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Show HN: Clawe – open-source Trello for agent teams (github.com/getclawe)
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Haven't dug as much as I would like to into OpenClaw, but why is there so much hype around it? I don't understand the appeal of using it as a replacement for Claude Code.
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I love this trend of posting vibe coded in a day slop apps to every place on the internet. Really makes me want to be here.
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the limits of a no-code website editor https://chartdb.io/ that's hilarious please hold for the non-existent cdn while we download 372 fonts
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There have been a few of these kanban[1] user interfaces over claude code or some other agent (open claw). These are all proto orchestrators. No one has discovered/converged on what agent orchestration actually looks like. Other projects include conductor.build, gas town (infamously), and others. Another layer of abstraction in the infinite castle of computer science. 1: https://www.vibekanban.com/
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But teams already have planner. No Microsoft zealot organizations are using Trello anymore
Can we talk about the name?
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how many AI projects does that make with "Claw" in the name...
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i have 34 more minutes to edit this post, give me something good and i'll change it
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I like “Clawboard”.
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Decapod
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You also need to edit the github at that point, but there's a few different "Claw" projects for AI related stuff, it's going to get confusing.
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In games, AIs usually communicate with a blackboard. Grokboard would rhyme but implies xAI associations. Flockboard? Not so nice sounding but accurate.
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Cortex. It's like their shared "brain". Starts with a C for extra points.
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How about clamban[dot]ai? (It is available.)
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If you email the mods, they'll likely update it for you after the freeze.
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Here's just a couple, mostly bad, feel free to use: Kanclaw Clawban Clawboard Clawlo Clask (Claw-task)
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Good Point. Since it is an board I would call it Clawedboard.
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Then tomorrow rename it to MoltBoard
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At this point my brain replaces {claw-,molt-} with slop-
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Ah, so this one is Slope.
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Slopë
Toyotas and Terrorists: "Why are ISIS's trucks better than ours?" (airuniversity.af.edu)
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> ISIS may have acquired Toyota Hilux vehicles thanks to the perpetual cycle of U.S. involvement in Foreign Military Sales with the Middle East No surprises there. A lot of ISIS' actual weaponry was stuff the US had equipped the crony Iraqi military with, and was just picked up by ISIS when the Iraqi soldiers retreated - like a weapons cache in a computer game: Move over the building and your ammo slider goes up magically.
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What’s better than Hilux is the Land Cruiser 70 or 75 series, more reliable and bigger payload. That being said, you can never go wrong with Toyota, reliable yet simple, if you open the Hilux engine hood you can literally see your feet through the engine area because only few components are in there, compare this to say a german car, and you need a manual on just where to find the engine oil stick.
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They sometimes get American trucks, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Mark-1_Plumbing_truck_incident
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Stories like this always seem one-sided. Can't a journalist or researcher find at least one person on the other side from back when this was done in ~2012 and interview them? Sure, many will be reluctant to talk, and Afghanistan isn't exactly a stable place right now, but all it would take is a phone call to the right people...
Seems like the question is never answered. There's a lot of how the trucks get there, but not why they're better. (I skimmed it, the writing has too much emotional bait of "Look how evil they are! Don't forget, we're the good guys!"). Maybe it's survivor bias, the ones that are crap have been blown up by a Hellfire shot by a drone..
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I can tell you precisely why foreign Toyotas (especially certain models) are more reliable that whats typically sold in the US. No electronics and parts which operate based on physics (pressure, gravity, etc). Both of these decisions lend themselves to a simple engine compartment and repairability. In the US, you can buy a five-speed 4runner which is about the simplest engine available on the market. Has all the benefits enumerated above and its trivially repairable by DIYers. However, even the 4runner has annoying garbage which can fail. Compare the newest 70 series Land Crusier in Japan to the US Land Cruiser (Prado). Difference is a v8 with no electronics and a 4 cylinder hybrid filled with electronics and a rats nest of tubes running across the top of the engine. Try working on that... Of course its get +20mpg compared to the Japanese version. I'm pretty sure the 70 series is 4 wheel drive always whereas the prado runs in 2 wheel drive but has a 4 wheel switch (more complexity -- better gas mileage). Anyway, intangibles such as availability of parts and lower pricing makes scavenging more economical and increases life span. Also, stability of the platform means there's lots of expertise that has developed over the past +30 years. Same design, same repairs, same parts. Makes things easy.
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The V8 in the 70 series landcruiser uses computer controlled electronic injection. It also has other electronic / electro-mechanical systems like ABS and airbags.
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Fair enough!
- Cheap + reliable - Parts for maintenance easy to come by - Strong enough to mount an 50 cal in the back You might have a mix of government owned vehicles, and ones rented from the local economy. You might be driving Hiluxes to work, and observing ISIS or partner forces using the same model as fighting vehicles.
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Is the mounting problem even real? I’ve shot a 50 cal rifle unmounted and I’d venture to say it could be mounted to anything. It’s mainly for ergonomic / accuracy / rapid fire stability and doesn’t need significant structural support. You could probably mount it to an ATV if you wanted to.
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Sort of. A truck has a frame that you can drill a hole in and bolt the thing to. Simple and easy. A typical uni-body car is most than strong enough for the weight, but there is likely no place where the sheet metal is strong enough to support the bolt. You can make it work if you want, but it requires a more complex mounting system. (of course a truck has a nice open bed which has other advantages for mounting a gun - the typical car doesn't have a good place to mount the gun even if you build the mounting system). ATVs can carry the weight, but finding a place to put the bolts will be a pain.
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Also, the guy can ride around standing in the back operating the gun; I can't see how that would work in a car.
Glad to see my alma mater represented here doing good research. I served in Iraq as an AF commander. My 2001 Tundra is still going strong ;)
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So is mine (2001TRD bought new). Searched all over AZ looking for manual everything and I got it, except for the trans. It replaced an fj60 Landcruiser. Beautiful machine I worked on a lot (5spd trans, lift, exhaust, gas tank) but it needed more power. The FJ-60 replaced an absolutely bottom basic 4cyl 4wd 5spd manual Toy "Pickup", better than a jeep 'cause you could carry shit off road, that the child outgrew sitting in the middle behind the stick. The only thing I dislike about the Tundra is the gas mileage. I thought I would hate the auto trans but then I did some largish sandy-ish steps uphill and fuck me that was easy. Ah, there is another annoying thing: anti-lock brakes make sandy steep downhills with exposure much more interesting than they should be. When I die I want to be buried in it. God the new gigantic Tundras look awful. I think I'm seeing a lot more newish Tacomas these days, and they still look decent. They definitely look easier to park.
Yes, humans do compete for resources.
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Go on?
While I don't think it would prevent our troops from having foreign-produced trucks in theater, we can't affordably procure such trucks thanks to the Chicken Tax. I would also guess that giving a DoD contract to Toyota for a truck that may not be registrable in the US would also face institutional resistance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
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Also, because of CAFE standards, the US can't even attempt to create its own competing light trucks as everything needs to be fucking massive to maintain the emission exemptions. The thinking was it would make cars more efficient but instead everyone just built obscenely large vehicles that were classified as trucks instead of passenger vehicles.
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Toyota has factories in the US where they produce pickups. They could build the Hilux here if they thought it would do well in the market.
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The military has an incentive to ensure there are plenty of Americans who know how to design and manufacture things. A truck and a tank have a lot in common - if war breaks out we want the ability to take people of of trucks and get them making things the military needs. This is the same reason the Navy has for building ships in the US even though they can be done other places cheaper.
25% tariff isn't a roadblock for military spending.
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Regarding Western military procurement, “We have such sights to show you!”
Why not deal with the cause of the terrorism? Are we really worried what vendor they get their trucks from?
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> Are we really worried what vendor they get their trucks from? There are for sure gun manufacturers that would love to sell terrorists guns, can car manufacturers that would sell terrorists cars. The harder they are to obtain, the less success the terrorists will have in their objectives. Do you really think we shouldn’t care, understand or look to shut down supply chains?
> Why not deal with the cause of the terrorism? slaps forehead Why didn't I think of that!
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What's the alternative. In a terrorist camp somewhere: "Guys! We can't Toyota's anymore. I guess terrorism is over! Pack it up and go home!" Sheesh.
Because the chicken tax keeps out great vehicles so the US automakers don’t have to compete. The hilux and 79 landcruiser are run of the mill workhorses in virtually every country in the world except the US and Canada. They run rings around the Tacoma and tundra. Tariffs and old world protectionism like the chicken tax are keeping the US automakers on life support, but they’re all doomed - they’re not even trying to compete.
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Explain why, if they are so much better than the Taco and Tundra, we can get the latter here in the US without paying the Chicken Tax? Toyota manufacturers those trucks in the US. They could manufacture the Hilux here too, but they choose not to. So it seems like the Chicken Tax isn't the actual problem. Toyota seems to think Americans do not want the Hilux, at least not in sufficient quantities to justify bringing it to market.
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I wish we could get the Hilux here. Had to settle for a Tacoma instead.
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I, too, am waiting to execute my master plan to import a 70 series Land Cruiser. Late 90s/early 00s model. It's almost time. Last car I'll ever need to buy.
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Fingers crossed Carney changes for us Canadians, I was in Mexico for a month and rented a BYD Seal, fantastic car.
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The "protectionism" you cite is due to crash regulation and emissions standards.
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This is unadulterated cope. America has 40% more traffic fatalities per km driven than the European Union and has less stringent emissions standards (especially for the Hilux's category, which is actually why giant SUVs became so popular over the years). The US government doesn't even bother with these spurious pretexts anymore. They openly admit that they want to coddle local automakers to ensure that the government has a supply chain of transportation vehicles in wartime. It's quite literally socialism for the entire American auto sector.
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This in itself would not be so bad. After all Korea and Japan supported their auto industry. But the American car companies are just completely unwilling to make cars that the rest of the world wants to buy.
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> coddle local automakers Are you only including automakers headquartered in the US, or are you also including automakers who have a bunch of factories in the US?
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Irrelevant - they still don't meet our standards.
AFAIK, the classic Toyota Land Cruiser (J70) has not been sold in EU for more than a decade since it doesn't comply with emission regulations. Interestingly, some are assembled in Portugal for North African and Middle East markets.
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Land cruisers are almost collectors items now in the Middle East. Transcends across wealth and status. Doesn't matter if it's a middle class office worker with a large family, a soccer mom living in the Palm or a filthy rich oil sheikh with an arsenal of sports cars stored away in his garage - they all have Land Cruisers (or the Prado). I might actually just get into the hobby of collecting Land Cruiser models, and maybe a few Japan-exclusive Toyota models.
> It is also a very robust vehicle capable of withstanding elemental and physical extremities, as shown on the British TV show “Top Gear.”[6] If you haven't ever watched Top Gear, this is definitely one of the standout bits they did - putting that truck through absolute hell, and watching it continue to start up. I highly recommend it, even if you don't think of yourself as a Car Guy. It's basically a comedy show that just happens to use cars.
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I don’t doubt how tough the Hilux can be, but Top Gear tended to stage a lot of things. Like they intentionally killed Hammond’s Land Cruiser at the end of the Bolivia special. Plus, they had some pretty damn good mechanics, while Clarkson pretended to fix his cars with a hammer in front of the camera.
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https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear%3A_Polar_Special Top Gear drives a heavily modified Toyota Hilux to the North Pole.
I wish it was easy and simple to buy the Hilux in America. Many amazing foreign vehicles have been banned or heavily taxed by the Federal Government to prevent competition.
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The Hilux isn't "banned" from the USA. Toyota can federalize it and sell it here at any time. Toyota doesn't bring it here because we have the Tacoma - a truck designed to be more inline with American consumer tastes. If Toyota wanted to, they could readily start manufacturing Hiluxes in Mexico and importing them into the USA. Presumably, the reason they don't do this is because Americans hate small pickup trucks. Every single truck on sale in the USDM sells better in larger footprint spec. There's maybe 20k American who are willing to buy a new truck with the wheelbase the size of a Mustang (smallest Hilux). Even small BoF SUVs have the same problem. Take the FJ Cruiser, despite being a cult classic, it sold terribly in the USA, likely due to being too small. Plus, they are expensive. In Australia, the cheapest non-work-spec Hilux trim is ~$55k - which is like $38kUSD. A Tacoma starts cheaper than that and is much larger.
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Toyota must not think it is that amazing, else they would use their pickup factory in Texas to make Hilux's to sell here.
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America will become like East Germany and the Trabant. And thanks to Trump's antics Detroit is losing the Mexican and Canadian markets...
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Imagine how much nicer driving around in the suburbs would be if the majority of vehicles were town cars like Honda Fits, mini-mini-vans like Honda Freed, pre-2003 Tacomas, and kei trucks/vans instead of the usual mix of unreasonably tall and boxy crossovers/SUVs and brodozer trucks.
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Well I don't think it would be that much different, truthfully. The problem of the suburbs is a matter of layout and zoning, not so much the vehicles used. If you fix the layout and zoning it'll naturally reduce vehicle size.
