETHING" vain.
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^ This. The Feds are so utterly gridlocked in culture war nonsense and whatever dumb bullshit Trump is up to that they cannot effectively govern. States and activists groups are trying to address actual problems the country has, instead of just playing political games on Twitter.
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Ah yes, the actual problem facing America right now... unsanctioned 3d printers. Thank you California for acting on this, our top national priority.
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The actual problem is gun violence which you absolutely, 100% know.
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Which this bill will do nothing to solve, which you absolutely 100% know.
> is this pressure from the gun manufacturing lobby Definitely not, it's pressure from the anti-gun lobby that keeps pushing "one more bill that this time will actually change violent crime statistics, we promise!" These bills are being introduced in the states that already have the most restrictive gun control already, yet to nobody's surprise, hasn't done much to curb violent crime. But the lobby groups and candidates campaign and fundraise on the issue so they have to keep the boogeyman alive rather than admit that the policies have been a failure.
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On the other hand, no one from the pro-gun camp is involved with or wants to involve themselves with drafting common-sense gun regulations to reduce the impact of mass shootings while respecting Constitutional rights. Everything from that side seems to revolve around arming schoolteachers and permitting more guns in more spaces. So of course you're going to have wildly-overreaching proposals making it through committees and put to the vote, because no one from the other side is there to compromise with. Americans prefer to debate on the news circuit instead of the committee floor.
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> hasn't done much to curb violent crime. > they have to keep the boogeyman alive rather than admit that the policies have been a failure. It's a documented, empirical fact that there is a marked correlation between common-sense gun laws and reduced rates of gun deaths.[1] [1] https://everytownresearch.org/rankings/
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Do you have a source that isn't the anti-pickle alliance's statistics on anti-pickle laws proving why you should implement their anti-pickle laws?
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"documented, empirical fact" I won't try to make as strong a claim as the person you are responding to, but unfortunately, the politicized nature of the topic makes research on gun violence, especially as it relates to gun laws in the US, extremely fraught. The vast majority of research articles are plagued with issues. One should not just blanket trust the research (in either direction, and there are definitely peer reviewed journal articles pointing in different directions). The claim you responded to was too strong, but for similar reasons, yours is also far far too confident.
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[delayed]
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> states that already have the most restrictive gun control already, yet to nobody's surprise, hasn't done much to curb violent crime The "most restrictive gun control" states in the US would still be generally by far the least restrictive gun control states in the rest of the developed world (you know, where gun-related deaths are a small fraction of here?). Your answer smacks of "well, they tried and surprise surprise it doesn't work so why are we doing it?", i.e. "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens".
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It is hard to police guns when there is free travel between the US states, yet only individual states can be relied upon to pass any reform. A broken federal government means guns are easily exported from red states with practically zero gun laws to blue states where they are used to commit crimes. States are often forced to recognize rights granted by other states because such an interstate jurisdictional question naturally bubbles up to the aforementioned dysfunctional federal system. Similarly to how many (most?) guns used criminally in Mexico actually come from the United States. Edit: I'm not surprised by the downvotes, but I am amused. These are objective facts. Any basic research will yield many studies (including from the American government) showing that the majority of guns used in crimes in Mexico are traced back to the States. Americans love the boogeyman of dangerous Mexican cartels so much they never seem to ask themselves where these guns come from in the first place. Hint: look in the mirror.
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Ironically the anti-gun lobby seems to drive a lot of gun sales, perhaps it is not what it says on the tin?
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No conspiracy required. There's a lot of money to be made lobbying against guns - in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year - regardless of efficacy.
Politically the US is very much not a monolith on this topic and many states and localities have passed laws that were later struck down as unconstitutional. This is a bill in California, which does have about the strictest laws that the federation allows them to have, and they would place even stronger restrictions on guns if they could. This is not really ironic as much as it is pushing the envelope for gun control as far as they legally can. But also, California regulators likely see the regulatory landscape as the reason this law is needed rather than in spite of it. Gun manufacturers are likely against these types of regulations because many of them would affect manufacturers and the tools they use too.
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> strictest laws that the federation allows them to have Note that "the federation" allowed states to have stricter gun laws until recently when we got a new partisan supreme court that is out of step with the previous 200 years of jurispudence.
who is sponsoring and pushing these bills?
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Feckless democrats who want to appear tough on guns. Instead of taking on the NRA or lobbying groups they go after low hanging fruit to tout as victories to their base. It generates votes and wealth for the rep. Same thing with anti-trans bills from the right. Legislation that can pass through targeting small enough collectives that they don't have to worry about bad press. All the news stories about ghost guns being 3D printed didn't hurt either. So they can sell a narrative of protecting people.
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The real truth? Nonprofits like Everytown, funded fully by billionaires like Bloomberg, who are effectively bribing/coercing legislators with their money and power. They supply identical bills into many deep blue states. They’re all extremely invasive in this way.
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It's anyone who manufactures plastic or parts. 3D Printers are the wild west of printing your own replacement parts and soon the goal will to ban these things, unless there is right to repair.
Do you have to prove that your 3D printer cannot print a 3D printer which can print a gun?
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only when they start printing ICs
Did you mean this one (PDF)? https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
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Not OP but yeah that's the one!
The real question is, if I buy 80% of a 3d printer to be finished on my own, does it need a Prop 65 sticker? (The answer is actually "yes, several".)
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i think it can go further than that, such as circular scenarios, what portion of the item, is the part to worry about. if a printing or milling job, or some combination of both, is split into many portions, until each portion is such a jigsaw puzzle, [perhaps literally] that it cant be filtered as its so non specific in form, that it could be anything.
> Regulating actual guns that are frequently used in crime? Unlikely. Well, two things. First, your phrasing implies there’s no regulations around firearm ownership at all, which is not true. Second, much to the chagrin of California and similar states, that pesky second amendment exists. Which makes the kind of regulations they _want_ around firearms (i.e., regulate/tax them out of existence) kind of tricky. But presumably regulations around what you can do with a 3D printer are much easier to handle from a constitutional perspective.
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The 28th amendment: right to keep and bare 3D printers
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There also exists a pesky fourth amendment that should protect people from laws like this but unfortunately it doesn't have the industry and lobbing that the second amendment has.
> Both things happen to a vanishingly small degree that it's not worth taking any action on either Eh, small thing there. Ever notice how when discussion about voter ID laws in the US come up that commenters from other countries are absolutely blown away by the idea of not having to show an ID when you vote? Because it’s such an obvious thing to not just leave up to the honor system, like we do? Point being, everyone else seems to think this “thing that could never happen” is worth safeguarding against.
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You're right it's a very obvious thing that you should have to show your government issued ID to verify who you are to a civic function, and that relying on the honor system is something that seems like it could never work because elections are serious and people have vested interest in particular outcomes and so would obviously look to cheat. But this is what I'm talking about it being a theoretical problem. It's so obvious that this could be an issue but it's not an actual issue and the USA stands as an example that, counterintuitively, you actually can rely on the honor system. And so because the system currently works as it is and there's no real problem to point to I think it is reasonable to be inherently suspicious of the motives of a government that wants to make a thing harder without being able to point to a concrete problem. A less controversial example on hacker news would be having to show your government ID to access porn. We are all rightfully suspicious of the motives of a government that wants that when to most Americans it is plainly obvious that there is not a real problem being solved. It's so obvious that you should have to show proof that you're 18 in order to access 18 and up material but we have more than two decades of proof that just asking them if they're 18 and up works well enough.
I’ve observed this behavior, but never came up with such a succinct (perhaps pithy) way of describing it.
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How about "when your career depends on appearing to solve problems, fake ones are much easier than real ones".
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> but never came up with such a succinct (perhaps pithy) way of describing it. Here's one. "Life is complicated, so is rule-making."
I don't know what language you speak but here is a part of the bill in English This bill would require, on or before July 1, 2028, any business that produces or manufactures 3-dimensional printers for sale or transfer in California to submit to the department an attestation for each make and model of printer they intend to make available for sale or transfer in California, confirming, among other things, that the manufacturer has equipped that make and model with a certified firearm blueprint detection algorithm. If the department verifies a printer make and model is properly equipped, the bill would require the department to issue a notice of compliance, as specified. The bill would require, on or before September 1, 2028, the department to publish a list of all the makes and models of 3-dimensional printers whose manufacturers have submitted complete self-attestations and would require the department to update the list no less frequently than on a quarterly basis and to make the list available on the department’s internet website. The bill, beginning on March 1, 2029, would prohibit the sale or transfer of 3-dimensional printers that are not equipped with firearm blocking technology and that are not listed on the department’s list of manufacturers with a certificate of compliance verification, except as specified. The bill would authorize a civil action to be brought against a person who sells, offers to sell, or transfers a printer without the firearm blocking technology. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB2047 Let me point out the statement: > The bill, beginning on March 1, 2029, would prohibit the sale or transfer of 3-dimensional printers that are not equipped with firearm blocking technology and that are not listed on the department’s list of manufacturers with a certificate of compliance verification, except as specified. It seems pretty clear this would prohibit the sale of 3D printers that are not approved by the California DoJ. It's not nice to lie about extremely obvious things.
