Unlurker|Replay|About
Palestinian boy, 12, describes how Israeli forces killed his family in car (bbc.com)
•
this story doesn't belong on HN
•
This will be flagged for being "political" but everyone here needs to be reminded that they may be complicit in this via the tech they work on and/or the companies they work for.
•
If I worked at [supposedly evil company], I doubt this largely unverifiable story would cause much turmoil. I'm sure at work I'd be hearing about much worse and more concrete stuff already.
•
> largely unverifiable story there’s literally pictures in the article of the bodies
•
There's no mention of any particular company, tech or otherwise, here. Yes, you can probably connect your work in some way to something that affects the military if you live in the US or Israel (and even many places outside of it - we're not restricting to direct connections), but, after all, "there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism".
The return-to-the-office trend backfires (thehill.com)
•
This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines that don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google). Either way surprising findings to me!
•
Do they do more work by working longer hours? People often do not. Output is not the same thing as hours worked. Productivity is output per hour, so its also possible for output to fall and productivity to rise. This will be the usual case with fewer hours.
•
For something to "backfire" you first have to account for why it was done. This article assumes performance and retention are the only considerations. It does not account for things like commercial real estate value, a buesiness's ability to monitor and control its employees, or excuses for layoffs.
•
What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
•
The article does say: > The better path is to raise the bar on management, not badge swipes. Real estate may play a role, but terrible management practices are also definitely a factor. And if every other company is doing it, it's safe to copy their behaviour and not stick your neck out.
Jemalloc un-abandoned by Meta (engineering.fb.com)
•
Meta never abandoned jemaloc. https://github.com/facebook/jemalloc remained public the entire time. It's my understanding that Jason's Evan's, the creator of jemalloc, had ownership over the jemalloc/jemalloc repo which is why that one stopped being updated after he left.
•
The repo's availability isn't related to whether it's still maintained.
•
Meta still maintained it and actively pushed commits to it.
•
One has to wonder if this due to the global memory shortage. ("Oh - changing our memory allocator to be more efficient will yield $XXM dollar savings over the next year").
•
How is the original author making out in the new arrangement?
•
Related. Others? Jemalloc Postmortem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44264958 - June 2025 (233 comments) Jemalloc Repositories Are Archived - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161128 - June 2025 (7 comments)
•
I recently started using Microsoft's mimalloc (via an LD_PRELOAD) to better use huge (1 GB) pages in a memory intensive program. The performance gains are significant (around 20%). It feels rather strange using an open source MS library for performance on my Linux system. There needs to be more competition in the malloc space. Between various huge page sizes and transparent huge pages, there are a lot of gains to be had over what you get from a default GNU libc.
•
One of the best parts about GC languages is they tend to have much more efficient allocation/freeing because the cost is much more lumped together so it shows up better in a profile.
•
If there is so much performance difference among generic allocators, it means you need semantic optimized allocators (unless performance is actually not that much important in the end).
•
Seems like they’d want to wait to commit until after the layoffs, right?
•
And the Oscar for most mealy-mouthed post of the year goes to…
•
We generally try to avoid corporate press releases for that reason, but is there a good third-party post to replace it with? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corporate%20press%20release%20by:dang
•
First impressions: LOL, the blunt commentary in the HN thread title compared to the PR-speak of the fb.com post. Second thoughts: Actually the fb.com post is more transparent than I'd have predicted. Not bad at all. Of course it helps that they're delivering good news!
The “small web” is bigger than you might think (kevinboone.me)
•
Cool to see Gemini mentioned here. A few years back I created Station, Gemini's first "social network" of sorts, still running today: https://martinrue.com/station
•
It's easy to hand-curate a list of 5,000 "small web" URLs. The problem is scaling. For example, Kagi has a hand-curated "small web" filter, but I never use it because far more interesting and relevant "small web" websites are outside the filter than in it. The same is true for most other lists curated by individual folks. They're neat, but also sort of useless because they are too small: 95% of the things you're looking for are not there. The question is how do you take it to a million? There probably are at least that many good personal and non-commercial websites out there, but if you open it up, you invite spam & slop.
•
great work
•
A fun trend on the "small web" is the use of 88x31 badges that link to friends websites or in webrings. I have a few on my website, and you can browse a ton of small web websites that way. https://varun.ch (at the bottom of the page) There's also a couple directories/network graphs https://matdoes.dev/buttons https://eightyeightthirty.one/
•
How many would be left after removing self promotion, AI generated content and "how I use AI?"(Claude code like everybody else)
•
I moved my site to Gemini on sdf.org, I find it far easier to use and maintain. I also mirror it on gopher. Maintaining both is still easier than dealing with *panels or hosting my own. There is a lot of good content out there, for example: gemini://gemi.dev/ FWIW, dillo now has plugins for both Gemini and Gopher and the plugins work find on the various BSDs.
•
This is a specific definition of "small web" which is even narrower than the one I normally think of. But reading about Gemini, it does make me wonder if the original sin is client-side dynamism. We could say: that's Javascript. But some Javascript operates only on the DOM. It's really XHR/fetch and friends that are the problem. We could say: CSS is ok. But CSS can fetch remote resources and if JS isn't there, I wonder how long it would take for ad vendors to have CSS-only solutions...or maybe they do already?