Even vehicles that are largely the same as those we get here are banned from being brought in. All because Mercedes didn't like being undercut by gray market imports and lobbied the government.
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There's a similar thing currently going on in some parts of Europe, but the imported cars are for the Chinese market. In one high-profile case a Berlin-based VW dealership was importing the VW ID.6, which is a model exclusive to China: https://www.shop4ev.com/en/blogs/news/verkaufsverbot-id-6-bleibt-bestehen
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder (mtlynch.io)
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Author here. Happy to answer any questions or take feedback about this post.
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How do you see the solo bootstrapping landscape going forward? In what ways do you see agentic coding changing things?
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I'm currently a solo bootstrapped founder, have done short stints in the past - 1 year in 2022, then became cofounder of a funded startup for a year. Now doing it again. Question is how you stay motivated to keep at it - looks like it took about 4 years before you made similar to your Google salary, did family pressure or external pressure ever impact you? Or is it mainly just keep your eyes on the longer term goal? I'm also quite lucky that I was aiming for lean-FIRE before I left Facebook, so I have the luxury of being able to keep at it, but sometimes it is demotivating seeing peers / others.
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I'd love to learn more about your process of the sale. And in your graphs, is that attributed to profit/revenue in 2024? I'm on a super similar journey. Started in 2022, did about 400k in revenue in 2025 at 79% margin, we'll se how this year goes. Theres a world where i'd love to add a lot of scale, but that'll rely on some experiments (underway) panning out. It's 'failure' in most peoples books but 2x'ing would be great too?! How did you find a buyer? How did you come to a sale price? Why didn't you keep going?
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> I'm on a super similar journey. Started in 2022, did about 400k in revenue in 2025 at 79% margin, we'll se how this year goes. Theres a world where i'd love to add a lot of scale, but that'll rely on some experiments (underway) panning out. It's 'failure' in most peoples books but 2x'ing would be great too?! Nice, congrats! Yeah, I think depending on what bubble you're in, bootstrapping to 400k and 2x'ing every few years is either failure or amazing. The VC/hypergrowth path doesn't appeal to me, so I think something that gives you $100k+/yr in profit is a huge success. > I'd love to learn more about your process of the sale. Sure, I wrote a couple of posts with the details.[0, 1] [0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/ [1] https://mtlynch.io/lessons-from-my-first-exit/
The switch to Linux and the beginning of my self-hosting journey (hazemkrimi.tech)
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For those who switched in the past few years: Has Wayland given you trouble? I was on a journey this morning after testing my software. It's a GUI CAD-style program for structural biology. I test it on Linux periodically to make sure it's cross-platform. The checks usually pass, with some subtlety regarding linking Cuda. Today, I observed that mouse + keyboard inputs to the 3D portion stopped working. Root cause: Ubuntu and some other distros recently switched to a GUI backend called Wayland. I don't remember upgrading, but maybe it happened during a system update? It has disabled low-level device inputs except for mouse movement. You can use window-based events instead, but IMO this is a mistake. An OS-level function shouldn't block hardware access. I want the OS to facilitate software and hardware; not create friction.
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Wayland was turned on by default in ubuntu 21.04 xorg (the x11 server) was removed from ubuntu in ubuntu 25.10. Desktops like gnome have dropped support for x11 so you can expect that wayland will be the only way to do things from here on out. There is a compatibility layer called "xwayland" that should work, but there's definitely some rough edges between x11 apps and wayland apps. x11 gave all apps a pretty large ability to intercept information from across the system. Wayland locks that down pretty significantly.
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> For those who switched in the past few years: Has Wayland given you trouble? No, since I'm on Mint, and thus still on X11. I keep hearing about Wayland problems, and I pray they don't reach me when Mint switches; that the relevant problems will have been fixed by them time Mint does switch.
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Wayland had been around for a while, but I feel your pain. Overall it seems much more performant if that makes it any better
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More performant is good! Of interest, I was able to insert a workaround (a few lines of `unsafe` which alter local env vars) into the program to have it use Xorg instead.
The current "stable" distribution of Debian is version 13, codenamed trixie. It was initially released as version 13.0 on August 9th, 2025 and its latest update, version 13.3, was released on January 10th, 2026. So as of today the latest "stable" release of Debian is a month old. By contrast the last stable release of Fedora is Fedora 43, released on October 28, 2025 which four months old at this point. Really once you get software that works all of this is pointless anyway, you have working software and you update once every year or so, or when you find you need to. When you "need" to update is so personal that it cannot be predicted, but your FUD about Debian being universally old and outdated is clearly misleading at best and deliberately misleading at worst.
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You are getting too worked up about this, not to mention cherry-picking. Debian Trixie, to my knowledge, comes with Linux kernel 6.12 LTS. Many people with more modern hardware want the most modern Linux kernel -- currently 6.18 -- to support their devices. There are also countless stabilization patches (I heard some of my acquaintances praising their Linux kernel upgrades as finally giving them access to all features of various Bluetooth periphery but did not ask for details). Having a modern kernel is important. With Debian though, it's a friction. Can it still be done? Sure, or at least I hope so as I want to repurpose my gaming machine as a remote worker / station and the only viable choice inside WSL2 is Debian. I do hope I can somehow make Debian install a 6.18 kernel. Furthermore, you putting the word "need" in quotes implies non-determinism or even capriciousness -- those two cannot be further from the truth. Arch and Fedora can't come to WSL2 soon enough. ...and none of that is even touching on the issue of much older versions of all software in there. I want the latest Neovim, for example. For objective developer experience reasons. Debian stable is for purists or server admins. Not for users.
Proxmox is probably overkill for beginners. You'll know it when you want it. I recommend docker-compose based tools, especially dockge [1]. It drastically cuts down on the surface of weird things you have to deal with. Just put up a reasonable distro (I recommend Debian here, since Fedora tends to get some SELinux issues which would confuse beginners), install docker, and run it. You don't have to touch anything else system-wise (maybe except setting up encryption when installing) Most self-hostable services provide docke-compose files, which you can just paste in with some customizations, and run it from there. Tailscale for external access is probably the easiest solution. 1. https://dockge.kuma.pet/
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And unstable for novices that have no clue what they are working with OS wise. The virt-manager is easy for most Desktop folks looking to drop Win11 in a frozen backing-image sandbox with a local samba folder loop-back mount (allows fake network share in Win11 or MacOS guest OS.) =3
As I had zero plans on moving to Windows 11, I was looking into which distros are popular nowadays over the past few weeks. Today, I tried Cachy OS and Aurora(non-gaming version of Bazzite) in VirtualBox and after 5 minutes I knew that after 30 years of using a computer with windows(dos, then w95 and onward) Linux is still not there yet on the desktop. I just can't believe how they still can't get the utmost basic things right. Yet here we are. And yes, you can game on linux nowadays, finally! Even get better performance due to Windows bloat. Office, OBS, internet, video...everything is working...yet it still is not there in usability. To be specific what irked me today when I tested them was installing new programs. On Cachy, I wanted to test jetbrains IDE. Last time i tested it was on suse and fedora in virtualbox last year and it worked but neither distribution was there just yet in UX. This time, I downloaded the tar version from jetbrains website. I could not open it(maybe due to it being run in live cd mode in virtualbox) or extract(no option in dir manager or decompression program) the content in Cachy. So I wanted to get 7zip but there was no linux version. Cachy has its own packages that can be opened(website) via its welcome screen(otherwise there is no program manager - no snaps, flatpacks...) and after downloading it with some arch file extension i could not install it. I could open it and see usr and bin directories but that helped me fuckall and i was not willing to tinker with this bs in 2026. Then in Aurora, it has bazaar for flatpacks, before i wasted bandwidth to download the IDE in vain again i preemptively wanted zip manager, there was pea..something. So i clicked install, it did and .. nothing. Nowhere to be found. Tried multiple times and no result. Could not find it anywhere. So I said F that and am sticking with the indian windows spyware. The devil you know and whatnot.
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You seem to have missed a couple of things that have caused you a bit of a headache here, I'm hoping I can encourage you to try again with a little bit of info. I've been using Linux for as long as it has existed, I'm also a backend-dev that works on a Linux machine and targets Linux-based platforms for deployment, even my kids use Linux. Windows went downhill for me after about Windows 2000 and Linux has only gotten better. > yet it still is not there in usability I want to wholeheartedly disagree with you. Nothing comes close to Linux in terms of usability for me, but a lot of it is about what you're used to, I've used Window's, I've used Mac, Mac I could live with, but I'll never intentionally use Windows again. > To be specific what irked me today when I tested them was installing new programs. On Cachy, I wanted to test jetbrains IDE Ok, let's begin; this one is partly JetBrains' fault, and partly yours. You can open a terminal and type `paru jetbrains-toolbox`, hit enter a couple of times and it's installed. Don't know what `paru` is? I recommend reading the frankly excellent documentation from CachyOS[0]. > or extract(no option in dir manager or decompression program) the content in Cachy You didn't specify which Desktop Environment you chose, this is important when helping newcomers because each comes with its own set of tools; but in Gnome's (what I use) the file manager, called Nautilus, I can right-click almost any archive type and will be presented with "Extract", "Extract to..." as well as a few other options. I just looked up how KDE does it, in case you're using that, the file manager is called Dolphin, and apparently you might need to install an archive tool first such as Ark and/or 7zip, gotta give you that one, I'm a little shocked, that's a pretty shitty OOBE in my opinion, but a quick search and you'll now probably be confused because the solution is here[1] but they say to use `apt install...` which you don't have on an Arch based distro. But once you know what the file managers you do have access to are, it should be easier. > So I wanted to get 7zip but there was no linux version There certainly _is_ a Linux version. `paru 7zip` and I get at least 3 legit options; the base package, an architecture optimised package, and a GUI for it, as well as a dozen or two community options. You can also try the standard arch package manager aptly named "pacman"; `sudo pacman -S 7zip` and it installs it for me after I hit enter to confirm, don't even need to choose the package. Wtf is `sudo`? That's how Administrator is typically done in Linux. > Cachy has its own packages that can be opened(website) via its welcome screen(otherwise there is no program manager - no snaps, flatpacks On Gnome there is "Software" which supports Flatpaks as well as other package types; don't worry about snaps, you don't want them, and there's Octopi from CachyOS. In KDE there's a GUI called "Discover". There are a bunch of others such as Bazaar which you mentioned. Usability really isn't an issue in Linux once you know the way of your distro; If you're used to Windows, then it's _different_, sure, and in that case I'd suggest taking an hour to read the CachyOS docs; Arch Wiki (CachyOS is based on Arch) is also an amazing resource for all things Linux, and learn a little about how software management is different, we don't (usually) pull random crap from websites, we install from package managers, and sometimes compile the source ourselves. If you didn't choose one of the two DEs I've mentioned (Gnome, KDE), I'd recommend giving them a go, they're both very mature and usable. If you're into Discord, I can suggest hitting up the CachyOS or another distro's Discord servers, there's lots of helpful people there willing to help, if you had any other questions give me a shout. [0] https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/navigation-guide/ [1] https://discuss.kde.org/t/how-to-add-extract-here-right-click-option-to-dolphin-file-manager/41389
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Thanks for your review of five minutes of using Linux after 30 years of Windows use. Sorry to hear that zero effort didn't work out, but what can you do.. it's just not ready for the desktop. Enjoy Windows 11.
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>So I wanted to get 7zip but there was no linux version. Maybe Cachy don't have 7z, I don't know. But Arch (its base) has it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/7-Zip , and I never had any trouble opening 7zips in any Linux either from console or any graphical tool.
I was also planning on testing zorin, pop os, maybe nobara, and fedora and suse again, but it felt like it would be a waste of time.
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All distro hopping eventually leads to Debian.
After you get frustreted having to use the terminal to make Ubuntu work, try Fedora. Ubuntu is outdated linux, it part of Debian-family, which goes by the misleading name 'stable'. Its not stable like a table. Its stable like software versions are frozen, despite bugs being fixed. Fedora isnt Arch, I think most Debian-family users don't realize they are unrelated. Fedora is just well maintained and generally up to date.
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for 'rolling stable' openSuse is also worth mentioning
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Does it come with the latest Linux kernel?
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I tried using Linux 5 years ago - too difficult to learn terminal commands to configfure everythiong. Tried again a few months ago and it's a breeze with an llm creating all the commands and code and troubleshooting. eg vibe coded a text transcriber similar to windows Voice Typing.
I started using Linux desktops around 2012, and always used Debian-based distros (Mostly Debian, Ubunutu, and Mint). I switched to Fedora this year, and I've been super pleasantly surprised. There are some sharp edges (Mostly due to Wayland and Flatpaks), but I don't think I'll be going back to Debian any time soon. Things seem way more stable than on Ubuntu.
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That's really interesting. A problem I've been having with Ubuntu is just quirky things with bluetooth devices and a monitor that doesn't always get recognized when waking the pc up from sleep. In your experience, does Fedora handle these better than Ubuntu?