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Clearly this is mostly security theatre (see eg comment about proving that them printer can't print a printer that can print a gun). On the other hand - it would be low hanging fruit to prevent off the shelf printers to print well known gun parts? Much like photocopiers and scanners and printers won't scan, copy or print known currency bills?
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> It seems pretty clear this would prohibit the sale of 3D printers that are not approved by the California DoJ. Note the difference w.r.t. the ridiculous "California's New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers".
Can you clarify what you mean?
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Title: "California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves" Actual fact: California’s New Bill Requires that 3D Printers Get DOJ Approval as Firearm-Blocking" (The "report on themselves" is fiction invented by Adafruit.)
Techno-cynics are wounded techno-optimists (aftermath.site)
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>Yes it is. It is still exactly as simple as it sounds. If I’m doing math billions of times that doesn’t make the base process somehow more substantial. It’s still math, still a machine designed to predict the next token without being able to reason, meaning that yes, they are just fancy pattern-matching machines. I find this argument even stranger. Every system can be reduced to its parts and made to sound trivial thereby. My brain is still just neurons firing. The world is just made up of atoms. Humans are just made up of cells. >here’s actually a few commonly understood theories of existence that are generally accepted even by laypeople, like, “if I ask a sentient being how many Rs there are in the word ‘strawberry’ it should be able to use logic to determine that there are three and not two,” which is a test that generative AI frequently fails. This shows that the author is not very curious because its easy to take the worst examples from the cheapest models and extrapolate. Its like asking a baby some questions and interpreting humanity's potential on that basis. What's the point of this? > The questions leftists ask about AI are: does this improve my life? Does this improve my livelihood? So far, the answer for everyone who doesn’t stand to get rich off AI is no. I'll spill the real tension here for all of you. There are people who really like their comfy jobs and have got attached to their routine. Their status, self worth and everything is attached to it. Anything that disrupts this routine is obviously worth opposing. Its quite easy to see how AI can make a person's life better - I have so many examples. But that's not what "leftists" care about - its about security of their job. The rest of the article is pretty low quality and full of errors.
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I liked the original title better "The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited". I think that sums up my grievances towards AI - amazing technology and certainly a booster to anyone's life, but what is the cost? Why AI companies get to download, consume and transform all copyrighted works essentially for free (I think there were some lawsuits that resulted in the companies paying), but normal people have to pay millions if they wanted to access all that data and pay to the original creators? I'm also not so ok with the workforce being displaced, but it's what happens with technological progress. But am not ok that it's displacing the writers while benefiting from their prior work without paying them a cent.
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> I will spare you some misery: you do not have to read this blog. It is fucking stupid as hell, constantly creating ideas to shadowbox with then losing to them. OK. Closed tab.
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They weren't talking about their blog.
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Correct. But it applies to their own screed.
You have to ask the question of "what exactly is Capitalism?" By putting capital ahead of everything else of course capitalism gives you technological progress. If we didn't have capitalism we'd still be making crucible steel and the bit would cost more than the horse [1] -- but if you can license the open hearth furnace from Siemens and get a banker to front you to buy 1000 tons of firebricks it is all different, you can afford to make buildings and bridges out of steel. Similarly, a society with different priorities wouldn't have an arms race between entrepreneurs to spend billions training AI models. [1] an ancient "sword" often looks like a moderately sized knife to our eyes
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> By putting capital ahead of everything else of course capitalism gives you technological progress. If we didn't have capitalism we'd still be making crucible steel and the bit would cost more than the horse [1] -- but if you can license the open hearth furnace from Siemens and get a banker to front you to buy 1000 tons of firebricks it is all different, you can afford to make buildings and bridges out of steel. The history of how steel got cheap is not really capital-based. It wasn't done by throwing money at the problem, not until the technology worked. The Bessemer Converter was a simple, but touchy beast. The Romans could have built one, but it wouldn't have worked. The metallurgy hadn't been figured out, and the quantitative analysis needed to get repeatability had to be developed. Once it was possible to know what was going into the process, repeatability was possible. Then it took a lot of trial and error, about 10,000 heats. Finally, consistently good steel emerged. That's when capitalism took over and scaled it up. The technological progress preceded the funding.
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The trial and error was fueled by capitalism, trying to get the best product possible. If it goes into a codified state system, it's regulated, resulting in a lack of motivation to take risks to make it better.
CTO says 93% of developers use AI, but productivity is still 10% (shiftmag.dev)
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How are CTO's so out of touch and yet loud and proud about it.
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My biggest road blocks as an engineer has almost never been the authorship of code but everything else around it. * Getting code reviewed * Making sure its actually solving the problem * Communicating to the rest of the team whats happening * Getting tests to pass * Getting it deployed * Verifying that the fix is implemented in production * Starting it all over when there is a misunderstanding Slinging more code faster is great and getting unit testing more-or-less for free is awesome but the separation between a good and great engineer is one of communication and management. AI is causing us to regress to thinking that code velocity is a good metric to use when comparing engineers.
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A 10% uplift in productivity for the cost of probably 0.001% of the salary budget is an incredible success.
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This is exactly right. And assuming organizations use the gains to cut headcount rather than boost total productivity, a 10% reduction in white collar employment would still be an era-defining systemic shock to the economy.
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Productivity improvements from automation actually result in an increase in jobs, not fewer jobs. Basic economics.
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The title is misleading. Productivity isn't at 10%, it's at 110%.
I read this article as the CTO being the bottleneck if he's only seeing 10% productivity boost at his organization. I dont think this is a purely AI problem more with the legacy costs of maintaining many minds that can't be solved by just giving people AI tools until the AI comes for the CTO role (but not CEO or revenue generating roles) too and whichever manager is bottlenecking. I imagine a future where we have Nasdaq listed companies run by just a dozen people with AI agents running and talking to each other so fast that text becomes a bottleneck and they need another medium that can only be understood by an AI that will hold humans hand This shift would also be reflected by new hardware shifts...perhaps photonic chips or anything that lets AI scale up crazy without the energy cost.... Exciting times are ahead AI but it's also accelerating digital UBI....could be good and bad.
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> it's also accelerating digital UBI Do you have sources for this claim?
This is self-reported productivity, in that devs are saying AI saves them about 4 hours per week. But let’s not forget the METR study that found a 20% increase in self-reported productivity but a 19% decrease in actual measured productivity. (It used a clever and rigorous technique for measuring productivity differences, BTW, for anyone as skeptical of productivity measures as I am.)
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https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ That info is from mid 2025, talking about models released in Oct 2024 and Feb 2025. It predates tools like Claude Code and Codex, Lovable was 1/3 current ARR, etc. This might still be true but we desperately need new data.
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Has the METR study been replicated?
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I haven’t heard about any similar studies, no. I’m planning to conduct one at my workplace but we’re still deciding exactly which uses of AI to test.
Apparently "AI is speeding up the onboarding process", they say. But isn't that because the onboarding process is about learning, and by having an AI regurgitate the answers you can complete the process without learning anything, which might speed it up but completely defeats the purpose?
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id guess the time til forst being able to make useful changes has dropped to near zero, but the time to get mastery of the code base has gone towards infinity. is that mastery still useful as time goes on though? its always felt a bit like its unhealthy for code to have people with mastery on it. its a sign of a bad bus factor. every effort ive ever seen around code quality and documentation improvement has been to make that code mastery and full understanding irrelevant.
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I think there's definite scope for that being true; not because you can start doing stuff before you understand it (you can), but because you can ask questions of a codebase your unfamiliar with to learn about it faster.
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Yes, that's how I'd interpret it, too. According to the article, onboarding speed is measured as “time to the 10th Pull Request (PR).” As we have seen on public GitHub projects, LLMs have made it really easy to submit a large number of low-effort pull requests without having any understanding of a project. Obviously, such a kind of higher onboarding speed is not necessarily good for an organization.
This will lead to natural selection. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into all areas, companies that manage it less effectively than others will face greater selection pressure.
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Or, AI will turn out to just not be that useful.
Blunt opinion: Most devs are not that good and really only execute what they are told to do. The threat of AI for devs, and the way to drastically improve productivity is there: keep the better devs who can think systemically, who can design solutions, who can solve issues themselves and give them all the AI help available, cut the rest.
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That’s how I feel too. When I was an architect at a ~300-person company, a big chunk of my job shifted to reviews, technical design docs, and guidance. I’m getting great results by feeding context like that into Claude Code, then reviewing and steering what it produces. It really does feel like a multiplier on me and I understand things enough to get my hands dirty where Claude struggles. Lately I’ve been wondering if that role evolves into a more hierarchical review system: senior engineers own independent modules end-to-end, and architects focus on integration, interfaces, and overall coherence. Honestly, the best parts of our product already worked like that even before AI.
Agreed. The bottleneck is QA/Code review and that is never going away from most corps. I've never worked at a job in tech that didn't require code review and no, asking a code agent to review a PR is never going to be "good enough". And here we are, the central argument for why code agents are not these job killing hype beasts that are so regularly claimed. Has anyone seen what multi-agent code workflows produce? Take a look at openclaw, the code base is an absolute disaster. 500k LoC for something that can be accomplished in 10k.