•
Yeah, CSS is Turing Complete: https://lyra.horse/x86css
•
One objection I have to the kagi smallweb approach is the avoidance of infrequently updated sites. Some of my favorite blogs post very rarely; but when they post it's a great read. When I discover a great new blog that hasn't been updated in years I'm excited to add it to my feed reader, because it's a really good signal that when they publish again it will be worth reading.
I think the article briefly touches on an important part: people still write blogs, but they are buried by Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com . It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, writings, all by real people. I am always fascinated by what it unearths when using it, and it really is a breath of fresh air. It's currently funded by NLNet (temporarily) and the project's scope is really promising. It's one of those projects that I really hope succeeds long term. The old web is not dead, just buried, and it can be unearthed. In my opinion an independent non monetized search engine is a public good as valuable as the internet archive. So far as I know marginalia is the only project that instead of just taking google's index and massaging it a bit (like all the other search engines) is truly seeking to be independent and practical in its scope and goals.
•
Thanks for shilling. Regarding the financials, even though the second nlnet grant runs out in a few weeks, I've got enough of a war chest to work full time probably a good bit into 2029 (modulo additional inflation shocks). The operational bit is self-funding now, and it's relatively low maintenance, so if worse comes to worst I'll have to get a job (if jobs still exist in 2029, otherwise I guess I'll live in the shameful cardboard box of those who were NGMI ;-).
•
I think that's a cool project, though I found the results to be less relevant than Google.
•
> Google that now optimizes their algorithm for monetization and not usefulness. I don't think they do that. Instead, "usefulness" is mostly synonymous with commercial intent: searching for <x> often means "I want to buy <x>". Even for non-commercial queries, I think the sad reality is that most people subconsciously prefer LLM-generated or content-farmed stuff too. It looks more professional, has nice images (never mind that they're stock photos or AI-generated), etc. Your average student looking for an explanation of why the sky is blue is more interested in a TikTok-style short than some white-on-black or black-on-gray webpage that gives them 1990s vibes. TL;DR: I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want. It might be not what a small minority on HN wants.
•
> I think that Google gives the average person exactly the results they want. There is some truth in this, but to me it's similar to saying that a drug dealer gives their customers exactly what they want. People "want" those things because Google and its ilk have conditioned them to want those things.
Which is exactly the point of Gemini.
•
Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining. The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination. Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me) It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.
Feeding llms you mean
•
Is there a good free-but-subscriber-only solution for blogs? It seems like a contradiction, but in practice it may be manageable.
Speed at the cost of quality: Study of use of Cursor AI in open source projects (arxiv.org)
•
Depends on the nature of the tool I would imagine - eg. Claude Code Terminal (say) would have higher entry requirements in terms of engineering experience (Cursor was sold as newbie-friendly) so I would predict higher quality code than Cursor in a similar survey. ofc that doesn't take into account the useful high-level and other advantages of IDEs that might mitigate against slop during review, but overall Cursor was a more natural fit for vibe-coders. This is said without judgement - I was a cheerleader for Cursor early on until it became uncompetitive in value.
Yes, it's not surprising that warning and complexity increased at a higher rate when paired with increased velocity. Increased velocity == increased lines of code. Does the study normalize velocity between the groups by adjusting the timeframes so that we could tell if complexity and warnings increased at a greater rate per line of code added in the AI group? I suspect it would, since I've had to simplify AI generated code on several occasions but right now the study just seems to say that the larger a code base grows the more complex it gets which is obvious.
•
"Notably, increases in codebase size are a major determinant of increases in static analysis warnings and code complexity, and absorb most variance in the two outcome variables. However, even with strong controls for codebase size dynamics, the adoption of Cursor still has a significant effect on code complexity, leading to a 9% baseline increase on average compared to projects in similar dynamics but not using Cursor."
I think the gist of it still applies to even Claude Code w/Opus 4.6. It's basically outsourcing to mediocre programmers - albeit very fast ones with near-infinite patience and little to no ego.
•
It doesn't map well to a mediocre human programmer, I think. It operates in a much more jagged world between superhuman, and inhuman stupidity.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Cert Authorities Check for DNSSEC from Today (grepular.com)
•
Is there non-ICANN DNSSEC Everyone knows "WebPKI", e.g., self-appointed "cert authorities", generally relies on DNS With an added DNSSEC step, perhaps this is now limited to ICANN DNS only
DNSSEC is one of very few topics where voices I respect on security seem completely opposed (WebPKI depends on DNS vs. DNS security does not matter). Is there any literature that demonstrates deep understanding of both arguments? Why are they (DNSSEC + WebPKI) never considered complimentary?
•
Bad arguments and FUD when it was being rolled out. Sysadmins also don't want to touch working infra code, you can see that with AWS lagging on IPv6.
Really? You're not concerned that someone might do a very specific kind of on-path DNS cache corruption attack, in 4-5 places simultaneously around the world to defeat multipath lookups at CAs, in order to misissue a certificate for your domain, which they can then leverage in MITM attacks they're somehow able to launch to get random people to think they're looking at your website when they're looking at something else? And that risk doesn't outweigh the fairly strong likelihood that at some point after you enable DNSSEC something will happen to break that configuration and make your entire domain fall off the Internet for several days?
•
> You're not concerned that someone might do ... I mean, now you've brought it up, I am concerned about it - but the level of concern is somewhere between "spontaneous combustion of myself leading to exploitation of my domain DNS because my bugger-i-ded.txt instructions are rubbish" and "cosmic rays hitting all the exact right bits at the exact right time to bugger my DNS deployment when I next do one which won't be for a while because even one a year is a fast pace for me to change something." (Plus I'm perfectly capable of taking my sites and domains offline by incompetent flubbery as it is; I don't need -more- ways to fuck things up.)