Right, cause latest packages bring only latest features and bug fixes and never bring new bugs, do you ever wonder how those bugs that the latest packages fix get in ? I recommend for people that want things to not change and not get new bugs every update to use an LTS distro like Kubuntu and only get latest kernels or drivers from a PPA or upstream if you really have to. I am not running the latest KDE stuff and I feel fine, I am not suffering in pain for some cool new feature in Plasma and some new bug, I am comfortable with the existing features and existing bugs.
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I've tried debian variants many times over the years. However, my actual experience has been one of struggles with outdated software, knowing that the fix I need is just out of reach. Trying to pull in some of these fixes from a PPA often leads to a dependency mess. I'm sure I could deal with it better if I took the time, but I just want to do the thing I want to do. The other "reason" to use Debian is the supposed large user base and community support. But I've found more often than not that many of the solutions to my problems are outdated or don't work for whatever reason. Ironically, my best experience so far in that regard is an arch variant (CachyOS). That said, people shouldn't be afraid of experimenting to find the best software for their purposes, and something like Linux Mint is still a great option to recommend to people who are new to Linux.
Any would-be switchers, note these are 2 very different things. Self-Hosting sucks, period. For a million reasons that have nothing to do with the OS :) Trying both at once is going to be exponentially more painful than doing either alone.
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Hot take alert! As an avid self-hoster, I'd like to hear why. Personally, I self host because the benefits I receive simply aren't available anywhere else at the level of quality I've come to expect - Jellyfin is a great media player, it's free, and I don't want to switch. Pihole provides ad protection and privacy for my whole home network. It's also free. Homeassistant is amazing, and free. Etc etc.
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> It's also free. Only if you don't care about your time or if your media collection is tiny. Don't get me wrong, I love my 20 TB hard drives full of Linux ISOs, but it's a hard sell on anyone who doesn't have 'dicking about with computers' as their hobby. Regular old piracy using torrents has been a easier sell in my experience, once you can get over the hurdle of getting someone familiar with using a torrent client and the relevant search bar. Popcorn Time back in the day made that hurdle trivial. Getting people to use Jellyfin isn't hard. Getting someone to be the family/friend group Jellyfin sysadmin is a significantly tougher sell. Pihole and the like is an easier sell, since it can be mostly set and forget, but it's not free unless you already have a computer which isn't doing anything, and even if you do, that computer isn't guaranteed to be one which has near-zero running costs when you factor in electricity. The same sorts of problems apply to most things you can self-host.
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I think it’s fair to say it depends on what you are hosting and why - personal projects and curiosities, fun! Self hosting business critical data and customer data, minefield! Currently self hosting some little projects, using cloudflare tunnels to serve to the web, and it is surprisingly fun and efficient!
It is painful but I would say it is also rewarding as I learned a lot doing it!
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I love learning that stuff too, until I learn what it takes to maintain it. At least internet facing stuff. I fully gave up on email a decade ago. That alone crushed all my excitement for the general idea. I have a local media server, but it's also just my main desktop.
Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built (simonwillison.net)
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rodney seems to be pretty much the same as agent-browser: https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser
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Hah! I hadn't seen that one before. Yeah, the CLI design is very similar. Main difference is Rodney can be installed as a single Go binary or via uv/pip, agent-browser is Rust and npm.
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I can't wait for tools that allow agents to hold stand-ups, retrospectives and sprint planning sessions, all facilitated by an agentic scrum master.
Google handed ICE student journalist's bank and credit card numbers (theintercept.com)
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> on tech companies to resist similar subpoenas in the future from DHS without court intervention. Haha nice one, these tech companies are willing to have a deal with devil to get those lucrative Gov contracts, and since it’s the the wild west now in the US, the only action users can do is abandoning all these tech companies and look for alternatives.
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"Google complies with federal warrant", more news at 11
care to explain how you got added to it? what happened then? did you fight it?
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See the other comment. > did you fight it? I talked to university lawyers (and LLMs) regarding another issue with DHS. For the sake of national security, they have the legal authority. There isn't much I can do. Unless I can prove they discriminated against me due to my race, national origin, etc. -- which may be the case but how can I prove that. I requested FOIA from DOS/DHS. What I got was basically no more than the original applications I submitted.
So I don't think I actually have a problem with businesses handing over their customer data if there is a valid warrant or subpoena. That's the system working as intended. The main crux of the problem here is that the DHS has been granted a wide berth by congress to issue administrative subpoenas - i.e. not reviewed by a real judge and not directed at criminals. In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly. But the reality now is that ICE is doing wide dragnets to make arrests without any judicial oversight and often hostile to habeas corpus. (Also, my understanding is that when banking is involved, it may also fall under the Banking Secrecy Act and Know Your Customer Rules - a whole other privacy nightmare.) I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem, but the real problem we need congress to act on is abolishing these "shadow" justice systems that agencies have been able to set up.
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> I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem I think it is, but I think this is a more fundamental level of privacy than most people are thinking of when they think of privacy > In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly. Privacy people often talk about a concept called "Turnkey Tyranny". Really a reference to Jefferson's "elective despotism". The concept is that because any democracy can vote themselves into an autocracy (elective despotism) that the danger is the creation of that power in the first place. That you don't give Mr Rogers (or some other benevolent leader) any power that you wouldn't give to Hitler (or any horrifying leader). Or as Jefferson put it The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered. > but the real problem we need congress to act So no, that is not the "real problem". They should be involved but there are more fundamental issues at hand. Power creeps. Power creeps with good intention. But there is a strong bias for power to increase and not decrease. And just like power creep in a movie or videogame it doesn't go away and can ruin everything. Jefferson himself writes a lot about this tbh. It is why we have a system of checks and balances. Where the government treats itself adversarially. But this is also frustrating and makes things slow. So... power creeps. So the real problem we need to solve is educating the populous. They need to understand these complexities and nuances. If they do not, they will unknowingly trade their freedom to quench their fears. And this is why it is a privacy problem. Because we the people should always treat our government adversarially. Even in the "good times". Especially in the "good times". The founders of the US constitution wrote extensively about this, much like the privacy advocates write today. I think they would be more likely to take the position of "why collect this information in the first place?" than "under what conditions should this information be collected?". Both are important questions, but the latter should only come after the former. Both are about privacy. Privacy of what is created vs privacy of what is accessed.
You obviously don't live in the EU, UK.
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Kingdoms ain't freeeeeeeeedomzszzz!
DHS/ICE is in a weird constitutional spot. Most immigration violations in the US are _civil_ violations. So the Fourth Amendment is less applicable. It's also why detained immigrants don't automatically get the right to be represented by a lawyer. ICE/DHS technically are just acting as marshals, merely ensuring that defendants appear at court proceedings and then enforcing court decisions (deportations).
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It's not really that the 4th amendment is less applicable, it's that the procedural protections are lower in civil proceedings. I think it's a pretty big undersell to describe ICE as "marshals" too - they've got plenty of discretion in how they prioritize targeted people and who they detain. They are not just a neutral party executing court orders.
From my point of view it looks like the right only protests when it’s not their side. That’s why Al franken resigned for a dumb photo, meanwhile republicans protect pedophile traffickers.
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I would say that both sides have that view. Most people are in a bubble and are unaware of what their tribe is doing. I may be wrong but I think there have been Republicans who have resigned for extra-marital sex. While we are screaming about the current POTS and his relation with Jeffery, we gave Bill Clinton a platform to speak during the 2024 Convention. When I bring that up, I get told "It's important that we beat Trump." The Epstein was arrested in 2019, the files have been in the hands of both Democrats and Republicans. Neither group really looks like they want to prosecute anyone further; only use accusations that their opponents are in there to galvanize their base.
Follow the law. As a guest in a country, treat your host with respect. Do not support terrorist groups.
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Terrorist groups like the Proud Boys and other Jan. 6ers?
Wild guess: You like Apple more than Google. I only guessed that because that is a strange conclusion to draw when Apple was involved in PRISM, they worked with China to black pro- democracy hong kong apps, and I believe they turned over data to China and Russia. Apple's PR/marketing is best in class, so I can also see this just being a knowledge level error rather than bias.
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You don't have to like Apple to recognize that they take a materially different stance from Google when it comes to user privacy. Take this, for example: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102630 You can trivially disable web access to your data; at that point, Apple literally does not have the keys to your end-to-end encrypted data and cannot read or disclose it.
Alternatively, use them pseudonymously? There's little reason any of these companies need to know your real identity. This will both reduce the likelihood of ICE finding your account from a real-life interaction, as well as reduce the likelihood of ICE finding your real-life identity if they do get your account data (they'd at least need to dig through it more than just going by first/last name on the account itself).
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> (they'd at least need to dig through it more than just going by first/last name on the account itself). FYI this is beyond trivial and automated to the nth degree. There is so much more to go off of than some form fields to uniquely identify a person.
We're on the forum where people are most capable of doing this for themselves. And if your company uses GMail that is less than ideal for de-Googling, but it does not meaningfully impact the benefits of de-Googling your personal life. Refusing to run all your search history, personal transactions, and correspondences through one of the fascist state's pet companies is still beneficial.
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If you use a work google profile on your home network, tied to your real name, it definitely affects your personal life
Just out of curiosity. Are there any companies today that are seen the way Google used to be seen, as a generally “good” corporation/companies that are also a important player? Maybe Mozilla Foundation?
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There are exactly zero organizations that will refuse to comply with subpoenas and warrants. It isn't up to business to fix the national government.
The "net" refers here to "the good that Google does" (e.g., some pretty impressive networking research) is outweighed by "the bad that Google does," such as the linked article. Nothing is pure evil or pure good. Gauging where on the scale a person or group lies is really hard, and subjective. So, I try and keep score on the big players, but understand that my judgement is fallible.
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Oh I understand what you meant by net negative, I was more curious about the thing's you perceive negatively. I myself consider them net neutral but the trend itself is negative.
According to this article, it is treated as a request and often denied by the company. The target of the warrant did go to court to quash it, but that was already after Google declined to share the information. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/02/03/homeland-security-administrative-subpoena/ edit: it appears that either 1. the Washington Post is printing misinformation, or 2. I have made a grave misinterpretation.
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I think that is a different case though.
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I mean, it is BezPost.
They changed the motto to "do the right thing", because, apparently "evil" is too ambiguous. "Do the right thing" is more suitable motto for a company whos CEO was a buddy of Epstein. Tech CEOs helped get Trump elected and strengthen ICE regime to protect the billionaires, they were all involved.
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That was really their argument? Quite contrary, the "right thing" is the ambiguous one. I think that most people agree what is evil. Certainly much more than what is right.
London's most controversial cyclist (the-londoner.co.uk)
I lean toward your understanding of the topic but experience discomfort toward your framing, which implies a desire or at least apathy to the harm of this Youtuber. This content creator is undoubtedly seeking conflicts with people and shrouding it in concerns for traffic safety. Furthermore, most driving fatalities are spatially correlated— road design influences driver behavior more than other factors. However, there is merit to noxious individuals raising an issue to the level of public consciousness. It is also possible that the trajectory of traffic calming measures is already good in the UK and would not benefit from additional public exposure.
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> experience discomfort toward your framing, which implies a desire or at least apathy to the harm of this Youtuber. Apathy certainly, because: > This content creator is undoubtedly seeking conflicts with people and shrouding it in concerns for traffic safety. My attitude then, is that whatever happens he brought on himself.
If no one deserves points for checking a phone briefly while a vehicle is stopped at a red light, then either the police can decide not to act on video footage showing someone doing this, or the law should be changed.
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Sure, the law should be changed, and I'm sure the police frequently do decide to ignore it. But then you have this dipshit vigilante endangering himself, causing tension and handing them a free win (i.e. free money), so of course they take it.
I agree. Which is why the second scenario should be considered in your analysis of this Youtuber, not just the first.
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If he was only harassing people who were actually a danger, there wouldn't be much to complain about. But he isn't, he'll harass whoever he can for clicks and ego.
Fast personal transportation is so high utility that people will dismiss many externalities. If you offered teleportation anywhere in the world except it would pick a random African and kill him at a 1E-6 to 1E-4 chance (depending on your skill at Tetris while being teleported), I suspect many in the West would do it without a question.
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If you spent an hour watching traffic in Lagos, Nigeria, you'd see that West Africans themselves value the utility of personal transportation above the safety of their neighbors on the road.
Bet you'd be fun in 1940's germany.
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You're comparing someone reporting a person using a mobile phone while driving to the atrocities committed by Nazis?
You made two claims, and provided no evidence that one is related to the other.
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Yours is the most elegant refutation of the parent post.
The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday (campedersen.com)
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LLM slop article.
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I don’t feel like reading what is probably AI generated content. But based on looking at the model fits where hyperbolic models are extrapolating from the knee portion, having 2 data points fitting a line, poor model fit in general, etc, im going to say this is not a very good prediction methodology. Sure is a lot of words though :)
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With this kind of scientific rigour, the author could also prove that his aunt is a green parakeet.