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The bottleneck at larger orgs is mostly always decision-making. Getting code written and reviewed is the trivial part of the job in most cases, discovering the product needs, considering/uncovering edge-cases, defining business logic that is extensible or easily modifiable when conditions change, etc. are the parts that consume 80% of my time. We in the engineering org at the company I work for have raised this flag many times during adoption of AI-assisting tools, now that the rollout is deeply in progress with most developers using the tools, changing workflows, it has become the sore thumb sticking out: yes, we can deliver more code if it's needed but for what exactly do you need it? So far I haven't seen a speed up in decision-making, the same chain of approvals, prioritisation, definitions chugs along as it was and it is clearly the bottleneck.
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i dont think thats actually the bottleneck? the bottleneck is aligning people on what the right thing to do is, and fiting the change into everyone's mental models. it gets worse the more people are involved
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> Take a look at openclaw, the code base is an absolute disaster. 500k LoC for something that can be accomplished in 10k. Mission accomplished: acquhire worth probably millions and millions. I agree with you, by the way.
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It was a hire not an acquihire. There was no acquisition.
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> I've never worked at a job in tech that didn't require code review I have. Sometimes the resulting code was much worse than what you get from an LLM, and yet the project itself was still a success despite this. I've also worked in places with code review, where the project's own code quality architecture-and-process caused it to be so late to the market it was an automatic failure. What matters to a business is ideally identical to the business metrics, which are usually not (but sometimes are) the code metrics.
the amount of people that work in technology and have never heard of amdahl's law always shocks me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law a 100% increase in coding speed means I then I get to spend an extra 30 minutes a week in meetings while now hating my job, because the only fun bit has been removed "progress"
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So if I'm understanding you correctly, prior to AI tools you spent 1 hour per week coding? And now you spend 30 minutes per week?
> let's have LLMs check our code for correctness Lmao. Rofl even. (Testing is the one thing you would never outsource to AI.)
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> Testing is the one thing you would never outsource to AI That's not really true. Making the AI write the code, the test, and the review of itself within the same session is YOLO. There's a ton of scaffolding in testing that can be easily automated. When I ask the AI to test, I typically provide a lot of equivalence classes. And the AI still surprises me with finding more. On the other hand, it's equally excellent at saying "it tested", and when you look at the tests, they can be extremely shallow. Or they can be fairly many unit tests of certain parts of the code, but when you run the whole program, it just breaks. The most valuable testing when programming with AI (generated by AI, or otherwise) are near-realistic integration tests. That's true for human programmers, but we take for granted that casual use of the program we make as we develop it constitutes as a poor man's test. When people who generally don't write tests start using AI, there's just nothing but fingers crossed. I'd rather say: If there's one thing you would never outsource to AI, it's final QA.
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> (Testing is the one thing you would never outsource to AI.) I would rephrase that as "all LLMs, no matter how many you use, are only as good as one single pair of eyes". If you're a one-person team and have no capital to spend on a proper test team, set the AI at it. If you're a megacorp with 10k full time QA testers, the AI probably isn't going to catch anything novel that the rest of them didn't, but it's cheap enough you can have it work through everything to make sure you have, actually, worked through everything.
You don't use the LLM to check your code for correctness; you use the LLM to generate tests to exercise code paths, and verify that they do exercise those code paths.
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And that test will check the code paths are run. That doesn't tell you that the code is correct. It tells you that the branching code can reach all the branches. That isn't very useful.
Outsourcing testing to AI makes perfect sense of you assume that tests exist out of obligation to meet some code coverage requirements, rather than to ensure correctness. Often I'll write a module and a few tests that cover its functionality, only for CI to complain that line coverage has decreased and reject my merge! AI to the rescue! A perfect job for a bullshit generator.
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outsourcing testing the AI also gets its code to be connected to deterministic results, and show let the agent interact with the code to speculate expectations and check them against the actual code. it could still speculate wrong things, but it wont speculate that the code is supposed to crash on the first line of code
Yeah, industry has told them that devs aren't valuable and AI can do their job. Who TF has motivation after that?
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People getting paid >$400k TC
Every time claude code runs tests or builds after a change, it's collecting training data.
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You need human language programming-related questions to train on too, not just the code.
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thats what the related chats are for?
Has Anthropic been able to leverage this training data successfully?
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I can't pretend to know how things work internally, but I would expect it to be involved in model updates.
No to the first question, and maybe with a lot of money for the second question.
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In the 20 years I've been in the industry, boiler plate has dropped dramatically in the backend. Right now, front end has tons of boiler plate. It's one of the reasons AI hassle such a wow factor for FE, trivial tasks require a lot of code. But even that is much better than it was 10 years ago. That was a long way of saying I disagree with your no.
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FE has a lot of boilerplate only if you’re starting from scratch every single time. That’s why we had template systems and why we invented view libraries. Once you’ve defined your libraries, you just copy-paste stuff.
Grok Exposed a Porn Performer's Legal Name and Birthdate–Without Being Asked (404media.co)
>I've been paying for data removal services for like, at least six years now Do such services actually work? The internet is forever.
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The tech industry was very much against the idea when it first came about. It was only really enforced by a few big companies because of some European law and this lady being from Europe likely excepts information on the internet to be controlled in a centralized way. There's also been some revenge porn laws in the US that have some cross over. But it's definitely mostly hopes and dreams if you have the money to spend, not something strictly practical.
Outing yourself as not having read the article; an image within and the text clearly shows that Grok provided both her stage name AND her legal name.
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You're right. I stopped reading at a fabrication worthy of a parrot. "Grok is revealing her legal name and all personal information it can find to whoever happens to ask." But thanks for the heads up, because now I see this article gets worse. After rereleasing the Grok statement, it calls Grok's release "abuse". As for "Dahl said she doesn’t know where Grok originally got her legal name from." ... er, perhaps Instagram? https://www.instagram.com/p/DOMBHqNgqKN/
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You are the one who chose not to read the article and then chose to baselessly speculate. You should own your decisions and not pass the buck to the author.
Farewell Rust (yieldcode.blog)
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I looove Rust for the backend. I've supported backends in typescript, python, Java, and Rust. Rust pages me the least at night. Sleep is beautiful.
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due to the nature of safety in Rust, I’d find myself writing boilerplate code just to avoid calling .unwrap(). I’d get long chain calls of .ok_or followed by .map_err. I defined a dozen of custom error enums, some taking other enums, because you want to be able to handle errors properly, and your functions can’t just return any error. This can be a double edged sword. Yes, languages like python and typescript/JavaScript will let you not catch an exception, which can be convenient. But that also often leads to unexpected errors popping up in production.
I find the dependency creep for both rust and node unfortunate. Almost anything I add explodes the deps and makes me sweat for maintenance, vulnerabilities, etc. I also feel perpetually behind, which I think is basically frontend default mode. Go does the one thing I wish Rust had more of which is a pretty darn great standard library with total backwards compatibility promises. There are awkward things with Go, but man, not needing to feel paranoid and how much can be built with so little feels good. But I totally understand just getting crap done and taking off the tin foil. Depends on what you prioritize. Solo devs don't have the luxury.
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Python used to have a great standard library, too. But now it's stuck with a bunch of obsolete packages and the packaging story for Python is awful. In a decade or so Go the awkward things about Go will have multiplied significantly and it'll have many of the same problems Python currently has.
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I just ported (this week) a 20-year-old Python app to uv/polars. (With AI it took two days). App is now 20x faster.
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Lots of removals have already happened and uv took over packaging in Python-land.
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These are two sides of the same coin. Go has its quirks because they put things in the standard library so they can't iterate (in breaking manners), while Rust can iterate and perfect ideas much faster as it's driven by the ecosystem.
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The cost of "perfecting" an idea here is ruining the broader ecosystem. It is much much better for an API to be kinda crappy (but stable) for historical reasons than dealing with the constant churn and fragmentation caused by, for example, the fifth revision of that URL routing library that everyone uses because everyone uses it. It only gets worse by the orthogonal but comorbid attitude of radically minimizing the scope of dependencies.
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> It is much much better for an API to be kinda crappy (but stable) for historical reasons But this does more than just add a maintenance burden. If the API can't be removed, architectural constraints it imposes also can't be removed. e.g. A hypothetical API that guarantees a callback during a specific phase of an operation means that you couldn't change to a new or better algorithm that doesn't have that phase.
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Same. That’s why Go is such a great tool.
The TS/React ecosystem is so mature, it's hard for Rust to compete with it. My optimal stack is currently: Rust on the backend, Typescript/React for web with OpenAPI for shared types.
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I'm doing this now and it's mostly great but the openapi generators are not good. At least the Typescript ones produce confusing function signatures and invalid type syntax in some cases.
Running rust in wasm works really well. I feel like I'm the world's biggest cheerleader for it, but I was just amazed at how well it works. The one annoying thing is using web APIs through rust - you can do it with web-sys and js-sys, but it's rarely as ergonomic as it is in javascript. I usually end up writing wrapper libraries that make it easy, sometimes even easier than javascript (e.g. in rust I can use weblocks with RAII)
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It does work well logically but performance is pretty bad. I had a nontrivial Rust project running on Cloudflare Workers, and CPU time very often clocked 10-60ms per request. This is >50x what the equivalent JS worker probably would've clocked. And in that environment you pay for CPU time...