> But there is no money in making that a solution and a TON of money in selling you BS HTTPS certs Ah yes, because lets encrypt is rolling in the $$$$.
•
Mark Shuttleworth paid for his ride to the space station by selling HTTPS certs. The sad thing is that Mozilla and others have to spend millions bankrolling Let's Encrypt instead of using the free, high assurance PKI that is native to the internet!
Which is exactly what happened to Slack, and took them offline for most of a business day for a huge fraction of their customers. This is such a big problem that there's actually a subsidiary DNSSEC protocol (DNSSEC NTA's) that addresses it: tactically disabling DNSSEC at major resolvers for the inevitable cases where something breaks.
•
As if DNS isn't a major contributing to A LOT of downtime. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing not investing in making deployment more seamless and less error prone.
•
> As if DNS isn't a major contributing to A LOT of downtime. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing not investing in making deployment more seamless and less error prone. Ah yes. Let's take something that's prone to causing service issues and strap more footguns to it. It's not worth it, because the cost is extremely quantifiable and visible, whereas the benefits struggle to be coherent.
This is a topic I obviously pay a lot of attention to. Wouldn't it be weirder if I came here with a different take? What do you expect? I don't think I'm out on a limb suggesting that random small domains should not enable DNSSEC. There's basically zero upside to it for them. I think there's basically never a good argument to enable it, but at least large, heavily targeted sites have a colorable argument.
•
Actually I think it probably is suspicious to have the exact same opinion after studying something over a long period of time. My opinions are more likely to remain consistent, rather than growing more nuanced or sophisticated, if all I've done is trot out the same responses over a longer period of time. I've struggled to think of an especially unexamined example because after all they tend to sit out of conscious recall, I think the best I can do is probably that my favourite comic book character is Miracleman's daughter, Winter Moran. That's a consistent belief I've held for decades, I haven't spent a great deal of time thinking about it, but it's not entirely satisfactory and probably there is some introduced nuance, particularly when I re-examined the contrast between what Winter says about the humans to her father and what her step-sister Mist later says about them to her (human) mother because I was writing an essay during lockdown.
Boy, how would cryptographically the ROOT of the internet make it more secure? Right here dude: https://easydns.com/blog/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
•
That entire post is that you should enable DNSSEC because it's "more secure", and there are no reasons not to. "More secure" begs the question "against what?", which the blog post doesn't seem to want to go into. Maybe it's secure from hidden tigers. My favourite DNSSEC "lolwut" is about how people argue that it's something "NIST recommends", whilst at the same time the most recent major DNSSEC outage was......... time.nist.gov! ( https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html )
You keep waving this blog post from 2015 at me. Not only have we discussed it before, but it was a top-level HN post with 79 comments, many of them from me. Please don't stealth-edit your posts after I respond to them. If you need to edit, just leave a little note in your comment that you edited it.
•
Sorry, I thought my edit was fast enough. Yes it did hit HN and you just said, "I stand by what I wrote." and then complain about buggy implementations and downtime connected to DNSSEC. As if that isn't true for all technologies, let alone /insecure/ DNS. DNS is connected to a lot of downtime because it undergirds the whole internet. Making the distributed database that delegates domain authority cryptographically secure makes everything above it more secure too. I rebutted your arguments point-by-point. You don't update your blog post to reflect those arguments nor recent developments, like larger key sizes.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure (writingruxandrabio.com)
To play the devils advocate, in places with low bureaucracy most of the risk taken is not innovation. It's just risk that leads to the death of others. Buildings with shitty concrete with too little rebar in it. Electrical wiring that will kill you. Improper foundations and such. At the end of the day there is no simple answer here. It's no different than the talks about AI that dominate HN these days. You can build good things with AI, but the vast majority of it is crap, so we put up filters and hoops to ensure we don't get flooded with that crap.
•
The devil doesn't need any more advocates.
"putting stickers on things is criminal damage deserving of prison time" is no better of a position But we should probably pay attention to what was written on the stickers.
•
America literally jails people for quoting the US president The UK jails people for extreme incitement
> They could have made the 'umbrella' of what they were fighting for cover 100% of the population [...] They didn't. We're all worse for it. Other people could have stood by them and fought for those rights too. You're blaming the wrong people. Regardless of your intentions, you're not coming across well. I'd urge you to try reframing this, as you're not going to win many supporters outside of the alt-right pipeline as you're pitching it at the moment. I don't want to accuse you of being a misogynist. Nor do I want to accuse you of being alt-right. But that is how you are coming across in your comments. Textual internet discourse always hides nuances. I'd really ask that you reconsider how you frame this, whether internally or externally, because as it stands, I don't think it's great.
•
And its already flagged, but I'll respond to you anyways. So yeah, it was a complaint towards the 2nd wave, only because they did identify it as a woman's issue. Men weren't the scope of their grievance, which is fine to identify. What I'm saying is that the whole birth control and abortion debate is a subset of bodily autonomy. It also covers trans rights. Also covers suicide rights. Covers self-medication and experimentation. I have in the back of my fridge a few sets of day-after pills, in case any of my friends have any issues that need resolved. I'm also aware and support the works of Four Thieves Vinegar collective, and their misoprostl abortion cards, and also diy chemistry. I would support birth control and abortion rights as inherent as bodily autonomy. I just felt their limited scope is what striated the public (well, men) from supporting it. And now we're in a really really bad place with abortion banned in multiple states, and women dying due to not getting needed care.