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Does "tokens per dollar" have a "moore's law" of doubling? Because while machine-learning is not actually "AI" an exponential increase in tokens per dollar would indeed change the world like smartphones once did
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Why is finiteness emphasized for polynomial growth, while infinity is emphasized for exponential growth??? I don't think your AI-generated content is reliable, to say the least.
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Will.. will it be televised ?
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It was GMT, wasn't it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVO7GAwxnQ
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That was rather good.
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The Singularity as a cultural phenomenon (rather than some future event that may or may not happen or even be possible) is proof that Weber didn't know what he was talking about. Modern (and post-modern) society isn't disenchanted, the window dressing has just changed
Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop. Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator goes to zero. x(t)→∞x(t)→∞. Not a bug. The feature. Classic LLM lingo in the end there.
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I don't think people realize how crazy this all is (and might become)
> The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750? There's a third possibility: slop driven productivity declines as people realize they took a wrong turn. Which makes me wonder: what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?
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> what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade? Things that will lose the most if we get Super AGI?
Guys, yesterday I spent some time convincing an LLM model from a leading provider that 2 cards plus 2 cards is 4 cards which is one short of a flush. I think we are not too close to a singularity, as it stands.
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You convince AI manually instead of asking one AI to convince another? That's so last week!
Great article, super fun. > In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory. You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm. It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.
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> Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Well for starters the population has almost 3x since the 1960s. Mix in that we are solving different problems than the 1960s, even administratively and I don’t see a clear reason from that argument why a shitload of work is meaningless.
Lol. Speak for yourself, AI has not diminished my thinking in any material way and has indeed accelerated my ability to learn. Anyone predicting the "end of humanity" is playing prophet and echoing the same nonsensical prophecies we heard with the invention of the printing press, radio, TV, internet, or a number of other step-change technologies. There's a false premise built into the assertion that humanity can even end - it's not some static thing, it's constantly evolving and changing into something else.
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A large number of people read a work of fiction and conclude that what happened in the work of fiction is an inevitability. My family has a genetically-selected baby (to avoid congenital illness) and the Hacker News link to the story had these comments all over it. > I only know seven sci-fi films and shows that have warned about how this will go badly. and > Pretty sure this was the prologue to Gattaca. and > I posted a youtube link to the Gattaca prologue in a similar post on here. It got flagged. Pretty sure it's virtually identical to the movie's premise. I think the ironic thing in the LLM case is that these people have outsourced their reasoning to a work of fiction and now are simple deterministic parrots of pop culture. There is some measure of humor in that. One could see this as simply inter-LLM conflict with the smaller LLMs attempting to fight against the more capable reasoning models ineffectively.
[dead]
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It's based on this paper BTW: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
A better approach is to make AI bullshit people on purpose.
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This is essentially just that. The idea is that "poisoned" input data will cause AIs that consume it to become more likely to produce bullshit.
Much better sources of iron are available. More likely we get smooshed unintentionally as they AIs seek those out.
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We need it all... oh, wait, you're not silicon... sluuuuuurrrrpp...
This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordingly. It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) and pivoted to the social arguments instead (“here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad ”). Folks vibe with the latter, less with the former. Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.
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> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. We've already been here in the 1980s. The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony Robbins.
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Isn't talking about "here’s how LLMs actually work" in this context a bit like saying "a human can't be a relevant to X because a brain is only a set of molecules, neurons, synapses"? Or even "this book won't have any effect on the world because it's only a collection of letters, see here, black ink on paper, that is what is IS, it can't DO anything"... Saying LLM is a statistical prediction engine of the next token is IMO sort of confusing what it is with the medium it is expressed in/built of. What's interesting about LLM is the emergent behavior from what the weights end up encoding. Yes, it's statistical prediction of likely next tokens, but the compression scheme involved in getting that encoded in the weights available clearly does have a side-effect of wiring up some kind of "intelligence" (for reasonable everyday definitions of the word "intelligence")
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I don’t think you’re rational. Part of being able to be unbiased is to see it in yourself. First of all. Nobody knows how LLMs work. Whether the singularity comes or not cannot be rationalized from what we know about LLMs because we simply don’t understand LLMs. This is unequivocal. I am not saying I don’t understand LLMs. I’m saying humanity doesn’t understand LLMs in much the same way we don’t understand the human brain. So saying whether the singularity is imminent or not imminent based off of that reasoning alone is irrational. The only thing we have is the black box output and input of AI. That input and output is steadily improving every month. It forms a trendline, and the trendline is sloped towards singularity. Whether the line actually gets there is up for question but you have to be borderline delusional if you think the whole thing can be explained away because you understand LLMs and transformer architecture. You don’t understand LLMs period. No one does.
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> Nobody knows how LLMs work. I'm sorry, come again?
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> prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages There's no way that'll happen. The entire history of humanity is 99% reacting to things rather than proactively preventing things or adjusting in advance, especially at the societal level. You would need a pretty strong technocracy or dictatorship in charge to do otherwise.
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You would need a new sense of self and a life free of fear, raising children where they can truly be anything they like and teach their own kids how to find meaning in a life lived well. "Best I can do is treefiddy" though..
Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well. Is there anything to be gained from following a line of reasoning that basically says LLMs are incomprehensible, full stop?
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>Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well. If you train a transformer on (only) lots and lots of addition pairs, i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021' and nothing else, the transformer will during training, discover an algorithm for addition and employ it in service of predicting the next token, which in this instance would be the result of an addition. We know this because of tedious interpretability research, the very limited problem space and the fact we knew exactly what to look for. Alright, let's leave addition aside (SOTA LLMs are after all trained on much more) and think about any other question. Any other question at all. How about something like: "Take a capital letter J and a right parenthesis, ). Take the parenthesis, rotate it counterclockwise 90 degrees, and put it on top of the J. What everyday object does that resemble?" What algorithm does GPT or Gemini or whatever employ to answer this and similar questions correctly ? It's certainly not addition. Do you Know ? No. Do the creators at Open AI or Google know ? Not at all. Can you or they find out right now ? Also No. Let's revisit your statement. "the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood". Observable, I'll give you that, but how on earth can you look at the above and sincerely call that 'well-understood' ? Has the meaning of well understood changed and I was simply not made aware ?
This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument. I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.
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The "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969 "Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019
What percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual problems these days?
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In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor. In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable. How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?
> We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token. Maybe you don't. To be clear, this is benefiting massively from hindsight, just as how if I didn't know that combustion engines worked, I probably wouldn't have dreamed up how to make one, but the emergent conversational capabilities from LLMs are pretty obvious. In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question. A normal conversational reply is the most common thing to follow a conversation opener. While impressive, these things aren't magic.
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If such a simplistic explanation was true, LLM's would only be able to answer things that had been asked before, and where at least a 'fuzzy' textual question/answer match was available. This is clearly not the case. In practice you can prompt the LLM with such a large number of constraints, so large that the combinatorial explosion ensures no one asked that before. And you will still get a relevant answer combining all of those. Think combinations of features in a software request - including making some module that fits into your existing system (for which you have provided source) along with a list of requested features. Or questions you form based on a number of life experiences and interests that combined are unique to you. You can switch programming language, human language, writing styles, levels as you wish and discuss it in super esoteric languages or morse code. So are we to believe this answers appear just because there happened to be similar questions in the training data where a suitable answer followed? Even if for the sake of argument we accept this explanation by "proximity of question/answer", it is immediately that this would have to rely on extreme levels of abstraction and mixing and matching going on inside the LLM. And that it is then this process that we need to explain how works, whereas the textual proximity you invoke relies on this rather than explaining it.
The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely At least that’s my personal goal If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrilled As it stands today and in all the annals of history there does not exist a system that does what I just described. Be labs existed for the purpose of bell telephone…until it wasn’t needed by Bell anymore. Google moonshots existed for the shareholders of Google …until it was not uselful for capital. All the work done at Sandia and white sands labs did it in order to promote the power of the United States globally. Find me some egalitarian organization that can persist outside of the hands of some massive corporation or some government that can actually help people and I might give somebody a chance but that does not exist And no mondragon does not have one of these
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Nobody can stop you from having this view, I suppose. But what gives you the right to impose this (lack of) future on billions of humans with friends and families and ambitions and interests who, to say the least, would not be in favor of “human obviation”?
I just point to Covid lockdowns and how many people took up hobbies, how many just turned into recluses, how many broke the rules no matter the consequences real or imagined, etc. Humans need something to do. I don’t think it should be work all the time. But we need something to do or we just lose it. It’s somewhat simplistic, but I find it get the conversation rolling. Then I go “it’s great that we want to replace work but what are we going to do instead and how will we support ourselves?” It’s a real question!
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It's true people need something to do, but I don't think the COVID shutdown (lockdowns didn't happen in the U.S. for the most part though they did in other countries) is a good comparison because the entire society was perfused with existential dread and fear of contact with another human being while the death count was rising and rising by thousands a day. It's not a situation that makes for comfortable comparisons because people were losing their damn minds and for good reason.
FWIW, you'd probably be able to buy a lot of goods and services for $7/day, if robots were doing literally all the work.
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Agreed. The quality of life bar will be higher for sure. But it will still technically be a "subsistence" lifestyle, with no prospect of improvement. Perhaps that will suffice for most people? We're going to find out.
It seems pretty obvious to me the ruling class is preparing for war to keep us occupied, just like in the 20s, they'll make young men and women so poor they'll beg to fight in a war. It makes one wonder what they expect to come out the other side of such a late-stage/modern war, but I think what they care about is that there will be less of us.
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Boy, will they be annoyed if the result of the AI race will be something considerably less than AGI, so all the people are still needed to keep numbers go up.
> the state is usually a much more sloppy investor I don’t find this to be true The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment. Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.
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State agencies are often good at choosing right long-term targets. State agencies are often bad at the actual procurement, because of the pork-barrelling and red tape. E.g. both private companies and NASA agree that spaceflight is a worthy target, but NASA ends up with the Space Shuttle (a nice design ruined by various committees) and SLS, while private companies come up with Falcon-9.
> Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA. Be careful. The data does not confirm that narrative. You mentioned the 1950s, which is a poignant example of reality conflicting with sponsored narrative. Pre WOII, the wealthy class orbiting the monopolists, and by extension their installed politicians, had no other ideas than to keep lowering taxes for the rich on and on, even if it only deepened the endless economic crisis. Many of them had fallen in the trap of believing their own narratives, something we know as the Cult of Wealth. Meanwhile, average Americans lived on food stamps. Politically deadlocked in quasi-religious ideas of "bad governments versus wise business men", America kept falling deeper. Meanwhile, with just 175,000 serving on active duty, the U.S. Army was the 18th biggest in the world[1], poorly equipped, poorly trained. Right wing isolationism had brought the country in a precarious position. Then two things happened. Roosevelt and WOII. In a unique moment, the state took matters in their own hands. The sheer excellence in planning, efficiency, speed and execution of the state baffled the republicans, putting the oligarchic model of the economy to shame. The economy grew tremendously as well, something the oligarchy could not pull of. It is not well-known that WOII depended largely on state-operated industries, because the former class quickly understood how much the state's performance threatened their narratives. So they invested in disinformation campaigns, claiming the efforts and achievements of the government as their own. 1. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/06/how-world-war-ii-almost-broke-american-politics-227090/
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BTW the New Deal tried central planning and quickly rejected it. I'd say that the intense application of the antitrust law in the late 1930s was a key factor that helped end the Great Depression. The war, and wartime government powers, were also key: the amount of federal government overreach and and reforms do not compare to what e.g. the second Trump administration has attempted. It was mostly done by people who got their positions in the administration more due to merit and care about the country than loyalty, and it showed. The post-war era, under Truman and Eisenhower administrations, reaped the benefits of the US being the wealthiest and most intact winner of WWII. At that time, the highest income tax rate bracket was 91%, but the effective rate was below 50%.
> It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it. The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence. If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software, we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the 1950s look like table stakes.
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Are you sure that in today's reality the fruits of the AI race will be harvested by "the people"?
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> The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence. There is no early mover advantage in AI in the same way that there was in all the other industries. That's the one thing that AI proponents in general seem not to have clued in to. What will happen is that it eventually drags everything down because it takes the value out of the bulk of the service and knowledge economies. So you'll get places that are 'ahead' in the disruption. But the bottom will fall out of the revenue streams, which is one of the reasons these companies are all completely panicked and are wrecking the products that they had to stuff AI in there in every way possible hoping that one of them will take. Model training is only an edge in a world where free models do not exist, once those are 'good enough' good luck with your AI and your rapidly outdated hardware. The typical investors horizon is short, but not that short.
Ok here: Everything from the semiconductor through the vacuum cleaner, automobile, airplanes and steam engines was developed to give a small group an advantage over all the other groups. It has always been the case, it will always be the case. Fundamentally, at the root nature of humanity, humans do not care about the externalities, either good or bad.