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The rust-js layer can be slow. But the actual rust code is much faster than the equivalent JS in my experience. My project would not be technically possible with javascript levels of performance
Better title: "Farewell, Rust for Web"
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Yeah Astro is a great choice for a static or mostly static website. Moving to Astro is not a slight on any other language or framework.
South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection (theguardian.com)
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Sentence not long enough
He'll be pardoned and released by the next election cycle, remember 2 presidents were even sentenced to death at one point. I'm reading the comments here and surprised by the lack of depth of assessing Korea's history of prosecuting its presidents and most of you are just regurgitating what's reported in mainstream news that is echoed by Korean mainstream news which cannot give you a neutral impartial view on the situation. Two Korean presidents were sentenced to death and were pardoned in the 90s. another two Korean presidents were jailed for decades and were released after a few years. All of this is just a quick pandering to voters for whichever side gets hold and I am willing to wager that the current and last President will also see the insides of a jail cell. I point that democracies like American politics even when it gets ugly to the point do not engage in such tit for tat against the President to the point of sending them to jail, for obvious reasons.
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> Two Korean presidents were sentenced to death and were pardoned in the 90s. The important context is that these two presidents were Chun Doo-hwan and his successor Roh Tae-Woo, who led the military coup of December 12th (1979), seizing power, and then sending paratroopers to murder hundreds of civilians to quash public protest in the uprising of Gwangju (1980). They weren't your garden variety corrupt politicians. They were mass murderers, and by 1995 when they were arrested, they and their military cabals were still posing a credible threat to Korea's democracy. Their arrest and subsequent death sentences, accompanied with a sweeping purge of their military cabal by president Kim Young-Sam, marked an important inflection point in Korea's decades-long struggle toward democracy: before that the threat of a military coup was a constant factor in politics. After that the threat was gone, and since then, the Korean military never even pretended they had any political ambitions. So mock their later pardons if you want to, but you can't deny it marked an important and necessary step in Korea's history. It also shows sending your ex-presidents to prison only to pardon them later is still better than not bothering with it at all. * Also, the "obvious reason" that American politics sent zero ex-presidents to prison is that Biden chickened out. So, there's that.
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> Also, the "obvious reason" that American politics sent zero ex-presidents to prison is that Biden chickened out. So, there's that. Don't forget Ford deciding to protect his political allies (by pardoning Nixon). And George HW Bush doing similar (preventing Iran-Contra scandal investigation by pardoning participants who could have fingered Bush or Reagan)
Yeah, I don't understand the comments praising Korea for this. A tradition of prosecuting political opponents and then pardoning all of them is a mockery of the rule of law, regardless of what they actually did.
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Not that I agree with the pardons, but former presidents are usually old. Letting your political opponent die in prison can have a massive backlash so most presidents would rather not let that happen.
Curious where in the world this happens (holding officials accountable for violating public trust). It certainly doesn't happen in the United States.
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Israel sent a former prime minister to prison. Ukraine has had many an anti-corruption sweep ever since the Russians invaded. France denied le Pen electability due to misappropriating EU funds.
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I'm fairly certain that in the cases you mentioned, the people doing the jailing / penalizing are also guilty of crimes and at the very least, violating public trust. Seems to me like more tit for tat politicking.
The 'firm' protects itself ruthlessly. Andrew was too exposed in a too public scandal, they had not alternative but to cut him loose to protect themselves and the monarchy. Governor of the Bahamas was not an option...
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"the form" protects the people realistically in the line of succession. There's a reason harry lives in America these days.
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Yes, that's what protecting itself means. In this case things have become so public that the best/least bad option to protect the King and the Prince of Wales is to sacrifice Andrew.
This era we'd like to return to, when did it end?
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Gradually. The current unholy mess of money being able to legally buy politicians didn’t happen in one specific day or rule.
This is the correct way to handle a former president who tries to mount an anti-democratic insurrection.
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I would also say that this is the correct way to handle a former president that was elected as the result of a rigged election.
It also illustrates what a real insurrection attempt looks like. [1] He declared martial law, suspended and prevented their Congress equivalent from meeting (and directed the military to enforce such), ordered the immediate arrest of numerous high level politicians with a goal of arresting hundreds, issued a declaration that all media and publications had to be approved before publication, ordered the power+water for a news broadcaster be cut, and much more. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_South_Korean_martial_law_crisis
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A failed and poorly executed insurrection attempt is still an insurrection attempt. People go to prison for attempted murder every day.
don't worry, I suspect there will be a 2nd attempt on Jan 6th 2029
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I doubt it. Reichstag fire by Q2 2028.
Even if he had done that, which he didn’t, that’s not what an insurrection looks like. He also told them to go home.
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Have you read or watched/listened to his entire speech? I genuinely do not believe any reasonable human being can look at just the speech in context - much less his statements surrounding it in the months leading up - and argue that he didn't get exactly what he wanted in good faith.
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Yeah! Like if we all just agree to pretend the one statement in isolation was the entire event he looks pretty reasonable! Why do people keep pointing out that months of lying about electoral fraud may have encouraged people to take some extreme actions? SMH, that's not what he said on the day! Well, at least not on that day within the few second window of what I'd like you to consider!
Innocent until proven guilty.
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First off, the majority of them were found guilty in court - https://web.archive.org/web/20240108135705/https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/36-months-jan-6-attack-capitol-0 Also, for the rest of them that accepted a pardon, that also necessities an admission of guilt - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/236/79/#89-90 So yes, they were guilty of insurrection even if they escaped punishment.
According to the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the incident, the attack was the culmination of a plan by Trump to overturn the election. Within 36 hours, five people died: including a police officer who died of a stroke a day after being assaulted by rioters and collapsing at the Capitol. Many people were injured, including 174 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months. Damage caused by attackers exceeded $2.7 million. It is the only attempted coup d'état directed towards the Federal government in the history of the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack#:~:text=The%2520FBI%2520estimates%25202%252C000%E2%80%932%252C500,Capitol%2520Police%2520officers%2520and%2520journalists.
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It's really odd that the speaker of the house and the mayor of DC declined the president at the times request to deploy 10k to 20k national guard troops there. Also weird that there were 250 or so plain clothes FBI officers inside the capitol at the time as well. Along with Capitol Police have been filmed opening gates and doors for people to go through and in. Its almost like a lot of what has been written about what happened on that day isnt what happened.
It was an insurrection, and he should have been barred from rerunning by the 14th amendment, but come on with adding deaths to the event that were not the one dumbass chick.
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It's even sillier after looking into it. Of the 4 people listed that died the same date as the insurrection attempt, 1 was shot (already mentioned), 1 died of overdosing on meth, and the other two both were over 50 and had heart attacks. Not to say being exceptionally out-of-shape or meth-addled has zero demographic connection to the riot, but...
The “within 36 hours” is dishonest sleight of hand to avoid the fact that only one person died that day — Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran that was shot by police.
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If we want to include additional details, perhaps add the ones that explain why she was shot (Violently breaking into an area being secured by capitol police that directly lead to the congresscritters) and not irrelevant ones like her status as a veteran.
Legally, yes. But everything was well-documented and publicized. As sentient creatures we can use our own eyes, ears, and judgement to come to our own conclusions in advance or lieu of a formal court ruling.
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I suggest you re-read the Constitution. The First Amendment protects people from any negative repercussions whatsoever resulting from their free exercise of certain kinds of speech.
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This is such an absolutely wild and demonstrably incorrect interpretation, I can only assume it's satire
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I forgot that satire was dead.
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Poe’s Law. Personally I thought that might be what you were doing, but I wasn’t sure.
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Or, alternatively, you're just bad at it.
The overreach of executive powers is very concerning, but those are more long term attempts to influence the public and policy makers through shady tactics. The insurrection everyone is referring to is definitely Jan 6th, which it is laughable to compare to an actual insurrection attempt. A few thousand unarmed people waving signs and wearing costumes break into government buildings and take selfies? What would the next steps be that would end in them overthrowing elected leaders?
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Killing legislators or physically threatening them into overturning the results. But siccing the mob was just a last-ditch move. The main plan was sending fake electors with fraudulent certifications and counting on Pence to derail the formal vote count and accept the false slate through a fog of procedural confusion. The fact that Pence refused to go along with the plan and Trump resorted to physically threatening him and Congress doesn't change the fact that their plan was an illegal and fraudulent interference with the verification of the election based on knowingly false claims.
According to the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the incident, the attack was the culmination of a plan by Trump to overturn the election. Within 36 hours, five people died: including a police officer who died of a stroke a day after being assaulted by rioters and collapsing at the Capitol. Many people were injured, including 174 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months. Damage caused by attackers exceeded $2.7 million. It is the only attempted coup d'état directed towards the Federal government in the history of the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack#:~:text=The%2520FBI%2520estimates%25202%252C000%E2%80%932%252C500,Capitol%2520Police%2520officers%2520and%2520journalists.
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> It is the only attempted coup d'état directed towards the Federal government in the history of the United States. The Civil War in the early 1860s doesn't count because they just wanted to secede?