So you think that complicated diseases are easily curable and the entire scientific world, including very different countries like China, has just decided to hide the knowledge? If your cynical take was correct, there would be no cures ever. And yet there are new ones all the time. For example, vaccines. There are way, way more vaccines developed in the 21st century than in the 250 years before that. Vaccines against HPV have reduced incidence of cervical cancers to basically 0 in the cohorts that obtained them. How come? Shouldn't Big Cancer be interested in treating cervical cancers expensively and promoting relapses? Even in cancers, your chances of surviving, say, Hodgkin's lymphoma, are now north of 90 per cent. The treatment is expensive, but time limited. You don't have to take pills for your entire life. How does that square with your view of the medical system as a machine for prolonging diseases indefinitely?
•
Plus even if we posit nefarious forces, we should also account for nefarious forces which want the sickness gone. If you're seriously sick you aren't making money because you can't work or all your money goes to Evil Pharma Co, then the Evil Government doesn't like that, because they can't wring taxes out of you. (Which they prefer since it's easier than fighting Evil Pharma Co.) Meanwhile, The Shadow Government wants you to be healthy enough to work every day, or else they won't finish the navigation beacons for the alien invasion.
Then feel free to point out the outliers that aren't interested in maximizing profits. https://www.somo.nl/big-pharma-raked-in-usd-90-billion-in-profits-with-covid-19-vaccines/ It seems to me that the leading vaccine manufacturers, who spend billions of dollars yearly in order to lobby US lawmakers that establish the bureaucracy the article is complaining about, are interested in just that (maximizing profits). It doesn't really matter much if there are individuals or other organizations interested in curing disease, when we have a system that allows for legal bribery of lawmakers, and other individuals / organizations with more money that value profits over anything else.
•
A large portion of the US healthcare is through nonprofits who are more interested in continuing to exist than in maximizing profits. Vaccine companies are very interested in preventing disease not the kind of extended treatment people so often expect the healthcare industry to be looking for. They have an endless stream of new people being born every year so have no interest in people getting sick.
•
If people aren't getting sick, they have no revenue stream. Those non-profits you mentioned obviously aren't as capable of lobbying congress to influence industry regulation / bureaucracy as for-profit organizations are.
Apideck CLI – An AI-agent interface with much lower context consumption than MCP (apideck.com)
> modern MCP clients do smart tool search that obviates the entire "I am sending the full list of tools back and forth" mode of operation How, "Dynamic Tool Discovery"? Has this been codified anywhere? I've only see somewhat hacky implementations of this idea https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/issues/1821#issuecomment-3709687415 Or are you talking about the pressure being on the client/harnesses as in, https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-use/tool-search-tool#mcp-integration
•
More of the latter than the former. The protocol itself is constrained to a set of well-defined primitives, but clients can do a bunch of pre-processing before invoking any of them.
I'm getting tired of everyone saying "MCP is dead, use CLIs!". Yes, MCP eats up context windows, but agents can also be smarter about how they load the MCP context in the first place, using similar strategy to skills. The problem with tossing it out entirely is that it leaves a lot more questions for handling security. When using skills, there's no implicit way to be able to apply policies in the sane way across many different servers. MCP gives us a registry such that we can enforce MCP chain policies, i.e. no doing web search after viewing financials. Doing the same with skills is not possible in a programatic and deterministic way. There needs to be a middle ground instead of throwing out MCP entirely.
•
This is the right framing. The chain policy problem is what happens when you ask the registry to be the entitlement layer. Here's a longer piece on why the trust boundary has to live at the runtime level, not the interface level, and what that means for MCP's actual job: https://forestmars.substack.com/p/twilight-of-the-mcp-idols
•
I feel like I don't fully understand mcp. I've done research on it but I definitely couldn't explain it. I get lost on the fact that to my knowledge it's a server with API endpoints that are well defined into a json schema then sent the to LLM and the LLM parses that and decides which endpoints to hit (I'm aware some llms use smart calling now so they load the tool name and description but nothing else until it's called). How exactly are you doing the process of stopping the LLM from using web search after it hits a certain endpoint in your MCP server? Or is this referring strictly to when you own the whole workflow where you can then deny websearch capabilities on the next LLM step?
Not sure. Our big org, banned MCPs because they are unsafe, and they have no way to enforce only certain MCPs (in github copilot).
•
Shameless plug: im working on a product that aims to solve this: https://www.gatana.ai/
But skills where you tell the LLM to shell out to some random command are safe? I'm not sure I understand the logic.
•
I think big companies already protect against random commands causing damage. Work laptops are tightly controlled for both networking and software.
US Job Market Visualizer (karpathy.ai)
•
It just comes up a black screen for me. Is this happening to anyone else?
•
Do you have JavaScript disabled?
Cool stuff. would be nice to have a color blind mode. I literally can't distinguish the red from green in this visualization.
•
Came here to mention this. I'm also Red/Green colorblind.
How are Top Executives 4% of all jobs?
•
small business is the majority of employment. Think of an indi-coffee shop, the person taking your order may very well be the ceo technically. So there's a lot of "top executives".
This is a surprisingly bad treemap, which is surprising given how easy it is to build a good one these days.
•
Looks average to me. Maybe I don't know how the good ones look? Can you give some examples?