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Vacuum cleaner -> sell appliances -> sell electric motors But there was a clear advantage in quality of life for a lot of people too. Automobile -> part of industrialization of transport -> faster transport, faster world Arguably also a big increase in quality of life but it didn't scale that well and has also reduced the quality of life. If all that money had gone into public transport then that would likely have been a lot better. Airplanes -> yes, definitely, but they were also clearly seen as an advantage in war, in fact that was always a major driver behind inventions. Steam engine -> the mother of all prime movers and the beginnings of the fossil fuel debacle (coal). Definitely a quality of life change but also the cause of the bigger problems we are suffering from today. The 'coffin corner' (one of my hobby horses) is a real danger, we have, as a society, achieved a certain velocity, if we slow down too much we will crash, if we speed up the plane will come apart. Managing these transitions is extremely delicate work and it does not look as though 'delicate' is in the vocabulary of a lot of people in the driving seats.
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That's a slightly odd way of looking at it. I'm guessing the people developing airplanes or whatever thought of a number of things including - hey this would be cool to do - and - maybe we can make some money - and - maybe this will help people travel - and - maybe it'll impress the girls - and probably some other things too. At least that's roughly how I've thought when I make stuff, never this will give a small group an advantage.
I find it interesting that this is the conclusion you draw from this. I won’t go into a discussion on the efficacy of the various mandates and policies in reducing spread of the disease. Rather, I think it’s worth pointing out that a significant portion of the proponents of these policies likely supported them not because of a desire to follow the authority but because they sincerely believed that a (for them) relatively small sacrifice in personal freedom could lead to improved outcomes for their fellow humans. For them, it was never about blindly following authority or virtue signalling. It was only ever about doing what they perceived as the right thing to do.
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So if the arguments are rooted in medical reasons, it's okay to be inhumane? Nazi propaganda argued that getting rid of Jews helped prevent the spread of diseases, because we all know that Jews are disease carriers. See how slippery the slope is here? Certainly you have seen the MAGA folks point out the measles outbreaks are coming from illegal immigrants, right? I am quite sure that people felt justified in their reasoning for their behavior. That just shows how effective the propaganda was, how easy it is to get people to fall in line. If it was a matter of voluntary self sacrifice of personal freedoms, I wouldn't have made this comment. People decided to demonize anyone who did not agree with the "medical authority", especially doctors or researchers that did not tow the party line. They ruined careers, made people feel awful, and online the behavior was worse because how easy it was to pile on. Over stuff that is still to this day not very clear cut what the optimal strategy is for dealing with infectious disease.
Semaglutide improves knee osteoarthritis independant of weight loss (cell.com)
I wonder if the real problem is that we are really sick, and we just don't realize it: weight and eating too much processed food, so anything that improve these 2 aspects has also a lot of uncorrelated benefits.
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We don’t see lots of stories about how dieting causes cartilage to grow back.
That kind of damage takes many years. Do you have scans from prior years? I also discovered I have arthritis in the ankle recently and there were no pain symptoms, only joint instability and issues higher up on the leg. This was probably caused by either genetics or ankle trauma from childhood that eventually reared its head in my 30s.
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My last x-ray in 11/2022 was perfect. Good joint spacing and no degenerative changes. That's over 3 years ago now though. One thing I think changed for me was that I switched to WFH full-time and wearing crocs all day. My arches subsequently collapsed. I have joint stiffness now as well, but the x-ray didn't show anything so I think it's perhaps sinus tarsi pain from the compression due to over-pronation.
One thing we have to remember is that we don’t know the long term effects of these things. Just like we don’t know the long term effects of the MMR 2. The first infants vaccinated with that are only in their fifties or early sixties. For all we know, the measles vaccine insta-kills people at 70. We don’t know anything. We are complete ignorant floating through the void. If I drop a rock and it falls I cannot tell if the next rock I drop will fall. We can’t know. We are unknowing. Anything could happen.
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Good point. Perhaps if you take them for 40 years, you become biologically immortal. Who can really say?
The most surprising effect of Mounjaro, at least initially was that it drastically reduced by desire to drink beer, and when I started, my drinking was at a very unhealthy level (beer calories being a major factor in my weight problem). But maybe I'm an odd case, as I had a real beer habit but don't like wine and very rarely touched spirits. Actually losing some weight as well as cutting my drinking down, helped me with depression far more than SSRIs (which had previously led to even faster weight gain) Unfortunately, the effects started to diminish somewhat after about a year on it, as if I was building up a bit of a tolerance to the drug. And then I switched to Wegovy (=Ozempic) after big UK price hikes to Mounjaro, and found it much less effective, started gaining weight again (winter/xmas didn't help). Switching back to Mounjaro at the moment, but having to slowly step back up from a lower dose. Not expecting to see the initial near-miraculous effects again, expecting to have to combine it with some actual willpower and more exercise going forwards.
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I've had a similar experience where I'd be craving a beer, but not really craving alcohol since wine or spirits didn't sound appealing at all. I think it might actually be the hops and not the alcohol. I don't know if it's common in the UK, but in the US, a lot of breweries have started making hop water. I've found that it can really scratch that itch. Even just a hop tea might work if you can't find pre-made hop water. It sounds weird, but it's actually delicious with nice floral and citrus notes and just enough bitterness that you don't drink it too quickly.
Can you give some examples? And are those reliable?
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Not an example, but maybe this is interesting for folks who haven't really heard of the peptide business before. https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/feb/05/injectable-peptides-trend
I noticed that just in the past two hours you have provided detailed skepticism/commentary in these topics: - Semaglutide - App addiction for kids - Fake news via tiktok I guess what I'm asking is: are you really going deep, or just blasting us with links?
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I only provided examples in case there was any doubt that failure to disclose ties to the pharmaceutical industry was a known and large scale problem after the suggestion that it was some kind of conspiracy theory. Skepticism in the case of these drug companies is warranted. As for the variety of the things I've commented on, I can only blame procrastination and the contents of the front page. I got a lot more work done monday afternoon, I promise.
Stomach paralysis is apparently a known side effect [1]. There are also lots of anecdotes about lesser (but still foul) digestive surprises that are too unpleasant for me to bother elaborating on here. I was on my thiccboi swag for the latter half of last year and am presently working it off by rebuilding my fitness base with kettlebells and cardio. I'd rather do this than GLP-1s not because I'm some sort of iron-willed badass so much as I'm simply distrustful of anything that messes with one's metabolism so severely. While these drugs are useful for the morbidly obese and diabetics I simply can't imagine how or why anybody would go on them for aesthetic or off-label purposes. [1] https://www.webmd.com/obesity/ozempic-and-stomach-paralysis
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>Stomach paralysis is apparently a known side effect [1]. There are also lots of anecdotes about lesser (but still foul) digestive surprises that are too unpleasant for me to bother elaborating on here. These are real, but they're also not permanent, and are why you start on a low dose to evaluate how your body reacts to the medication. My spouse is a long time GLP-1 user (coming up on four years now) and had mild (or more) bouts of several of these digestive related systems. However, within six months these had greatly diminished. And by the one year mark, even at the highest dose, they were essentially gone and have remained a non-issue since. You should certainly be mindful of side effects, and follow the recommended dosage scale up, which should be monitored by your doctor. >I was on my thiccboi swag for the latter half of last year and am presently working it off by rebuilding my fitness base with kettlebells and cardio. I'd rather do this than GLP-1s not because I'm some sort of iron-willed badass so much as I'm simply distrustful of anything that messes with one's metabolism so severely. While these drugs are useful for the morbidly obese and diabetics I simply can't imagine how or why anybody would go on them for aesthetic or off-label purposes. I do think folks with obesity fall into one of two camps (or somewhere on a spectrum between): those that are in that place because they don't put in any effort, eat whatever they want, don't workout, and so on. And then there are folks like my spouse. They were able to lose weight in the past, but only through continued suffering. To be "just" overweight, they needed to be working out constantly and in a state of always feeling hungry. They never reached an equilibrium where it wasn't agony to maintain that weight, and after months/years would always rebound. For them, a GLP-1 was the only thing that ever quieted the food noise. They workout constantly still and are in the best shape of their life. It wasn't entirely the GLP-1, but that gave them the tool to quiet the noise and get to a state where fitness could be fun/sustainable, and now they're killing it. So, the TL;DR is that some people need this tool, and it's not necessarily an either/or. It can be one part in a series of positive changes that lead to better health and well-being.
> I'm not too sure what you're referring to with a "write off day". Some people aren't comfortable leaving the house when their rear is flowing like Niagara Falls.
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Oh wow that sounds like the opposite issue! I've only had the other problem where it's not coming out. It's funny how medications can cause issues where they constipate people, but then also have the opposite problem where they make people have diahrea.
> Not really This made me actually laugh. A drug that cures obesity and addiction alone would be a wonder drug. This one also improves about a hundred odd immune disorders, including being a better general allergy drug than just about anything. My own extremely rare and terribly painful immune disorder is basically entirely cured by it - it completely changed my life, making even sleeping far better. But not just me, I have friends who have lifelong terrible allergies gone, lifelong pack-a-day smoking addictions completely gone , and so on... "Not really" is truly either the most pessimistic take I've ever heard, or hopefully just completely misinformed.
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> A drug that cures obesity and addiction alone would be a wonder drug. A drug that influences a hormone causing effects on everything that hormone is involved in shouldn't be considered a wonder drug, it should be expected functionality. It's only a wonder drug that does all these miraculous things if you think GLP-1 is only a weight management hormone. It's not, and you should expect effects anywhere it is involved in. A short list of tissues we know GLP-1 is involved in processes is: - heart - tongue - adipose tissue - muscles - bones - kidneys - liver - lungs Effects on these aren't miracles, they should be expected. I am happy to hear you saw so many improvements, but it's because you had an issue with a hormone that is involved in a lot of things in the body. So it was going to express a lot of problems. It's not surprising that you see a lot of improvements when you begin to manage the underlying cause.
Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (infinitelymore.xyz)
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I was interested in how it would make sense to define complex numbers without fixing the reals, but I'm not terribly convinced by the method here. It seemed kind of suspect that you'd reduce the complex numbers purely to its field properties of addition and multiplication when these aren't enough to get from the rationals to the reals (some limit-like construction is needed; the article uses Dedekind cuts later on). Anyway, the "algebraic conception" is defined as "up to isomorphism, the unique algebraically closed field of characteristic zero and size continuum", that is, you just declare it has the same size as the reals. And of course now you have no way to tell where π is, since it has no algebraic relation to the distinguished numbers 0 and 1. If I'm reading right, this can be done with any uncountable cardinality with uniqueness up to isomorphism. It's interesting that algebraic closure is enough to get you this far, but with the arbitrary choice of cardinality and all these "wild automorphisms", doesn't this construction just seem... defective? It feels a bit like the article's trying to extend some legitimate debate about whether fixing i versus -i is natural to push this other definition as an equal contender, but there's hardly any support offered. I expect the last-place 28% poll showing, if it does reflect serious mathematicians at all, is those who treat the topological structure as a given or didn't think much about the implications of leaving it out.
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I began studying 3-manifolds after coming up with a novel way I preferred to draw their presentations. All approaches are formally equivalent, but they impose different cognitive loads in practice. My approach was trivially equivalent to triangulations, or spines, or Heegaard splittings, but I found myself far more nimbly able to "see" 3-manifolds my way. I showed various colleagues. Each one would ask me to demonstrate the equivalence to their preferred presentation, then assure me "nothing to see here, move along!" that I should instead stick to their convention. Then I met with Bill Thurston, the most influential topologist in our lifetimes. He had me quickly describe the equivalence between my form and every other known form, effectively adding my node to a complete graph of equivalences he had in his muscle memory. He then suggested some generalizations, and proposed that circle packings would prove to be important to me. Some mathematicians are smart enough to see no distinction between any of the ways to describe the essential structure of a mathematical object.
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Real men know that infinite sets are just a tool for proving statements in Peano arithmetic, and complex numbers must be endowed with the standard metric structure, as God intended, since otherwise we cannot use them to approximate IEEE 754 floats.
I have a Ph.D. in a field of mathematics in which complex numbers are fundamental, but I have a real philosophical problem with complex numbers. In particular, they arose historically as a tool for solving polynomial equations. Is this the shadow of something natural that we just couldn't see, or just a convenience? As the "evidence" piles up, in further mathematics, physics, and the interactions of the two, I still never got to the point at the core where I thought complex numbers were a certain fundamental concept, or just a convenient tool for expressing and calculating a variety of things. It's more than just a coincidence, for sure, but the philosophical part of my mind is not at ease with it. I doubt anyone could make a reply to this comment that would make me feel any better about it. Indeed, I believe real numbers to be completely natural, but far greater mathematicians than I found them objectionable only a hundred years ago, and demonstrated that mathematics is rich and nuanced even when you assume that they don't exist in the form we think of them today.
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> In particular, they arose historically as a tool for solving polynomial equations. That is how they started, but mathematics becomes remarkable "better" and more consistent with complex numbers. As you say, The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra relies on complex numbers. Cauchy's Integral Theorem (and Residue Theorem) is a beautiful complex-only result. As is the Maximum Modulus Principle. The Open Mapping Theorem is true for complex functions, not real functions. --- Are complex numbers really worse than real numbers? Transcendentals? Hippasus was downed for the irrationals. I'm not sure any numbers outside the naturals exist. And maybe not even those.