I’ll reiterate the earlier poster’s question: > What would the next steps be that would end in them overthrowing elected leaders?
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It was explicitly an attempt to influence Pence or congress to not certify the election results, attempting to allow Trump to use his fake electors to change the results in his favor. It was a naked attempt to change the outcome of the election. What are you not understanding about this?
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Congresspeople either intimidated or emboldened into rejecting some or all of the state electors to annul the actual electoral result and declare Trump the 46th president. We know this was the outcome Donald Trump's wanted because he said so several times. I assume the individuals that brought zip ties had more specific plans for the elected officials they didn't approve of. It wasn't a well-planned insurrection but neither was Yong Suk Yeol's
No, he called some Mexican migrants into the US rapists. Trump has done plenty of real things that are worthy of criticism. Calling Mexicans in general rapists is not something he did.
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No. His full quote: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." This statement first asserted that mexico was deliberately exporting its people to the US (as opposed to people deciding to come of their own accord) and then generalized that they were importing social problems, before making a concession that some of them might not be. This would be like if I said your HN posts consisted of lies, propaganda, and invective but that I assume some of them were worth reading. I doubt you'd feel the little conciliatory bit at the end balanced out the unfair allegations that preceded it.
AI makes you boring (marginalia.nu)
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Additionally, the boredom atrophies any future collaboration. Why make a helpful library and share it when you can brute force the thing that it helps? Why refactor? Why share your thoughts? Why collaborate at all when the machine does everything with less mental energy? Online ecosystem decay is on the horizon.
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AI is a mirror. If you are boring, you will use AI in a boring way.
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> I don't actually mind AI-aided development, a tool is a tool and should be used if you find it useful, but I think the vibe coded Show HN projects are overall pretty boring. Ironically, good engineering is boring. In this context, I would hazard that interesting means risky.
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I agree for writing, but not for coding. An app can be like a home-cooked meal: made by an amateur for a small group of people.[0] There is nothing boring about knocking together hyperlocal software to solve a super niche problem. I love Maggie Appleton's idea of barefoot developers building situated software with the help of AI.[1, 2] This could cause a cambrian explosion of interesting software. It's also an iteration of Steve Jobs' computer as a bicycle for the mind. AI-assisted development makes the bicycle a lot easier to operate. [0] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ [1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software [2] https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html
> There's a middle ground of "written by human and LLM together". Absolutely, but I’d categorize that ‘bit’ as the innovation from the human. I guess it’s usually just ongoing validation that the software is headed down a path of usefulness which is hard to specify up-front and by definition something only the user (or a very good proxy) can do (and even they are usually bad at it).
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> but I’d categorize that ‘bit’ as the innovation from the human. Agreed.
I feel like dealing with robo-calls for the past couple years had led me to this conclusion a bit before this boom in ai-generated text. When I answer my phone, if I hear a recording or a bot of some sorts, I hang up immediately with the thought "if it were important, a human would have called". I've adjusted this slightly for my kid's school's automated notifications, but otherwise, I don't have the time to listen to robots.
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Robocalls nowadays tend to wait for you to break dead air before they start playing the recording (I don't know why.) So I've recently started not speaking immediately when someone calls me, and if after 10 seconds the counterparty hasn't said something I hang up.
Here's AI responding to you: "You're describing the default output, and you're right — it's bad. But that's like judging a programming language by its tutorial examples. The actual skill is in the prompting, editing, and knowing when to throw the output away entirely. I use LLMs daily for technical writing and the first draft is almost never the final product. It's a starting point I can reshape faster than staring at a blank page. The real problem isn't that AI can't produce concise, precise writing — it's that most people accept the first completion and hit send. That's a user problem, not a tool problem."
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This response provides the recommended daily allowance of irony.
DOGE Bro's Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT 'Is This DEI?' (techdirt.com)
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I hate it here
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I wonder if the same thing happened with--or is happening at--NSF? I know researchers that did not get funding for quantitative ecology fellowships or grants. After back channeling with program managers, it seems that using "diversity"--as in the quantitative ecological measures, metrics, or derived functional values--may have flagged proposals to be rejected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_diversity
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The "lists" that were public of science grants identified as DEI absolutely indicated they were just doing a ctrl+f on diversity, women, race at times. Same went for removing people from government websites and so on.
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It sounds like the author thinks you need a graduate degree from Cornell to become a professional blogger. He probably should have gone the college dropout path as well
That has always been a thing since the invention of computers. The great thing about computers is that they do exactly what you ask them to do. The problem with computers is that they do exactly what you ask them to do.
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> On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#:~:text=226-,Passages%20from%20the%20Life%20of%20a%20Philosopher
My guess is this will garner attention for use of AI — that's where my attention went as well initially. But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not. My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; I doubt AI could do better, and even if it could, I'm not sure I'd want that to be the determining factor about whether it would get funded. To the extent it was, I'm not sure it would be a bad thing.
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If you can use a criteria to finance academia [1] you can use the reverse to define what DEI is. Every major corporation had DEI departments and yet it doesn't exist, it's a ghost. I really hope the backlash to this bullshit finally reaches europe. Same song and dance for 14 years straight, there is no SJW you're just imagining them, it's just called being a decent human being, they say as they kick me repeatedly in the face. [1] https://archive.is/UmkH3
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> But there's another layer to this, which is whether a grant should be terminated just because it pertains to DEI, regardless of AI being involved or not. Another layer? I think it's the same level of stupidity/shadiness.
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>My guess is you couldn't get a roomful of experts to agree on what "DEI" means; You don't need to, it's clearly defined within existing legal frameworks. A lot of people including the current administration seem to believe it means "racism against white men," but those people are simply wrong.
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DEI has nothing to do with experts or any legitimate analysis. It’s in the same basket as woke, CRT, SJW, BLM, and so on -- thought-terminating keywords that the right deploys to focus the ire of their base. If one starts losing its mindshare, a new one gets introduced and propagated. But they all point to the same liberal boogeyman.
turns out this function works just as well for that too
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only 50% of the time
It sounds like they stupidly did exactly what was stupidly expected.
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That's like calling it just incompetence where it clearly is both incompetence and malice.
Choosing a Language Based on Its Syntax? (gingerbill.org)
> I never got why compilers don't have pluggable syntaxes. An interesting question, but the answer is "because it's a bad idea" that doesn't actually solve the problem. That said, the right way to implement this is as a "transpiler" that compiles one syntax into another. And only the people who want to use it pay the costs.
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> An interesting question, but the answer is "because it's a bad idea" that doesn't actually solve the problem. This doesn't really explain anything, and it isn't clear that both of you have the same model of "the problem" in mind.
in the era of LLMs, syntax might matter more than you think. The c form of `type name;` is ambiguous because it could actually be more than one thing depending on context. Even worse if you include macro sheananigans. The alternate (~rust/zig) is `var/const/mut name type` is unambiguous. For humans, with rather long memory of what is going on in the codebase, this is ~"not a problem" for experts. But for an LLM, its knowledge is limited to the content that currently exists in your context, and conventions baked in with the training corpus, this matters. Of course it is ALSO a problem for humans if they are first looking at a codebase, and if the types are unusual.
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I suspect that the context-dependence in C is more an issue with the implementation than the overall syntactic philosophy.
LSP is meant for IDEs and very deterministic calls. Its APIs are like this: give me a definition of <file> <row> <column> <lenght>. This makes sense for IDEs because all of those can be deterministically captures based of your cursor position. LLMs are notoriously bad at counting.
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I think one could easily build an MCP tool wrapping LSP which smooths over those difficulties. What the LLM needs is just a structured way to say "perform this code change" and a structured way to ask things like "what's the definition of this function?" or "what functions are defined in this module?" Not much different from what agents already do today inside of their harnesses, just without the part where they have to read entire files to find the definition of one thing.
Semantics are where the rubber meets the road, certainly; but syntax determines how readable the code is for someone meeting it the first time. Contrast an Algol-descendant like C, Pascal, Java, or even Python with a pure functional language like Haskell. In the former, control structure names are reserved words and control structures have a distinct syntax. In the latter, if you see `foo` in the body of a function definition you have no idea if it's a simple computation or some sophisticated and complex control structure just from what it looks like. The former provides more clues, which makes it easier to decipher at a glance. (Not knocking Haskell, here; it's an interesting language. But it's absolutely more challenging to read.) To put it another way, syntax is the notation you use to think. Consider standard math notation. I could define my own idiosyncratic notation for standard algebra and calculus, and there might even be a worthwhile reason for me to do that. But newcomers are going to find it much harder to engage with my work.