I took one glance at the chart and decided the results were impossible because of that. Apparently "top executive" median pay is $105,350 per year: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/top-executives.htm
•
Remember that exec tech salaries are extreme outliers. I worked for an exec in manufacturing. He had full p&l responsibility for a business segment with ~150 employees, $27 million in revenue at 40% gross margins, and a production plant. His total comp was ~$300k. Now just think of the comp levels in sectors like government, education, etc.
•
Sounds plausible? Even a company with 100 employees and few growth prospects is likely to have a couple of executives, and most companies are small.
> A modern dishwasher will use 3 to 4 gallons on a run. By comparison, my kitchen sink holds about 10 gallons of water on each side. When I wash by hand, I'll fill one side with soapy water and rinse each dish individually. Easily more than 10 gallons of water get used in the whole process. I'm pro-dishwasher, but you could use much less water handwashing. If I don't have a dishwasher, my normal method is to stopper one side of my sink, squirt some dish soap on the first few dishes, and run just enough water to wet the dishes. Then I scrub some dishes, run the water (into the stoppered sink) just to rinse them as I transfer to the dish rack, then turn off the water and repeat. The dirtiest dishes that have the most food stuck on get done last so they get the most time soaking in the soapy rinse water from the rest of the dishes. I can do a full dishwasher load with one side of my sink maybe 1/4 full of water.
•
Time how long you run the sink while washing and rinsing. If you run it for more than 1.5 to 2 minutes, you've used more water than the dishwasher would have.
•
I'm collecting all the water in the sink, I can measure the volume directly. 10 cm of water in my sink in about 13 litres. My dishwasher is specced for 16.5 - 29.7 litres on the "Energy Saver" cycle that I normally use. (The "normal" cycle is specced for 11.0-27.7 litres but uses more electricity, which is more expensive than water.)
I don’t doubt the intelligence of the OP though I question their wisdom and I doubt they know how to surf. They are more or less correct in their assessment of the current state of things and where things are heading, but this would entail a significant existential risk. Having an natural aversion to our own destruction is probably a sensible approach going forward.
•
again, grateful for the better words :) it's funny, I'm pretty charismatic in my community spaces IRL, but I constantly displease the HN hivemind i think i need more patience -- i seem to fall into a certain tone due to my low expectations, and it's likely a self-fulfilling process which i am complicit in
The raw anti Ai hate for anything that even mentions it makes me think of the early days of the internet where it was considered just a fad.
•
There are a lot of things that people were saying were fads that ended up being fads. There are also a lot of things that people were saying were fads that weren't. Nobody knows. Anyone who confidently says "AI is inevitable" or "AI is just a fad" is full of shit. They don't have a crystal ball, and they don't know what the future holds.
AirPods Max 2 (apple.com)
•
I'm not buying another expensive AirPods from Apple until they have their story straight w.r.t battery health and battery repair that is cost-effective. I'm done wasting money on these only to have battery issues, clicking noises etc in less than 2 years of continuous use. Irritating thing is how Apple hides bluetooth headphones pairing 2-3 clicks deeper than AirPods pairing – on iPhones and Apple TV.
•
Wild. I have been eagerly awaiting this refresh, but this doesn't address either of the main issues with the original AirPods Max: 1. Still just as heavy. The AirPods Max sound quite good, but they are very heavy, to the point of being quite uncomfortable after listening for any longer amount of time. This release as the exact same weight as the originals (13.6 oz). 2. Still no off button/position. They stay partially on unless you put them in the awkward and useless "case", which means they're constantly out of power when you want to use them. There's even an obvious fix: the ear cups swivel flat, they could just make this the "power off" position. Solved. But they didn't, so presumably these still have the same problem. There's also no mention of magnetic charging via stand, which would be another way to help alleviate this problem. If these were even a few ounces lighter and powered off properly, I would buy them for sure. Given this announcement, I guess I look for something else to replace the old AirPods Max.
•
Guess I'll be the contrarian on this one - I've got a pair of the Max's and love them. I use them primarily for watching movies and TV (I live in an apartment and am not a sociopath), and the "spatial audio" is incredibly good. Apple's got a "Sound" to their products that isn't neutral, but is very detailed and tends to disappear pretty quickly. Both the noise cancellation and the "transparent" mode are phenomenal. They're a bit buggy, yes, but not tangibly worse than any other bluetooth headphones I've owned. They're heavy, but I don't wear them outside - they're solely for home use. I'm personally excited to see these get a refresh.
•
i'm sort of done with apple products for awhile. aside from apple silicon, the quality of hardware and software decisions seems to have been consistently dropping for quite some time. i regret buying the new iphone. i regret buying the new air pods. i don't regret buying a mac mini recently, but only because it's got an apple silicon processor.
•
I can't believe they finally refreshed this after I just churned (after owning the v1 since launch), always happens! The old Airpods Max had an issue of these giant booms when it was going low power that just wrecked my eardrums - I feel like the apple ecosystem pull is pretty compelling, but I think torturing your users for enough time will get even the most loyal customers churn. I've been enjoying the nothing headphones, I enjoy having an off button and ability to connect via wire to the device.
The mesh in version one lasted just over 12 months. Repair bill at Apple was 90% of the cost of a new pair. Truly the worst built product I’ve bought from Apple. Never again.
•
The worst built apple product is the HomePod. It just sits there, with no one touching it. Suddenly, music randomly starts and stops playing. Take it into the Apple Store, they acknowledge it’s a known hardware defect to start registering non-existent touches, and they refuse to fix it. Offer to replace it with a refurb unit for like ~$20 less than a brand new unit. Edit to add: the unit is less than 2 years old.