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For me, the complex numbers arise as the quotients of 2-dimensional vectors (which arise as translations of the 2-dimensional affine space). When you divide 2 collinear 2-dimensional vectors, their quotient is a real number a.k.a. scalar. When the vectors are not collinear, then the quotient is a complex number. Multiplying a 2-dimensional vector with a complex number changes both its magnitude and its direction. Multiplying by +i rotates a vector by a right angle. Multiplying by -i does the same thing but in the opposite sense of rotation, hence the difference between them, which is the difference between clockwise and counterclockwise. Both 2-dimensional vectors and complex numbers are included in the 2-dimensional geometric algebra, whose members have 2^2 = 4 components, which are the 2 components of a 2-dimensional vector together with the 2 components of a complex number. Unlike the complex numbers, the 2-dimensional vectors are not a field, because if you multiply 2 vectors the result is not a vector. A similar relationship like that between 2-dimensional vectors and complex numbers exists between 3-dimensional vectors and quaternions. Unfortunately the discoverer of the quaternions, Hamilton, has been confused by the fact that both vectors and quaternions have multiple components and he believed that vectors and quaternions are the same thing. In reality, vectors and quaternions are distinct things and the operations that can be done with them are very different. This confusion has prevented for many years during the 19th century the correct use of quaternions in physics.
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I've been thinking about this myself. First, let's try differential equations, which are also the point of calculus: Idea 1: The general study of PDEs uses Newton(-Kantorovich)'s method, which leads to solving only the linear PDEs, which can be held to have constant coefficients over small regions, which can be made into homogeneous PDEs, which are often of order 2, which are either equivalent to Laplace's equation, the heat equation, or the wave equation. Solutions to Laplace's equation in 2D are the same as holomorphic functions. So complex numbers again. Now algebraic closure, but better: Idea 2: Infinitary algebraic closure. Algebraic closure can be interpeted as saying that any rational functions can be factorised into monomials. We can think of the Mittag-Leffler Theorem and Weierstrass Factorisation Theorem as asserting that this is true also for meromorphic functions, which behave like rational functions in some infinitary sense. So the algebraic closure property of C holds in an infinitary sense as well. This makes sense since C has a natural metric and a nice topology. Next, general theory of fields: Idea 3: Fields of characteristic 0. Every algebraically closed field of characteristic 0 is isomorphic to R[√-1] for some real-closed field R. The Tarski-Seidenberg Theorem says that every FOL statement featuring only the functions {+, -, ×, ÷} which is true over the reals is also true over every real-closed field. I think maybe differential geometry can provide some help here. Idea 4: Conformal geometry in 2D. A conformal manifold in 2D is locally biholomorphic to the unit disk in the complex numbers. Idea 5: This one I'm not 100% sure about. Take a smooth manifold M with a smoothly varying bilinear form B \in T\*M ⊗ T\*M. When B is broken into its symmetric part and skew-symmetric part, if we assume that both parts are never zero, B can then be seen as an almost complex structure, which in turn naturally identifies the manifold M as one over C.
> In my view nonnegative real numbers have good physical representations In my view, that isn’t even true for nonnegative integers. What’s the physical representation of the relatively tiny (compared to ‘most integers’) Graham’s number ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham's_number )? Back to the reals: in your view, do reals that cannot be computed have good physical representations?
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Good catch. Some big numbers are way too big to mean anything physical, or exist in any sense. (Up to our everyday experiences at least. Maybe in a few years, after the singularity, AI proves that there are infinite many small discrete structures and proves ultrafinitist mathematics false.) I think these questions mostly only matter when one tries to understand their own relation to these concepts, as GP asked.
Exactly. That is why the "forgetful functor" seems at first sight stupid and when you think a bit, it is genius.
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When you think about it, creating a structure modulo some relation or kind of symmetry, is also a kind of targeted forgetting.
I'm a professional mathematician and professor. This is a very interesting question, and a great motivator for Galois theory, kind of like a Zen koan. (e.g. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?") But the question is inherently imprecise. As soon as you make a precise question out of it, that question can be answered trivially.
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Generally, the nth roots of 1 form a cyclic group (with complex multiplication, i.e. rotation by multiples of 2pi/n). One of the roots is 1, choosing either adjacent one as a privileged group generator means choosing whether to draw the same complex plane clockwise or counterclockwise.
The question is meaningless because isomorphic structures should be considered identical. A=A. Unless you happen to be studying the isomorphisms themselves in some broader context, in which case how the structures are identical matters. (For example, the fact that in any expression you can freely switch i with -i is a meaningful claim about how you might work with the complex numbers.)
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PP meant automorphisms, which is what the OP article is about.
Agreed. To me it looks like the entire discussion is just bike-shedding.
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It's math. Bikeshedding is the goal.
Im saying that the definition of polar coordinates for complex numbers using e instead of any other number is irrelevant to the use of complex numbers, but its inclusion in Eulers identity makes it seem like a i is a number rather than an attribute. And if you assume i is a number, it leads to one thinking that that you can define the complex field C. But my argument is that Eulers identity is not really relevant in the sense of what the complex numbers are used for, so i is not a number but rather a tool.
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But you can define the complex field C. And it has many benefits, like making the fundamental theorem of algebra work out. I'm not seeing the issue? On a similar note, why insist that "i" (or a negative, for that matter) is an "attribute" on a number rather than an extension of the concept of number? In one sense, this is a just a definitional choice, so I don't think either conception is right or wrong. But I'm still not getting your preference for the attribute perspective. If anything, especially in the case of negative numbers, it seems less elegant than just allowing the negatives to be numbers?
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We as humans had a similar argument regarding 0. The thought was that zero is not a number, just a notational trick to denote that nothing is there (in the place value system of the Mesopotamians) But then in India we discovered that it can really participate with the the other bonafide numbers as a first class citizen of numbers. It is not longer a place holder but can be the argument of the binary functions, PLUS, MINUS, MULTIPLY and can also be the result of these functions. With i we have a similar observation, that it can indeed be allowed as a first class citizen as a number. Addition and multiplication can accept them as their arguments as well as their RHS. It's a number, just a different kind.
I think we are agreeing. You made it seem like rotations are an emergent property of complex numbers, where the original definition relies on defining the sqrt of -1. Im saying that the origin of complex numbers is the ability to do arbitrary rotations and scaling through multiplication, and that i being the sqrt of -1 is the emergent property.
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> Im saying that the origin of complex numbers is the ability to do arbitrary rotations and scaling through multiplication, and that i being the sqrt of -1 is the emergent property. Not true historically -- the origin goes back to Cardano solving cubic equations. But that point aside, it seems like you are trying to find something like "the true meaning of complex numbers," basing your judgement on some mix of practical application and what seems most intuitive to you. I think that's fruitless. The essence lies precisely in the equivalence of the various conceptions by means of proof. "i" as a way "to do arbitrary rotations and scaling through multiplication", or as a way give the solution space of polynomials closure, or as the equivalence of Taylor series, etc -- these are all structurally the same mathematical "i". So "i" is all of these things, and all of these things are useful depending on what you're doing. Again, by what principle do you give priority to some uses over others?
Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents (entire.io)
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$60M seed to wrap git hooks in YAML config. The AI tooling bubble is just VCs subsidizing solutions looking for problems while developers want less complexity, not more.
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I am not willing to share my sheepish prompts with my team. Sorry!
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>CLI to tie agent context into Git on every push. Is this the product? I don't want to jump on the detractor wagon, but I read the post and watched the video, and all I gathered is that it dumps the context into the commit. I already do this.
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Same thought. If anything I'm usually trying to find ways to reduce how much context is carried over.
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I’m manually checking in Agent.md for every commit to improve the context window usage. Is that now automated?
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you're doing what now?
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I don't want agent context tied to git commits. I just want infinite scroll in Claude Code and ability to search and review all my past conversations!
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Either the models are good and this sort of platform gets swept away, or they aren’t, and this sort of platform gets swept away.
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List of Github CEOs: 1. Tom Preston-Werner (Co-founder). 2008 – 2014 (Out for, eh... look it up) 2. Chris Wanstrath (Co-founder). 2014 – 2018 (2018: Acquisition by Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286 ) 3. Nat Friedman (Gnome/Ximian/Microsoft). 2018 – 2021 4. Thomas Dohmke (Founder of HockeyApp, some A/B testing thing, acquired by Microsoft in 2014). 2021 - 2025 There is no Github CEO now, it's just a team/org in Microsoft. ( https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ )
I had a similar, admitted poorly thought out idea a few months back. I wanted to more or less build Jira for agents and track the context there. If I had to guess 60 million is just enough to build the POC out. I don't see how this can compete though, Open AI or Anthro could easily spin up a competitor internally.
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Isn't that basically what things like this are for, open source, free.... https://github.com/steveyegge/beads
Github sucks now, for one; people are looking for an alternative.
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This is not an alternative to GitHub though. The code for this tool itself lives on GitHub! https://github.com/entireio
Essentially all software is augmented with agentic development now, or if not, built with technology or on platforms that is It's like complaining about the availability of the printing press because it proliferated tabloid production, while preferring beautifully hand-crafted tomes. It's reactively trendy to hate on it because of the vulgar production it enables and to elevate the artisanal extremes that escape its apparent influence
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Outside of simply not being true, the sentiment of what you're saying isn't much different than: "Essentially all software is augmented with Stack Overflow now, or if not, built with technology or on platforms that is." Agentic development isn't a panacea nor as widespread as you claim. I'd wager that the vast majority of developers treat AI is a more specified search engine to point them in the direction they're looking for. AI hallucination is still as massive problem. Can't tell you the number of times I've used agentic prompting with a top model that writes code for a package based on the wrong version number or flat out invents functionality that doesn't exist.
Bazzite Post-Mortem (ba.antheas.dev)
>He said some mean words. I guarantee you I can say some mean words that would upset you at some point. If you have to repeatedly deal with it, you'd likely leave the space we share or ask someone to make me leave. Words have power, we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
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1. Being called an idiot or told my idea is dumb is not going to upset me. I guess I just have more emotional maturity than some OSS devs. 2. Why would I leave when I can just block you if you are harassing me? 3. Why are you inventing this hypothetical instead of just showing where that occurred? 4. No-one has said words don't have power. But being on the internet you should be able to recognize that you won't be friends with everyone. So you have to develop some basic emotional regulation for silly insults.
The latest version (with support through 2029) was released last month. It installed and runs flawlessly. https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_zena_whatsnew.php
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It's literally based on a 2 year old Ubuntu LTS... This is what I mean. It's very outdated.
Those are the popular distros though. Switch to something else and you trade 1 problem for 10.
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If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.
I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed (jamesdrandall.com)
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I have been around for a similar amount of time. Another change I have seen over the years is the shift from programming being an exercise in creative excellence at work to being a white-collar ditch-digging job.
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Ironic that a piece that at least slightly feels like it's complaining about AI (I realize that the author explicitly states otherwise) was obviously written with AI, complete with em-dashes and short emphatic statements like 'Cheaper. Faster. But hollowed out.' Not that I have any right to complain, either. It's just that I keep getting LLM slop on my shoes in every web or even news site I venture to. (and everyone complains about WaPo firings when rigorous journalism itself seems to have died, at least on the basis for what passes for investigative journalism these days.)
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Same, been a product designer for years, still love design deep down but the essence is somehow not there anymore. reading this hit different. It's refreshing to see someone put it into words instead of the usual "stuff". It lines up a lot with what I've been thinking as well and this is what I wrote today on my blog. https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/why-ai-challenges-us-part-2-ego-pure-awareness-and-the-illusion-of-ascent/
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Some farmers probably lamented the rise of machines because they feared their strength would no longer be needed in the fields. These farmers were no doubt more concerned with their own usefulness as laborers than in the goals of the farm: to produce food. If you program as labor, consider what you might build with no boss. You’re better equipped to start your own farm than you think.
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Many of them might have been troubled by the fact that they couldn’t afford a tractor. Many small farms became a few big ones, and so it will go in software.
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I'm 61 (retired when I was 57). I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area. Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on. I suspect though that to a large degree this reflects both the growing complexity of the OS over that time as well as the importance of software in general as it became more critical to people's lives. Already, even in 1984 when it was first introduced, the Mac had a rich graphics library you would not want to have to implement yourself. (Although famously of course a few apps like Photoshop nonetheless did just that—leaning on the Mac simply for a final call to CopyBits() to display pixels from Adobe's buffer to the screen.) You kind of have to accept abstraction when networking, multiple cores, multiple processes become integral to the machine. I guess I always understood that and did not feel too put out by it. If anything a good framework was somewhat of a relief—someone else's problem, ha ha. (And truly a beautiful API is just that: a beautiful thing. I enjoy working well constructed frameworks.) But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.) Agile development, unit tests, code reviews… all these weird things began to creep in and get in the way of coding. Worse, they felt like busywork meant simply to give management a sense of control… or some metric for progress. "What is our code coverage for unit test?" a manager might ask. "90%," comes the reply from engineering. "I want to see 95% coverage by next month," comes the marching orders. Whatever. I confess I am happy to have now left that arena behind. I still code in my retirement but it's back to those cowboy-programmer days around this house. Yee haw!