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> In the latter, if you see `foo` in the body of a function definition you have no idea if it's a simple computation or some sophisticated and complex control structure just from what it looks like. All control structures are reserved as keywords in Haskell and they're not extensible from within the language. In C I can't tell that an if(condition) isn't a function call or a macro without searching for additional syntactic cues, or readily knowing that an if is never a function. I generally operate on syntax highlighting, followed by knowing that an if is always a control structure, and generally never scan around for the following statement terminator or block to disambiguate the two. I've found in general programmers greatly overestimate the unreadability they experience with the ISWIM family to be an objective property of the grammar. It's really just a matter of unfamiliarity. Firstly, I say this as a programmer who did not get started in the ML family and initially struggled with the languages. The truth of the matter is that they simply engage a different kind of mental posture, this is generally true of all language families. Pertinant to that last point and secondly, the sense of "well this is just plain unreadable" isn't unique when going from the Algol family to the ISWIM family. The same thing happens in reverse, or across pretty much any language family boundary. For example: Prolog/Horn clauses are one of the least ambiguous syntax families (less so than even S-expressions IMO), and yet we find Elixir is greatly more popular than Erlang, and the most commonly cited preference reason has to deal with the syntax. Many will say that Erlang is unintuitive, confusing, strange, opaque, etc. and that it's hard to read and comprehend. It's just the same unfamiliarity at play. I've never programmed Ruby, I find Elixir to be borderline incomprehensible while Erlang is in the top 3 most readable and writable languages for me because I've spent a lot of time with horn clauses. I think there's a general idea programmers have where it's believed that when you learn how to program, you are doing so in a universal sense. Once you've mastered one language, the mental structures you've built up are the platonic forms of programming and computer science. But this is not actually the case. More problematically, it's propped up and reinforced when a programmer jumps between two very similar languages (semantically and/or syntactically) and while they do encounter some friction (learning to deal without garbage collection, list comprehensions, etc), it's actually nothing that fundamentally requires building up an entirely different intuitive model. This exists on a continuum in both semantics and syntax. My Erlang example indicates this, because semantically the language is nothing like Prolog, its differentiation from Elixir is purely syntactic. There is no real universal intuition you can build up for programming. There is no point at which you've mastered some degree of fundamentals that you would ever be able to cross language family boundaries trivially. I've built up intuition for more formal language families than is possibly reasonable, and yet every time I encounter a new one I still have to go through the same process of forgetting virtually everything I knew. The only "skill" I could have gotten from doing this is knowing better than to think mastery of J means I'd be able to get comfortable reading complex Forth code.
> Contrast an Algol-descendant like C, Pascal, Java, or even Python with a pure functional language like Haskell. In the former, control structure names are reserved words and control structures have a distinct syntax. In the latter, if you see `foo` in the body of a function definition you have no idea if it's a simple computation or some sophisticated and complex control structure just from what it looks like. The former provides more clues, which makes it easier to decipher at a glance. (Not knocking Haskell, here; it's an interesting language. But it's absolutely more challenging to read.) For what it's worth, Python has been moving away from this, taking advantage of a new parser that can implement "soft keywords" like 3.10's "match" statement (which I'm pretty sure was the first application). Believe it or not, the motivation for this is to avoid reverse compatibility breaks. Infamously, making `async` a keyword broke TensorFlow, which was using it as an identifier name in some places ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51337939 ). In my own language design, there's a metaprogramming facility that lets you define new keywords and associated control structures, but all keywords are chosen from a specific reserved "namespace" to avoid conflicts with identifiers.
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I don't have any real problem with words that are reserved absolutely and words that are reserved just in particular places. My point was more that in Algol-derived languages control structures look like control structures. And even in languages that implement `map()` and other higher-order functions, you can tell that it's a method/function call and that these things are being passed to it and those other things are not without going and looking up what `map()` does.
Wow, this is one of the most surprising comments I've ever read on HN! Personally, I bucket C++ and Rust and Swift under "basically the same syntax." When I think about major syntax differences, I'm thinking about things like Python's significant indentation, Ruby's `do` and `end` instead of curly braces, Haskell's whitespace-based function calls, Lisp's paren placement, APL's symbols, etc. Before today I would have assumed that anyone who was fine with C++ or Rust or Swift syntax would be fine with the other two, but TIL this point exists in the preference space!
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There are a lot of important points of difference. Whether functions are introduced with an explicit keyword; how return types are marked; whether semicolons can be omitted at end of line; how types are named (and the overall system for describing algebraic types). Not to mention semantics around type inference (and whether it must be explicitly invoked with a `var` or `auto` etc.) and, again, algebraic types (what means of combination are possible?). And specifically with Rust you have the syntax required to make the borrow checker work. Oh, and then there are the implicit returns. Rust certainly didn't invent that (I seem to recall BASIC variants where you could assign to the current function name and then that value would be returned implicitly if control flow reached the end), but it reflects a major difference in philosophy. ... Which is really all to say: different people are focused on different details, at different levels.
Swift's syntax may look nice, but as soon as you run into "The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time; try breaking up the expression into distinct sub-expressions" you'll forget all of that. Hint: they are related.
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It didn't have to be like that though... It hasn't always been this bad. Personally I think they've been ruining Swift since version 4. It's particularly terrible in SwiftUI context nowadays but you can also make it chuck on something as simple as a .map(...)
As Ken Iverson noted in "Notation as a Tool of Thought"[1], yeah the syntax absolutely matters. The same program might resonate and make sense in one language but be incomprehensible if translated 1:1 in another. Computer languages are for humans to understand and communicate. 1. https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.pdf
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Iverson's point is more regarding semantics than syntax, though. The only mention of syntax suggests its better for it to be simple (presumably so that the semantics are closer to the surface). Every programming language is a notation for describing computation; notation is a catch all for all three levels: orthography, syntax, and semantics. APL is interesting because it not only uses an unconventional syntax, but also an unconventional orthography (obligate usage of special symbols), and its semantics are different as well from most languages (array programming). Iverson's point is that APL as a notation is valuable for making the structure of certain computations obvious, and that this point generalizes across programming languages. GingerBill's article is making a narrower claim: that semantics are what determines a good notation usually, not syntax.
AI made coding more enjoyable (weberdominik.com)
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I've worked as both an IC and EM over the course of 25 years. The best part of being an IC is crafting solutions to single-human-sized problems—without needing to deal much with people. The best part of being an EM is directing the creation of larger solutions, sometimes vastly larger solutions, at the cost of dealing with people stuff. AI takes the craft out of being an IC. IMO less enjoyable. AI takes the human management out of being an EM. IMO way more enjoyable. Now I can direct large-scope endeavors and 100% of my time is spent on product vision and making executive decisions. No sob stories. No performance reviews. Just pure creative execution.
Well, that's the thing. You have to shut your programmer brain off and turn on your business brain. The code never really was that important. Delivering value to end users is the important thing, at least to the people that count. Tim Bryce, one of the foremost experts on software methodology, hated programmers and considered them deeply sad individuals who had to compensate for their mediocre intelligence and narrow thinking by gatekeeping technology and holding the rest of the company hostage to them. And, he said upper management in corporate America agreed with him. If you place a lot of value in being a good programmer, then to the real movers and shakers in society you are at best a tool they can use to get even richer. A tool that will soon be replaced by a machine. The time has come for programmers to level up their soft skills and social standing, and focus their intelligence on the business rather than the code. It sucks but that's the reality of the AI era.
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you're a tool to them even if you are miserable instead of enjoying what you do.
I think we (developers) need to get over that. Code was always the means to an end, which is providing a product to solve a problem, not the end itself.
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The code is still the means to the end. AIs still write code, that is compiled and deployed and operated in some manner.
Gemini 3.1 Pro (deepmind.google)
Gets 10/10 on my potato benchmarks: https://aibenchy.com/model/google-gemini-3-1-pro-preview-medium
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Are you intentionally keeping the benchmarks private?
These models are so powerful. It's totally possible to build entire software products in the fraction of the time it took before. But, reading the comments here, the behaviors from one version to another point version (not major version mind you) seem very divergent. It feels like we are now able to manage incredibly smart engineers for a month at the price of a good sushi dinner. But it also feels like you have to be diligent about adopting new models (even same family and just point version updates) because they operate totally differently regardless of your prompt and agent files. Imagine managing a team of software developers where every month it was an entirely new team with radically different personalities, career experiences and guiding principles. It would be chaos. I suspect that older models will be deprecated quickly and unexpectedly, or, worse yet, will be swapped out with subtle different behavioral characteristics without notice. It'll be quicksand.
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"These models are so powerful." Careful. Gemini simply, as of 3.0, isn't in the same class for work. We'll see in a week or two if it really is any good. Bravo to those who are willing to give up their time to test for Google to see if the model is really there. (history says it won't be. Ant and OAI really are the only two in this race ATM).
It got the car wash question perfectly: You are definitely going to have to drive it there—unless you want to put it in neutral and push! While 200 feet is a very short and easy walk, if you walk over there without your car, you won't have anything to wash once you arrive. The car needs to make the trip with you so it can get the soap and water. Since it's basically right next door, it'll be the shortest drive of your life. Start it up, roll on over, and get it sparkling clean. Would you like me to check the local weather forecast to make sure it's not going to rain right after you wash it?
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Gemini 3 pro and flash already answered this correctly.
This feels very Google
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I found the Googler!
the agentic benchmarks for 3.1 indicate Gemini has caught up. the gains are big from 3.0 to 3.1. For example the APEX-Agents benchmark for long time horizon investment banking, consulting and legal work: 1. Gemini 3.1 Pro - 33.2% 2. Opus 4.6 - 29.8% 3. GPT 5.2 Codex - 27.6% 4. Gemini Flash 3.0 - 24.0% 5. GPT 5.2 - 23.0% 6. Gemini 3.0 Pro - 18.0%
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LOL come on man. Let's give it a couple of days since no one believes anything from benchmarks, especially from the Gemini team (or Meta). If we see on HN that people are willing switching their coding environment, we'll know "hot damn they cooked" otherwise this is another wiff by Google.