•
I got sick of it, unplugged it, and left it for a few months, and ... apparently it fixed itself? Now it's working fine, as fine as any HomePod does.
I don't understand how a pair of headphones can be $549 meanwhile the Macbook Neo is $599 The pricing on these always seemed a bit crazy to me, like the value is way off compared to other Apple products
•
Sennheiser HD 800 S is $1700 and has been around for years. Or the Meze Elite Tungsten at $4,000 - if Apple can get 80/90% of the way there at $549, they'd be a steal for the right customer .
•
Isn't this pricing pretty in line with other high end ANC headphones? e.g. Bowers & Wilkins PX8 ($699), Focal Bathys ($849), Sony WH-1000XM6 ($399), Kef Mu7 ($399), Bose QC Ultra ($449)
•
As said, different markets. If you look from the same perspective, the last iPhone I ordered is 3x the price of a last generation MacBook Air. $549 is pretty reasonable if the headphone has the sound detail it's advertising. Given how AirPods Gen 3 sounds, I'm sure that thing sounds pretty amazing.
•
Different target markets. Audiophiles and wealth exhibitionists are much more willing to pay the large amount
a lot of non apple headphones cost more... and many don't even sound better...
•
Well, in the market segment of Bluetooth ANC headphones, there's not that much. Bowers & Wilkins and Focal come to mind, both audiophile luxury brands and similarily overpriced. On the other hand, the flagship Sony is quite a bit less than AirPods Max.
The Max 2 finally arrived and I felt nothing. That surprised me... I buy every in-ear AirPods Pro without much deliberation, even the Pro 3 which measurably regressed on sound. The heart rate sensor and ANC bump were enough. I say that to clarify: I wanted to want these. But it's death by a thousand cuts. The weight alone I'd live with. The case I'd accept. No IP rating on something I'd like to wear outside.. fuck.. fine , annoying, moving on. But all of it together, at that price, with that much time to fix any of it? Hard pass. I've gone for the Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 instead. More expensive, noticeably worse ANC. But you can hear where the money went. The drivers, the feel, the fact that four hours in you've stopped thinking about them. It sounds like it was made by people who find audio interesting. Apple used to feel like that. Embarrassingly, it also has no IP rating: somewhat hilarious from a company in West Sussex, where "unexpected sunshine" makes the local news. And the ANC versus Sony is less a gap than a... uh "chasm". The question I'd put to anyone in this thread still weighing it up: are you buying the best headphone, or the most convenient one? For in-ears those are the same answer. For over-ears, I'm not sure they are.
•
can you use them in wired mode?
•
I feel like a salesman now, but yeah you can... they come with a straight through USB-C:USB-C cable (though it's super thick and seems rated to carry 60w and USB2.0 speeds according to my Treedix.. weird choice) and a USB-C to 3.5MM jack cable.
•
> even with the Pro 3's having inferior sound quality Then > I decided to buy the Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 Have you seen its frequency response?
•
Yeah, but isn't that a deliberate tuning thing? Much further away from Apples marketing as "best airpods yet" for an all-rounder product.
Truly the Beats of our generation. Buy headphones from audio specialists, not Apple.
•
Apple headphones have better audio fidelity than you are giving them credit for. I have several different pairs of high-end studio headphones and expensive amps to drive them. The Apple Max, which I also own, frankly provides a cleaner reference than some of the classics. They are perfectly usable as reference headphones. The built-in Apple audio DSP, amps, etc have surprisingly good fidelity. Much higher quality than you would expect from consumer hardware. They even provide high-impedance headphone jacks on their recent computers.
•
These earphones are not for people who appreciate good audio. They are for people who want more products in the Apple ecosystem and have lots of money to spend.
•
Still pretty happy with my Homepods in Stereo
•
Apple knows its cookies when it comes to sound. I can say that as someone who uses proper HiFi systems and has played in orchestras.
•
Honestly Apple's Airpods Pro and Airpods Max sound pretty great though, and I own several pairs of "audiophile" IEMs and headphones.
•
Will agree about Airpods Pro, but Max are a notch below the competition (Bose, Sony, Sennheiser).
•
Apple hardware sound is the best on the market (macbooks, ipad, etc.). It is unwise to dismiss their prowess
Crazy to think Apple is now pricing their consumer headphones in the same segment as serious professional gear, they seems to cost more or less the same I paid for my "studio-grade" DT 1770 Pro.
•
Typical studio grade cans need studio grade equipment to drive them. No surprise when decently sounding headphones that already ship with tailored DAC, amplifier (my first can were 600 Ohm), ANC cost more than decent headphones for which you need to buy all that (and lug around if you travel). With all that taken into account, today the latest DT 1770 Pro still cost over 20% more than the latest AirPods Max. Considering Apple also markets Max for audio work, they compete on the same turf, and Apple’s offer is way more cost effective, for whatever that is worth.
It's amusing to me how personal all this stuff is. The XM5s were super uncomfortable to me (to the point I was relieved when they got stolen) and I ended up going back to Bose even though I liked the sound quality on the Sonys better.
•
Same experience. Everyone raved about the Sonys and so when my Bose died, I tried them out. I can't stand them! They're way less comfortable and have worse noise cancellation. The lack of buttons drives me crazy. And worst of all - when on flights, the noise cancellation will randomly stop working. Despite flights being one of the main reasons I purchase noise cancelling headphones.