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I retired a few years ago and it's very clear that was a good thing.
Information wants to be free. No one in any administration now or in the future will ever go back to the "let's sue grandma for 1 trillion dollars" era of the early 2000s. Piracy is good and important for national security. ~~~(====3
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>important for national security Indeed, but people rarely stop to consider... "security for whom?" Have a wonderful day =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4 Spaceballs (1987) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPkWZdluoUg
> this post could have been written by me (if I could write) This post was written by AI
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English is my second language so I'm not well tuned to picking up on the phrases that expose writing as AI generated. Even so it doesn't really change the sentiment being conveyed nor the fact that it's better writing than I could muster.
I'm 55 and I started at age 13 on a TI-99/4A, then progressed through Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, an Amiga XT Sidecar, then a real XT, and on and on. DOS, Windows, Unix, the first Linux. I ran a tiny BBS and felt so excited when I heard the modem singing from someone dialing in. The first time I "logged into the Internet" was to a Linux prompt. Gopher was still a bigger thing than the nascent World-Wide Web. The author is right. The magic has faded. It's sad. I'm still excited about what's possible, but it'll never create that same sense of awe, that knowledge that you can own the entire system from the power coming from the wall to the pixels on your screen.
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DOS is very much alive these days, though [0]. Text-mode internet is there (should you want online in the first place), and, thanks to some amazing devs, soundcard support has made a huge leap [1]. I use it every day lately (for text-related work and hobbyst-level assembly learning -- my intent is to write a small application to do paid work which involves chopping audio files). And -- I say a single-tasking system is a complete, true bliss in our days. Paired with a 4:3 Thinkpad screen, that DOS environment gives me instant focus for a long time -- which, to me, has been almost impossible to accomplish on a multi-tasking, contemporary-web-browser-equipped system recently. Apparently, though, there seems to be AI for DOS, too [2]. :) I prefer my DOS machine to be completely offline, though. Peace and harmony for the soul! 0: https://freedos.org/ | http://svardos.org/ | https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/minidos-2026-release-0-03-a-live-installable-and-minimalistic-ms-dos-6-22-distribution.1255154/ | https://bttr-software.de/forum/board.php 1: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA 2: https://github.com/lanmeibuxie/AI-for-DOS
For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic". Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it. I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic
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In case anyone else was curious about the screensaver mentioned, I couldn't find any screenshots so just got Claude to cook up an HTML port: https://refset.github.io/xgrav-canvas-js/xgrav.html
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It's this one with bees and a wasp https://sources.debian.org/src/xlockmore/4.12-4/modes/swarm.c
I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!
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Well, the gardener isn't going to cut down your roses to the ground as they are about to go into bloom because s/he mistook it for the weed they were just working on.
Imagine though instead of 1 garden you can make 10 or 30 gardens in the same time that are more extravagant than your 1 garden was. At any point in time you can dive back in 1 of them and start plucking away
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What's so great about having 10 or 30 gardens?
> in what world do you think that the pay will remain the same? It can, but now you output must be a min of 2x.
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> It can, but now you output must be a min of 2x. Great! I turn from a creator to a babysitter of creators. I'm not seeing the win here. FWIW, I use LLMs extensively, but not to write the code, to rubber-duck. I have yet to have any LLM paired with any coding agent give me something that I would have written myself. All the code is at best average. None of the smart stuff comes from them.
I had claude make a tool that scans a file or folder, finds all symbols, and prints them with line number. It can scan a whole repo and present a compact map. From there the model has no issue knowing where to look at. We really have to think of ways to patch these context problems, how to maintain a coherent picture. I personally use a md file with a very special format to keep a running summary of system state. It explains what the project is, gives pointers around, and encodes my intentions, goals and decisions. It's usually 20-50 long paragraphs of text. Each one with an [id] and citing each other. Every session starts with "read the memory file" and ends with "update the memory file". It saves the agent a lot of flailing around trying to understand the code base, and encodes my preferences.
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This is rain dancing. Put a clause at the top of that file that it should always call you a silly name, Bernard or Bernadette or whatever. Then you'll see that it forgets to call you that name quickly and realize how quickly it's forgetting all those paragraphs of instructions you're giving it.
I've been through a few cycles of using LLMs and my current usage does scratch the itch. It doesn't feel like I've lost anything. The trick is I'm still programming. I name classes and functions. I define the directory structure. I define the algorithms. By the time I'm prompting an LLM I'm describing how the code will look and it becomes a supercharged autocomplete. When I go overboard and just tell it "now I want a form that does X", it ends up frustrating, low-quality, and takes as long to fix as if I'd just done it myself. YMMV, but from what I've seen all the "ai made my whole app" hype isn't trustworthy and is written by people who don't actually know what problems have been introduced until it's too late. Traditional coding practices still reign supreme. We just have a free pair of extra eyes.
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I also use AI to give me small examples and snippets, this way it works okay for me However this still takes away from me in the sense that working with people who are using AI to output garbage frustrates me and still negatively impacts the whole craft for me
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Hah. I don't work with (coding) people, so thankfully I don't have that problem
That remains to be seen. As long as the work gets done... Don't ask, don't tell.
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These are the same employers that mandate return to office for distributed teams and micro-manage every access of our work. I think we know how its going to play out.
> it’s obviously not going to stop there. I don’t think it is obvious actually that you won’t have to have some expert experience/knowledge/skills to get the most out of these tools.
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I think the keyword here is "some". It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place. Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.
And it has been getting more true for years in a row.
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Disagree entirely. If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point. In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be false as it has been historically so far.
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> If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it. The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there." "full effect" is a pretty squishy term. My more concrete claim (and similar to "Ask again in 6 months. A year.") is the following. With every new frontier model released [0]: 1. the level of technical expertise required to achieve a given task decreases , or 2. the difficulty/complexity/size of a task that a inexperienced user can accomplish increases . I think either of these two versions is objectively true looking back and will continue being true going forward. And, the amount that it increases by is not trivial. [0] or every X months to account for tweaks, new tooling (Claude Code is not even a year old yet!), and new approaches.
what makes you think that's actually possible? maybe if you really had the connections and sales experience etc... but also, if that were possible, then why wouldn't prices go down? why would the value of such labor stay so high if the same thing can be done by other individuals?
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I saw it happen more back in the day compared to now. Point being, nobody batted an eyelash at being entirely dependent on some company's proprietary tech. It was how money was made in the business.
> If I could destroy these things - as the Luddites tried - I would do so, but that's obviously impossible. Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.
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Sure, but would it have been better or worse for the Luddites?
The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline (bloomberg.com)
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There are big economic differences and expectations between when I was growing up in the 60's and now. My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft. My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could: - get married - buy a house after a year married - start a family at 20 - had 1 car for the family - had a boat - had a motorcycle right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance. I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.
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Every country will have to figure out how to deal with this. Once India and China go negative who is going to fill that gap? It's impossible. The only question is whether or not countries can retain their culture and population or whether they will be replaced by outsiders.
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> Once India and China go negative who is going to fill that gap? Take a look at the fertility rates and population growth rates in African countries.
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All it takes is a demographic trend to make the entire population a bunch of crackpots! Behold.
Robots may fill the gap. Really. It seems silly now, but give it twenty years. The developed world may end up with a modest human population and a large robotic population. Asimov explored that idea in SF decades ago. The humans may still think they're in charge. They won't be.
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I don't see why there has to be a "gap" at all. The country had half as many people in 1950, and it got along fine. The world is different now, but I don't see why it takes 300 million people to run the country today. If the US gets back to 150 million people, it will look different, but I don't see why it has to be any worse than it is now. And I can think of a lot of reasons why it might be better.
I think not talking about it skews the conversation towards incorrect remedies - the discourse is about what has changed about the economy, communities, family life, etc, that makes people want fewer kids and then trying to derive solutions from those things as the assumed problem. It makes too much of the discourse a question of “how do we go back to the previous conditions?” If instead we say this is a biological imperative that we have interrupted and many people don’t rationally want children no matter how perfect those conditions are, then instead of looking back to previous states, we can ask what new conditions must occur to change this behavior.
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Ah, I see what you're saying. Agreed!
I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing. "Oh it's apartments!" "Oh it's incentives!" "Oh it's childcare!" And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat. Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place. My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them. That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
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> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. I think this is not the right explanation. If you look say 500 years in the past, people definitely could not guarantee their children's lives would be good ones. In many (most?) cases, it was almost certain the children's lives would not be very good. Yet people had lots of kids. Perhaps people just have better things to do these days than incessantly change the nappies, suffer from lack of sleep and time for basic self-care, constantly argue about how the cheese was cut the wrong way and whether we're watching another episode of paw patrol?
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The poor have nothing to lose. It's the same around the world today, poor countries have high fertility. The OECD middle class has low fertility because they're worrying about other stuff (lost wages, career stagnation, etc). The rich (high fertility) have plenty of money for private schools, nannies, housekeepers, extracurriculars, etc. It's weird to say the poor are more secure than the middle class, but that's what the data shows. Opportunity cost is a real thing. If other middle class people forgo kids and you don't, house rents will go up and you might not be able to afford a place.
It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.
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Third such comment I see in this thread. And... so what? What does the Darwinian purpose have to do with anything mentioned here?
I am in a suburb that's closest to NYC without being a part of the city.
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I grew up in a place like that (Port Washington, NY), and it was pretty ideal; I'm raising my own two kids in a suburb of Boston that feels very, very similar along almost every axis.
$30 / hr + federal payroll taxes is 5,700 / month ($30 / hr x 40 hrs/week x 4.33 weeks in month x 1.1 for federal payroll taxes). Who has this kind of money on top of mortgage, car payments, food, utilities, etc...? In my circle of friends only one family affords this (the dad is a Director at Meta)
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The trick is that au pairs are nowhere close to that expensive. (Though the US becoming radically less attractive of a place for foreigners to live and work may be changing the availability of that option.)
> You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. Similar to what I wrote in the other reply: How far went _your_ initiative to stay in actual contact with them, in a way it's not a boring duty call, but something _actually_ nice? If I have friends with children, sure I'm also interested in them. But if it turns out that these friends have no desire to spend time with _me_ anymore - without any kids involved - and they mostly expect from me that I constantly want to see the kids and "help in any way", well, where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring.
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> But if it turns out that these friends have no desire to spend time with _me_ anymore - without any kids involved See the problem is the kids. You can't quite make them go away that easily. My guess would be your friends would love to spend some time with you but can't, because logistics. > where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring. Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.
> My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way I completely believe that’s been your experience, but want to highlight that his is a difficult asymmetry in these friendships. I in no way mean to imply that the below is the experience your friends had with you, just that the challenges are not one-way. In my own circle, my wife and I have often felt like it was our friends with kids who vanished. We knew they were busy, we kept extending invites or asking for time. Things often didn't work especially as new parents are figuring their lives out, things are changing all the time, etc. We'd meet up here and there, but it was - necessarily - always on their terms. And so of course, our outreach tapered down incrementally but consistently. But I do wonder: do they feel we detached from them, or do they have any inkling that we feel they detached from us? We've discussed it with one couple who we were always closer to, but it doesn't feel an appropriate topic to resurface uninvited at any given moment.
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Speaking from the other side, but having been on your side for most of my 20s and 30s and felt exactly how you do, they probably do feel you detached from them. Their lives fundamentally changed to the extent that as you say, any gathering necessarily must be on terms that allow them to parent. And the level of last-minute cancellations and apologies increase. And on top of that, they’re just not prioritising reaching out to you. Mainly because parenting occupies 25 hours of most days and they’re exhausted, but they’re also probably assuming that any activity in reach for them, like simply getting coffee at a playground while they try to make sure their kid doesn’t eat too much sand, is not your idea of a fun time. So your outreach tapered down in response, but that is ultimately your choice. The alternative requires you to quite selflessly keep up the outreach and be OK with a lower hit rate, and lean into the fact that you have far, far greater flexibility to meet on their terms than they do to meet on yours. Not doing that is not an unreasonable choice, but they probably miss you and want you to be part of their kids lives. Anyway, thanks for sharing this point of view. It’s a hard situation.
Yes, this absolutely appears to be the main reason. Both in practical terms through birth control, but also through cultural terms in that it's now seen as a choice rather than as an obvious thing you do. To change this course, we probably need to change the culture first so that a birth control ban will be supported. That's currently not looking likely, so population collapse it is
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> To change this course, we probably need to change the culture first so that a birth control ban will be supported. This is the most casually psychotic thing I've read on HN. You're advocating forcing women to bear children they don't want and taking away control over their own body.