Yes but why would a pelican need a helmet? If it falls over it can just fly away... Common sense 1 Gemini 0
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Obviously these domestic pelicans can't fly, otherwise why would they need a bike?
Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, but I think that's because they're having performance teething problems on launch day.
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Cost per task has increased 4.2x but their ARC-AGI-2 score went from 33.6% to 77.1% Cost per task is still significantly lower than Opus. Even Opus 4.5 https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
I like how they also did a frog on a penny-farthing and a giraffe driving a tiny car and an ostrich on roller skates and a turtle kickflipping a skateboard and a dachshund driving a stretch limousine.
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reminds me of andor, luthen, positive reinforcing wasting time of emperor
A few thoughts: - One thing to be aware of is that LLMs can be much smarter than their ability to articulate that intelligence in words. For example, GPT-3.5 Turbo was beastly at chess (1800 elo?) when prompted to complete PGN transcripts, but if you asked it questions in chat, its knowledge was abysmal. LLMs don't generalize as well as humans, and sometimes they can have the ability to do tasks without the ability to articulate things that feel essential to the tasks (like answering whether the bicycle is facing left or right). - Secondly, what has made AI labs so bullish on future progress over the past few years is that they see how little work it takes to get their results. Often, if an LLM sucks at something that's because no one worked on it (not always, of course). If you directly train a skill, you can see giant leaps in ability with fairly small effort. Big leaps in SVG creation could be coming from relatively small targeted efforts, where none existed before.
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We’re literally at the point where trillions of dollars have been invested in these things and the surrounding harnesses and architecture, and they still can’t do economically useful work on their own. You’re way too bullish here.
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Neither do cars until very recently. A tool doesn't have to be unsupervised to be useful.
Who has time for that? This is how I run codex: `codex --sandbox danger-full-access --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox --search exec "$PROMPT"`, having to approve each change would effectively destroy the entire point of using an agent, at least for me. Edit: obviously inside something so it doesn't have access to the rest of my system, but enough access to be useful.
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>Who has time for that? People that don't put out slop, mostly.
You can really notice the tool use problems. They gotta get on that. The agent trend seems real, and powerful. They can't afford to fall behind on it.
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"They can't afford to fall behind on it." They are very, very seriously far behind as of 3.0. We'll see if 3.1 addresses the issue at all.
> Knowledge cutoff is unchanged at Jan 2025. Isn't that a bit old?
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Old relative to its competitors, but the Search tool can compensate for it.
Mark Zuckerberg Grilled on Usage Goals and Underage Users at California Trial (wsj.com)
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If this is a real litigation process, I wonder what would be the conditions Meta will need to accept for them to let it go.
> The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged personal injury. I didn't realize this was literally a single person claiming they were personally injured by literally every major social media company. How does that even work? What laws are purported to have been broken here? I wholeheartedly support some sort of regulatory framework around social media, but this specific case seems like a cash grab. It was already successful too, since Snap and TikTok have settled.
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She alleges that social media applications deliberately got her addicted, knowing that might lead to the depression and suicidality she experienced.
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She's not wrong. The discovery process has shown that such decisions were made by Meta and Zuck himself, knowingly, in the face of research that opposed their goals.
okay it's not a slippery slope, but it's something similar (that's why I said "feels like"). He's trying to establish a continuum of things that have a variety of addictive properties in an attempt to discredit the whole idea of addiction ("Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted").. > apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.
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As far as I can tell, even in US, the most litigious nation in the world, you can't SUCCESSFULLY sue e.g. a cigarette maker or alcohol maker for making you addicted. (I emphasize successfully because of course you can sue anyone for anything. The question is what lawsuits are winnable based on empirical data of what lawsuits were won). If you could, that would be the end of those businesses. The addiction is beyond dispute and if every alcoholic could win a lawsuits against a winemaker, there would be no winemakers left. In that context it seems patently absurd that you could sue Facebook for making you addicted. It would be absurd to create a law that makes it possible without first making such laws for alcohol and cigarettes. It's also patently absurd that we (where "we" here is leftist politicians) are allowing open drug dealing in populated areas of San Francisco and yet this is what we discuss today and not politician's systemic failure to fix easily fixable problems for which we already have laws making them illegal.
> Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Where do you live that this is not possible? (I know you’re speaking loosely, I.e. you mean “where I live bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2 Am” but it’s so loose that there’s 0 argument made here, figured I’d touch on another aspect leading to that, other replies cover the others. Ex. The 2 AM law isn’t about you it’s about neighborhoods with bars)
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i don't live there anymore, but BC or, Dubai as another example although Dubai is oddly more lax about liquor than most of the US or Canada. It's also about liquor stores which have to close at midnight, so its not just about neighborhoods with bars. Where I live 5 grams of coke, 10 grams of weed, is legal, you can buy and drink alcohol 24/7, and bars can be open as late as they want even with outdoor patios, even in front of the Presdiential Palace. And you can drink outside on the street. Its also the happiest country on earth. (As measured by happiness, not some lame proxy like public healthcare) I would never again live in the global north, or a country that lacked western values.
> Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes Go on
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https://news.gallup.com/interactives/248240/global-emotions.aspx
Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal (micasa.dev)
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This is dope.
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Super cool. Installed. It would be great if the f and b keys for moving between navigation elements circle back to the first element once reached its end.
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Heh, I actually turned that off because I kept getting confused about where I was. Perhaps there's a better UX there, or better styling that would make me less confused and keep the nav wrapping.
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Very cool! When on docs column, and pressing e to edit, it seems to just take you to edit the entire project, with no way to edit docs (which I am not sure what that even is supposed to be, I assume a way to attach files?).
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This UX was a bit iffy for me, but I thought I'd experiment with it and decided to go with it. When you edit an ID column, it opens a form editor to edit the entire row at once. The thinking was to make all columns editable _in some way_, but ID columns are autogenerated and thus not designed to be directly manipulated. I thought: since the ID represents a unique entity, in this case document, then it made some sense to make editing that editing the whole row. That said, this is a bug even with the explanation I just gave: editing on the ID column of Docs doesn't show all the row's data in the form. Will fix that shortly.
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Is there even a Wichita, Arkansas?
> When do I need to clean the dishwasher filter? Dishwashers have filters??!?
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Many have removable filters that you're supposed to clean periodically. If there's nothing obviously removable in yours then it might have a "self-cleaning" system that would be harder to take out and clean yourself.
Cool! Although I'd rather use Obsidian with the Tables stuff, so I get everything in my UI with photos, and I can share with mobile
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I'm building a Home vault like this currently. With the new obsidian cli, you can do a lot more with letting an agent manage things and update dashboards, etc. for you.
> can a TUI app bundled with an icon to simply click and start it? Almost certainly. I personally don't use clicky things to the extent that I am able to avoid them, so I can't describe the specific mechanism or name any of the nouns/tools involved, but I'm pretty sure this exists.
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You just create a shortcut to the binary in the dock or desktop on macos.
Oh that's not my philosophy at all. I don't like too much automation because I'm very fussy as to what I want at one moment. It all depends on my mood which home assistant doesn't know. Sometimes when I enter a room I want the lights on, other times I don't, stuff like that. Like when the curtains are open and I'm walking around half naked. And sometimes I just like the dark and sometimes I need bright lights. Sometimes I need heat and sometimes sitting in 16 degrees (C) is totally fine. Yeah I'm weird I know :) Also I'm really chaotic in terms of schedule. My mood and behaviour changes by the day. I use it more as a monitoring and control tool. Not saying your way is bad, it's more as HA is intended. But I'm just saying it won't work for me.
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Same. My environment molds to my comfort, not the other way around.
We've been building https://homechart.app for years (without GenAI...) and folks just don't realize that home managers exist as an app. They're too used to single purpose solutions, so they don't think to look for more comprehensive options. There's also the inherit struggle of being everything for everyone with an app like this, and focusing on features 80% of your users want and leaving the other 20% niche features on the backlog upsets people, mostly the power users.
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I checked out HomeChart, and boy howdy it feels like its doing way too much.
> It's possible to do sensor fusion of all the outward facing cameras from your home Is that legal though? I'm guessing it the US it might be, given the amount of cameras of public places you can see in various communities, but wonder how common that is. Where I live (Spain) it's not legal to just stick a camera on your house and record public places, you need to put the camera in a way so you're only filming your private property or similar.
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The US gives you no expectation of privacy in public places and private property is generally do what you want. It gets murkier if your cameras are pointed at other private property (your neighbors). Not a legal expert just what I’ve heard.
Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022) (borischerny.com)
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Birds are dinosaurs, and we eat a lot of chicken.
> Avocado. I heard it was dinosaur food. Nope, and this is trivial to check. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado#Taxonomy_and_evolution The proposed seed dispersers are now-extinct mammalian megafauna. Much more recent than the dinosaurs - 10k to 100k years ago.