Funny that something similar swore me off another brand’s headphones. The noise cancelling would amplify mechanical vibrations of the headphones, so much so that even eating with them on would cause a deafening bass. Walking with them on was also incredibly loud. I sent them to support with a very good description of the problem, came back the same, “cannot reproduce”. It seems support workers for both companies just connect them to an audio source and check if sound comes out relatively alright.
•
Prior to the third time going to Genius Bar, I was able to reach a senior manager for Apple repairs in a phone call to Apple Support. And even after asking him to take down a note on my incident to have the repair tech physically open the right ear can, they still came back with "cannot reproduce". There was either a screw loose in my brain or the headphones. Guess we'll never know which.
All three pairs of AirPod Pros I've owned have had rattling issues that would reproduce when I physically moved/tilted my head. It's really annoying.
•
Same here. Three pairs and all had this issue after some time. One of the pairs was a used one with the same problem.
•
This is exactly why I will never buy them at all again.
•
For the price that is insane.
They're one year old at this point, why is this news?
•
What was released last year was the same AirPods Max just with a USB-C port. This is a new generation.
No wireless lossless audio means these are a hard pass for me. I really expected Apple of all folks to figure that out since they engineer their entire stack, hardware to software, but they’re still just pushing the same bluetooth audio that my Airpods Pro 2’s consume (which are half the price and incredibly excellent). Sony’s LDAC is niche, but sounds objectively better to my ears than the AAC used on Apple’s kit when I opt to use my Walkman+XM4s. As for wired listening? My XM4s sound okay wired in, and at home I’ve got critical-listening kit already. Adding a USB-C cable to the Max is not appealing given that 3.5mm already exists, USB-C cables are heavier than analog audio wires, and more corps block USB ports in general or mess with them in ways that corrupts the audio stack. Give me wireless CD-quality audio and I’ll be a happy dinosaur. Until then, I have zero reason to upgrade what I currently have.
•
So you're one of the few people who actually can consistently tell MP3 and lossless apart? https://abx.digitalfeed.net/
My AirPods Max headphones are incredible. They sound amazing. They also squeeze my head so much that they hurt so I don't use them. Kinda sad, really. I'd use them at my desk every day if they were comfortable to wear.
•
I've had some headphones in the past where I stuck them over a slightly-bigger-than-my-head object when not wearing them to stretch them out over some time to alleviate this problem.
What's new about this with the H2 chip? My H1-chipped USB-C Airpods Max (OG) seem to switch seamlessly between my iphone, ipad, and macbook pro already.
•
If your gen 1 are already excellent for you, there’s no reason to upgrade, same as there’s no reason to get a new phone or laptop every year. My wired headphones are ten plus years old and will be fine for a couple more decades; my gen1 Max, at a fifth the price, are also fine and will be fine until their Bluetooth becomes too old (which may be ten or twenty years these days). Both benefit from earcup swaps occasionally (but gen1 lightning needs them more often than usb-c.) If you’re unsatisfied with Transparency mode on your gen1 then the gen2 will give you Adaptive which is a big improvement ( especially so if you wear them outdoors or around other people). Same improvement that the AirPods had, if you’re familiar with that. If you use them for videoconferencing, the lower latency and higher quality headset codec may be worth upgrading. They retain value on the used market so long as you unpair them from Find My an hour before you sell them and have a purchase receipt. I suspect there might be some slight power savings for your transmitting devices if both sides support Bluetooth 5.3, but I would not expect that to be significant or advertised.
>They are a luxury item, you are paying for the privilege of signaling you can afford $550 headphones. Plus they give juuuust enough features to cover for the true purpose and give you plausible deniability. Same as most luxury items. None truly give the value of the cost (Is a Ferrari 10x as fast as a GR86? Carry 10x as much stuff? Go 10x as far on the same gas load? Etc etc etc) "Oh but there's nothing like the experience of driving a Ferrari!"
•
I don't think this is the right analysis, pretty much all products follow an ever steepening curve of price to get to the highest quality. The general sentiment on HN, of which I count myself among, is that you stop before the curve gets too steep. You can stop at Oreos you don't have to pay Stella Parks to make you hers. You get the highest quality thing that isn't commanding crazy premium prices. But the market for that last 10% 1% 0.1% does exist. Like yes it's funny to make fun of middle aged guys who buy extremely expensive cars and who if actually tested couldn't tell the difference between a $60k sports car and a $160k sports car and there are plenty of businesses that prey on that lack of discerning taste to take advantage but it doesn't mean the difference isn't there at all.
You're joking, right? There are many high quality competitors in that price range. I'm holding a pair (Sennheiser HDB 630). They are significantly lighter weight, better comfort and sound quality.
•
My hd660s2 leave an indent in my skull. I don’t find them uncomfortable though.
I see, I remember checking that they didn’t support high definition wireless codec but missed the part where they could do lossless over the wire last year. Why can’t they squeeze in that codec, considering Pros have it for years and are a lot smaller? Edit: apparently I was confusing AirPods Pros with Sony WH models, which have LDAC. I guess there is no chance Apple adopts LDAC, even in their large heavy cans.
•
LDAC is also not lossless btw.