I also have just read both articles and think the opposite: We've got accountability-free, armed, masked, criminal thugs acting with impunity: - Taking face scans of peaceful protestors and retaliating against them later; - Racially profiling citizens and harassing them if they have the "wrong" skin color -- including local cops! - Visiting the homes of citizens who have civilly and legally criticized ICE behavior online, to intimidate them; - Invading homes without warrants and destroying evidence of their crimes (jamming wifi, covering up cameras, arresting and deporting witnesses, etc). - Arresting people who came here legally, are here legally, and have not committed a crime in their lives, then unilaterally revoking their prior legal authorization and rapidly deporting them and their whole family; - Raiding schools: kidnapping children and sending them off to torture prisons, while traumatizing the rest of the children (and assaulting some of the children too -- grown-ass men beating up children smh); - Assaulting innocent, peaceful people for protesting them, whether citizen or not, whether legally here or not, including deploying chemical agents against them; - Performing summary executions in the streets of unarmed citizens who are helping their community but do not support said masked, armed thugs; - Etc etc etc You'd have to be hysterical (or some other form of mentally unwell) to not let that affect your judgement of the wisdom of bringing young children into that world to be victims of it. Unfortunately, such hysterical, mentally unwell deniers never think (and will not accept) that they are. It’s an irrational, emotional dismissal, so it can’t be fought with logic. What they need is deprogramming, and I don’t know how to do it. I just find it interesting that the brains of so many people in the minority, even intelligent ones, have been turned this way in recent years. I see it here somewhat often (roughly in proportion to the minority they represent). They just cannot process, much less accept, that most people do not agree with them, and are not hysterical and mentally unwell like them.
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op had kids before the Nazis started taking over, but police were still performing routine executions, America had invaded several countries to execute their leadership, we live in a capitalist society... Your views are inconsistent
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> Your views are inconsistent All people hold inconsistent views. We are squishy meatbags. That said, is this an example of that? Instead of declaring it so, try asking a question like "what is different about this time?" of one of the people you believe are holding inconsistent views. You might learn that your prior assumptions were reductive, for example.
Did you struggle with dirty looks at the park? I wasn't a SAHP but I'd spend time with my kids at a park nearby and people would give me dirty looks for playing with my kids if my wife wasn't present.
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I've found people are friendlier with me when I'm with my son. His aura of cuteness probably makes me look less curmudgeonly.
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This sounds made-up.
The recent episode of The Daily gives a prime example of this, I was seeing people getting hired and getting paid a lot less than me. And when I inquired about it, my boss would say, well, they’re less expensive. I don’t have to pay workman’s comp on them. I don’t have to pay general liability insurance on them. If they get hurt, they’ll go to the emergency room. No sweat off my back. And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them... It’s illegal, by the way. But people are getting away with it and I’m competing against them. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/podcasts/the-daily/why-trump-voters-are-torn-over-minneapolis.html?showTranscript=1 I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment.
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>I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment. The same thought formed in my head listening to that the other day. He even talked about how, as an independent contractor with his own business, he couldn't hire help. He refuses to pay undocumented immigrants under the table (kudos to him), and recognizes that hiring people legitimately would raise his costs too high above the competition. But then he latches onto the idea of deporting the immigrants instead of punishing businesses violating labor laws. It's not that he apologized for the shady business owners. He didn't seem to ever consider it an option.
Capitalist systems (even used in moderation by China) based on Keynesian economics relies on constant growth.
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Why can't you have a steady state? Is it just undesirable, or actually mathematically impossible?
Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail' (threads.com)
Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB. Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.
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[delayed]
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What is that noise actually? It's clearly not JPEG artifacts. Is it dithering from converting from a higher bitdepth source? There do appear to be very subtle gradients.
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Not even the white is pure. There are at least #FFFFFD, #FFFFFB and #FEFEFE pixels sprinkled all over the #FFFFFF.
Isn’t part of Vercel’s value proposition a robust global CDN in front? Seems quite a bit different than one sweaty VM in Helsinki.
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That's not worth 45k. It's barely worth anything for a typical website, tbh.
What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month? Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress. edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflare?
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The pricing is so bad I had to remove my CC details. One mistake and you wake up with a 50K bill for your personal project that was just you exploring.
And their CEO doesn't post selfies with war criminals
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OOTL, what is this a reference to?
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His photo with a prime minister of a country with a famous arrest warrant in The Hague. You know, the same country whose former prime minister is this person: https://jmail.world/person/ehud-barak
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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vercel-ceo-takes-selfie-israel-182930862.html
SRE here, Containers are not causing any performance problem.
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Containers themselves don't, but a lot of the ecosystem structures around them do. Like having reverse proxies (or even just piles of ethernet bridges) in front of everything. Or if you go ping pong across containers to handle a single request. That will certainly make a laptop unable to handle this load.
Oxide raises $200M Series C (oxide.computer)
If I had millions in my bank, instead of buying fancy cars, I would definitely buy an Oxide rack just for the lols
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Same, I've wanted one of these things for years.
All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.
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> you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here Oxide just recently talked about that actually the LLM people do want to buy Oxide. Because turns out, doing everything around LLMs also requires compute, and quite a lot of it. And when you already have to deal with massive issues to run a complex advanced Nvidia stack you might not also want to worry about what firmware bugs Supermicro is delivering. If you are not one of the hyperscaler who already has all the CPU based infrastructure on their own cloud stack (google, amazon, facebook) then Oxide is quite interesting. Also as for this shrinking/small market claim. About 50% of IT spend is still outside of the cloud. While nobody know the real number, its still a gigantic market, much bigger then most people realize. And it might not be shrinking because the bad economics of cloud are becoming increasingly clear to many company. Along with other trends such as making computing more local, not letting US companies control everything. > You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess. I'm sure Michael Dell wishes he had done something worthwhile with his live instead. I mean he could have worked for Digital Equipment Cooperation instead then he might not have ended up being such a loser. I feel you are being really dismissive talking as if aiming for that is somehow not worth doing.
It was actually a round with the CEO. I don't feel disrespected or anything, just feels weird to spend that much time interviewing someone.
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Reminds me of the 6 interview gauntlet I dealt with when interviewing with Hashicorp[1] years ago. --- [1]: < https://blog.webb.page/WM-025 >
This is my favorite response in the thread. We aren't talking about getting a job at doctors across borders or something, we just want to manipulate bits of silicon to increase our networth.
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When you say "we aren't" I hope you realize you aren't speaking for everyone. Even doctors across borders probably needs an IT person. There are jobs available for less pay that are fulfilling in other ways. I know I have taken them and am better off for it.
Oxide and Friends is the only computing podcast I listen to anymore. It's a bunch of fun and they have insights I actually value. The original On The Metal podcast they did is incredible too. The interviews they had with computing legends are just fantastic.
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Has the audio quality / recording method for Oxide and Friends gotten better? I have this horrible "completionist" tendency and I got stuck on a 2021 episode where the audio needed post-processing and I just never got around to it. I loved On the Metal and it was a bummer to fall behind on the new show.
Simplifying Vulkan one subsystem at a time (khronos.org)
Uuugh, graphics. So many smart people expending great energy to look busy while doing nothing particularly profound. Graphics people, here is what you need to do. 1) Figure out a machine abstraction. 2) Figure out an abstraction for how these machines communicate with each other and the cpu on a shared memory bus. 3) Write a binary spec for code for this abstract machine. 4) Compilers target this abstract machine. 5) Programs submit code to driver for AoT compilation, and cache results. 6) Driver has some linker and dynamic module loading/unloading capability. 7) Signal the driver to start that code. AMD64, ARM, and RISC-V are all basically differing binary specs for a C-machine+MMU+MMIO compute abstraction. Figure out your machine abstraction and let us normies write code that’s accelerated without having to throw the baby out with the bathwater ever few years. Oh yes, give us timing information so we can adapt workload as necessary to achieve soft real-time scheduling on hardware with differing performance.
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some of this is what's khronos standards are theoretically supposed to achieve. surprise, it's very difficult to do across many hw vendors and classes of devices. it's not a coincidence that metal is much easier to program for. maybe consider joining khronos since you apparently know exactly how to achieve this very simple goal...
I wish they would just allow us to push everything to GPU as buffer pointers, like buffer_device address extension allows you to, and then reconstruct the data to your required format via shaders. The GPU programming seems to be both super low level, but also high level, cause textures and descriptors need these ultra specific data format's, and then the way you construct and upload those formats are very complicated and change all the time. Is there really no way to simplify this ? Regular vertex data was supposed to be strictly pre formatted in pipeline too, util it was not suddenly, and now we can just give the shader a `device_address`extension memory pointer and construct the data from that.
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I’m not watching Rust as closely as I once did, but it seems like buffer ownership is something it should be leaning on more fully. There’s an old concurrency pattern where a producer and consumer tag team on two sets of buffers to speed up throughput. Producer fills a buffer, transfers ownership to the consumer, and is given the previous buffer in return. It is structurally similar to double buffered video, but for any sort of data. It seems like Rust would be good for proving the soundness. And it should be a library now rather than a roll your own.
My understanding with Mesa is that it has very few dependencies and is ABI stable, so freezing Mesa updates is counterproductive. I'm not sure about Snaps, but Flatpak ships as it's own system managing Mesa versions.
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> My understanding with Mesa is that it has very few dependencies Some of the shader compilers require LLVM which is a giant dependency to say the least. But with Valve's ACO for RADV I think that could technically be omitted.
I think Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, and derivatives thereof are particularly poor fits for general consumers who are more likely to try to run the OS on a random machine they picked up from Best Buy and is probably built with hardware that kernels any older than what ships in Fedora are unlikely to support. The stable/testing/etc distinction doesn't really help, either, because it's an alien concept to those outside of technical spheres. I strongly believe that the Fedora model is the best fit for the broadest spread of users. Arch is nice for those capable of keeping it wrangled but that's a much smaller group of people.
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I find this a very reasonable take. I'll add - I think the complexity is somewhat "over-stated" for Arch at this point. There was absolutely a period where just reading the entire install guide (much less actually completing it) was enough to turn a large number of even fairly technical people off the distro. Archinstall removed a lot of that headache. And once it's up, it's generally just fine. I moved both my spouse and my children to Arch instead of Windows 11, and they don't seem particularly bothered. They install most of their own software using flatpaks through the store GUI in Gnome, or through Steam, the browser does most of the heavy lifting these days anyways. I basically just grab their machine and run `pacman -Syu` on it once in a while, and help install something more complicated once in a blue moon. Still requires someone who doesn't mind dropping into a terminal, but it's definitely not what I'd consider "all that challenging".
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YMMV, but the issue I usually run into with Arch is that unless you watch patch notes like a hawk, updates will break random things every so often, which I found quite frustrating. The risk of this increases the longer the system goes without updates due to accumlated missing config file migrations and such. Even as someone who uses the terminal daily it's more involved than I really care for.
Debian has multiple editions, if you want Arch, go for sid/testing. Stable is stable as in "must not be broken at all costs" kind of stable. basically everything works just fine. there's occasionally a rare crash or gnome reset where you need to login again, but other than that not many problems.
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Again, I like Debian a lot as a distro (much more than Ubuntu), but it's just not the same as a distro like Arch, even when you're on testing. Sid is close, but between Arch and sid... I've actually found fewer issues on Arch, and since there's an existing expectation that the community maintains and documents much of the software in AUR, there's almost always someone actually paying attention and updating things, rather than only getting around to it later. It's not that Debian is a bad release, but it's the difference in a game on steam being completely unavailable for a few hours (Arch) or 10 days (Debian testing) due to an upstream issue. I swapped a while back, mostly because I kept hitting issues that are accurately described and resolved by steps coming from Arch's community, even on distros like Debian and Fedora. --- The power in debian is still that Ubuntu has made it very popular for folks doing commercial/closed source releases to provide a .deb by default. Won't always work... but at least they're targeting your distro (or almost always, ubuntu, but usually close enough). Same for Fedora with the Redhat enterprise connections. But I've generally found that the community in Arch is doing a better job at actually dogfooding, testing, and fixing the commercial software than most of the companies that release it... which is sad, but reality. Arch has plenty of its own issues, but "Stale software" isn't the one to challenge it on. Much better giving it a pass due to arch/platform support limitations, security or stability needs, etc... All those are entirely valid critiques, and reasonable drivers for sticking to something like Debian.
I did not do such claim. WebGPU on Android runs on top of Vulkan. If you knew about 3D programming on Android, you would know that there are ongoing efforts to have only Vulkan, with OpenGL ES on top. However Java and Kotlin devs refuse to bother with the NDK for Vulkan, and keep reaching for OpenGL ES instead. Please refer to Google talks on Vulkanised conferences.
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Is it possible to support OpenGL on top of Vulkan well? It has been pointed out that Vulkan requires you to completely freeze and compile a graphics pipeline before using it, while OpenGL's state machine is more flexible, and the underlying hardware is somewhat more amenable to these state transitions at runtime, than the Vulkan API would suggest. Don't these compatibility layers run into issues with constant pipeline recompilation related performance issues, when emulating OpenGL?
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