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A great related article on mammalian megafauna and plants. https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
That's because when something becomes a new species is a surprisingly difficult and contentious debate in biology. That's simply due to the nature of evolution. It's nearly impossible to look at one past generation of chicken to the next to figure out when the ancestor was no longer a chicken. Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix. Every generation is a new missing link. It's an extremely fuzzy process.
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This is because "species" is a taxonomical category that we invented, but that does not actually map cleanly to reality.
Hydrogen ions are edible, although usually dissolved in water. Hydrogen ions existed before oxygen or water
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Yep, I ensure I ingest a healthy amount of plain old-fashioned protons. Surely among nature's most ancient foods.
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (console.cloud.google.com)
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I asked Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview to generate the modern artworks as SVG for my Pelican Art Gallery. I particularly like the rendition of the Sunflowers: https://pelican.koenvangilst.nl/gallery/category/modern
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Another preview model? Why google keep doing this?
I always try Gemini models when they get updated with their flashy new benchmark scores, but always end up using Claude and Codex again... I get the impression that Google is focusing on benchmarks but without assessing whether the models are actually improving in practical use-cases. I.e. they are benchmaxing Gemini is "in theory" smart, but in practice is much, much worse than Claude and Codex.
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I find Gemini is outstanding at reasoning (all topics) and architecture (software/system design). On the other hand, Gemini CLI sucks and so I end up using Claude Code and Codex CLI for agentic work. However, I heavily use Gemini in my daily work and I think it has its own place. Ultimately, I don't see the point of choosing the one "best" model for everything, but I'd rather use what's best for any given task.
My understanding is that all recent gains are from post training and no one (publicly) knows how much scaling pretraining will still help at this point. Happy to learn more about this if anyone has more information.
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You gain more benefit spending compute on post-training than on pre-training. But scaling pre-training is still worth it if you can afford it.
Remember when ARC 1 was basically solved, and then ARC 2 (which is even easier for humans) came out, and all of the sudden the same models that were doing well on ARC 1 couldn’t even get 5% on ARC 2? Not convinced these benchmark improvements aren’t data leakage.
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ARC 2 was made specifically to artificially lower contemporary LLM scores, therefore any kind of model improvements will have outsized effects Also people use "saturated" too liberally. The top left corner 1 cent per task is saturated IMO. Since there are billions of people who would perfer to solve arc 1 tasks at 52 cents per task. Arc 2 a human would make thousands of dollars a day with 99.99% accuracy
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You are saying something interesting but too esoteric. Can you explain for beginners?
America vs. Singapore: You Can't Save Your Way Out of Economic Shocks (governance.fyi)
You won't be able to in the future unless you are very wealthy. Countries cannot afford the benefits and healthcare promised to retirees. So governments are getting more grabby. That pattern seems to be occurring in many countries. New Zealand example: when you are in nursing or elderly care you must spend all your savings and sell your home. The retirement age also needs to increase - one fund suggested to 70+ https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/586737/retirement-age-will-rise-to-cover-superannuation-cost-investment-company-predicts Netherlands example: new capital tax 36% rate. A capital growth tax (vermogensaanwasbelasting) applies to stocks, bonds, savings, and cryptocurrencies. A separate capital gains tax applies to real estate and startup shares, taxing only upon sale. US: see medical debts. Articles usually talk about savings as though you can bank some funds while working, earn interest, and withdraw the savings later. Don't deceive yourself thinking like that. "Savings" cannot work in the future due to demographic issues (especially due to people living longer) even if you saw it work in the past. Look at how many workers support one retiree. In New Zealand it used to be 7 workers to one retiree, and in the future it looks like 2 workers to 1 retiree. This is a core issue for anyone below retirement age. Not only do we deceive ourselves about solutions, we are deceived by articles and history.
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I have no intention of spending my childrens' inheritance selfishly extending my own life, and I'm grateful to live somewhere I still have that choice. The people of New Zealand and the Netherlands have my sympathy and I hope they one day have the same freedom of choice.
SS is different mostly in that you’re not really loaning money to the government. The money coming in today mostly goes right back out as payments. There’s also an upper limit on SS taxable income. I forget what it is, but basically the entirety of the top quintile isn’t paying SS on their entire income. I want to say it’s like 90k, but it’s been a while since I looked.
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The top social security taxable income hasn’t been as low as $90K since around 2005. It’s currently $184500. 93% of income earners earn less than that https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
You do know you can have a wedding even if you're already on-paper married? The ceremony really has nothing to do with the legal act.
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So wouldn’t it go against everything that FIRE stood for to spend money on a wedding after you lost your job?
"Live frugally" , "FIRE" , "work in tech" All incompatible with 99% of the upper class, neither do they want to eat ramen to retire early. You're also one medical disaster away from being "very very wrong"
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I know several people with normie jobs (not tech related or government) and normie lifestyles that saved up enough money to never need to work again by 50 while still maintaining their lifestyle. Most still work because they have no idea what to do with their time even though they don’t need to work anymore. You can easily derive that this is possible from the median household finance statistics published by BLS, never mind the upper class. It isn’t that hard if you care to do it.
Good insurance is one aspect including long term disability coverage if you haven’t retired. That’s the thing medical expenses when young are unlikely enough insurance is a viable strategy. Long term it’s worthwhile to move to a country with a less expensive medical system. You can move basically anywhere in retirement and be better off.
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Again like I have been saying, good insurance is predicated on the open market and ACA being around and not being killed by Republicans. Even if they don’t outright kill it, they are trying to put in a “death spiral” where only sick people use it and insurance companies don’t want to participate. LTC not discriminating against pre-existing conditions is also post ACA.
It cost $30k for a loved one just to go to the hospital when their heart "felt weird" but absolutely nothing turned out to be wrong and all they did was run a couple quick scans and tests. I do agree with the overall idea of what you're saying that usually the premiums are way more than what you could get care for if you just saved the money, but the numbers on the website seem very wrong. I realize it's a total anecdote but from loved one's bills it is $20-30k just to get in the door and that is if actually nothing is wrong and there is no heart attack yet they're quoting $30k for an actual heart attack care.
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That's the pricing when you have insurance. It is cheaper if you don't.
I think whether houses should be sold on a 99 year lease vs property is a large and separate question. The vast misunderstanding of it still remains - the idea that a house is owned, not rented. Selective properties might be bought back. But the fundamental invariant of this whole situation is that all 99 year leases will worth 0 eventually. Any rise in prices now only increases the eventual depreciation. And add on that massive loans are taken out on depreciating assets, so it's not an investment, it's a liability. And the significant majority of Singaporeans bears this liability on their books.
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> 99 year leases will worth 0 eventually. That's not how it works. The flats aren't valued for their space in the sky; they are valued for the land they are attached to, and their proximity and connections to other communities and infrastructure. I've already said that flats slated for SERS are bought back by the government at market rates well in advance of their leases expiring. > The vast misunderstanding of it still remains - the idea that a house is owned, not rented. What you seem to greatly misunderstand is that land in Singapore is at an extreme premium, the likes of which is hitherto unseen anywhere else. With this context in hand, the idea of traditional 'home ownership' is fundamentally flawed in the first place, because unlike much larger countries, there isn't a large suburban or rural zone in which a new city can just be sprouted up. 750 square kilometres is all you have, and if you have to recycle existing land to maximise its use, so be it, and if it means 99-year leases, then that is the cost. Given average human lifespans, the Western concept of a 'freehold' doesn't really make that much sense anyway, unless you want monarchies, oligarchies, or corporate dynasties monopolising prime land and settling into an even more predatory outright rental economy, which is already seen in most large cities elsewhere.
A lot of that here in the US is because we've lost the will to participate in the systems that establish these things. We leave that to other people, and those other people represent our interests poorly. The people in a democracy take a really long time to effect change. It can be a life's work for some people. But the premise is that if we can find common ground we can eventually see some of our ideas take shape. That does still work here, but we have to actually have real conversations with each other that respect each others' differences to get anywhere.
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After a bit it just comes down to motivation. Who wants to win more: 1. Someone who has everyone's best interests at heart so is unwilling to really run against anyone and is trying to balance out support for multiple conflicting groups all while learning the landscape and job or 2. Someone who knows they can use the position to get tens of millions of dollars, and are supported by a few large groups similarly motivated? This is how you get people like Va Lecia Adams Kellum and Karen Bass.
This isn't something the government gives you. It is something they have confiscated and held on to. > Your duty as a citizen is to work and build your nation What about the duty of the trust fund babies and idle wealthy? What about the duty of the capital owners? Why is the retirement age going up instead of down as productivity increases?
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because lifespans are increasing much more, people are outliving what they used to and are using a lot more money in retirement than they used to. Old people used to sit in houses and watch grandkids, now they're flying to foreign countries for fun.
> I meant foreign workers So did I. Being foreign, they can work at home and not pay into a system they have no part of. Problem solved.
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When you move to Vienna you become part of the system since you pay income + other taxes, just like the locals, except unlike the locals, you get rug-pulled at social housing. Unless of course ... your comment was just an anti immigration dogwhsitle from the start, in which case you should just said THAT instead, and not waste people's time with cumbersome allegories masquerading as arguments.
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