My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (community.home-assistant.io)
•
actually the hardest part of a locally hosted voice assistant isn't the llm. it's making the tts tolerable to actually talk to every day. the core issue is prosody: kokoro and piper are trained on read speech, but conversational responses have shorter breath groups and different stress patterns on function words. that's why numbers, addresses, and hedged phrases sound off even when everything else works. the fix is training data composition. conversational and read speech have different prosody distributions and models don't generalize across them. for self-hosted, coqui xtts-v2 [1] is worth trying if you want more natural english output than kokoro. btw i'm lily, cofounder of rime [2]. we're solving this for business voice agents at scale, not really the personal home assistant use case, but the underlying problem is the same. [1] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [2] https://rime.ai
If you're less concerned about privacy, I use Gemini 2.5 Flash for this and it's exceptionally good and fast as a HA assistant while being much cheaper than the electricity that would be needed to keep a 3090 awake. The thing that kills this for me (and they even mentioned it) is wake word detection. I have both the HA voice preview and FPH Satellite1 devices, plus have experimented with a few other options like a Raspberry Pi with a conference mic. Somehow nothing is even 50% good as my Echo devices at picking up the wake word. The assistant itself is far better, but that doesn't matter if it takes 2-3 tries to get it to listen to you. If someone solves this problem with open hardware I'll be immediately buying several.
•
What about your wifi APs sensing which room you are in, with your choice of hilarious dance moves as the trigger ? Funky chicken for Gemini Penguin dance for OpenAI Claude?
I have no firsthand knowledge, but I’d strongly bet that the home-assistant effort to donate training data is mostly get adult males, and nearly zero children.
•
This was 2021 (so pre-llm), but I used to work for a company that gathered data for training voice commands (Alexa, Toyota, Sonos, were some clients). Basically, we paid people to read digital assistant scripts at scale. Your assumptions about training data do not match the demographics of data I collected. The majority of what our work revolved around was getting diversity into the training data. We specifically recruited kids, older folks, women, people with accented/dialected English and just about every variety of speech that we could get our hands on. The companies we worked with were insanely methodical about ensuring that different people were included.
Do people like talking to voice assistants? I've used one occasionally (mostly for timers when I'm cooking), but most of the time it would be faster for me to just do it myself, and feels much less awkward than talking to empty air, asking it to do things for me. It might be because I just really don't like making more noise than I have to (Yes, I appreciate that some people may be disabled in such a way that it makes sense to use voice assistants, eg motor problems)
•
I pretty much only use them for timers and weather, and the occasional lookup for quick random info. And this is all only if I don’t have a phone handy or eg the toddler is going to timeout and I need to set his timer in the midst of him having a meltdown about it. It’s why I haven’t and won’t enable Gemini, and I’ll likely chuck my nest minis once I’m forced to have an LLM-based experience. Hopefully they’ll be able to at least function as dumb Bluetooth speakers still but I’m not holding out hope on that end
If my lights and heat were 99% reliable, I'd be getting new lights and heat.
•
I took 99% reliable as meaning not having to repeat the command, which given that Siri is something like 50% reliable by that metric, 99% sounds like heaven.
One of my favorite episodes: I set 2 timers for the same thing somehow. I then tried to cancel one of them. >“Siri, cancel the second timer” “You have 2 timers running, would you like me to cancel one of them?” >“Yes” “Yes is an English rock band from the 70s…” >“Siri, please cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 10 seconds on it” “Would you like me to cancel the timer with 2 minutes and 8 seconds on it?” >“Yes” “Yes is an English rock band from the 70s…” Eventually they both rang and she listened when I said stop.
•
Helping my kid get ready for shower I had this exchange: Me: "Text Jane Would you mind dropping down the robe and underpants" Siri: Sends Jane "Would you mind dropping down" Me: rolls eyes "Text Jane robe and underpants" Siri: "I don't see a Jane Robe in your contacts." Me: wishes I could drown Siri in the bathtub It's wild to me that Apple got the ability to do the actual speech-to-text part pretty much 100% solved more than half a decade ago, yet struggles in 2026 to turn streams of very simple, correctly-transcribed text into intents in ways that even a local model can figure out. Siri is good STT, a bunch of serviceable APIs that can control lots of stuff, with the digital equivalent of a brain-damaged cat sitting at the center of it guaranteeing the worst possible experience.
'Pokémon Go' players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30B images (popsci.com)
•
Pretty sure you take a video when you’re doing this task so the images are extra extracted from the video?
•
Nintendo's brand means nothing.
•
Niantic has been doing this for a long time starting with Ingress. I've maybe done a handful of scans in PoGo but as others have mentioned the rewards were just not worth the trouble. The rewards for doing it in Ingress were much better (at least back in the day). I'm more split on my feelings towards it these days given our current political/social climate but part of me still thinks the idea of mapping the real world in great detail is a worthy endeavor if it can be done "right". I'd probably be more inclined to support it if they would release the data or make it publicly accessible for others to use but it being tied to the whims of a corporation (even one that's been less shitty than most) makes it hard to get behind.
You're right in that money is not the only motivator for people. I would also argue that if you told them the _real_ reason, aka your own actual motivation behind the offer, the number of people who would actually be "playing" would be much lower. I would be motivated to collect free data if it meant I was helping save lives, with that help not being behind a paywall. I would be motivated to play a free game with ads just for the fun of it. I would not be motivated to play a free game just for the fun of it if my playing of the game was furthering some faceless corporation's profit motives. In fact, in that last scenario, I would feel tricked, and it would take a non-trivial amount of money for me to not feel that way.
•
Same thing with social media. If they clearly disclosed that the more time they spend glued to their apps the more money the company makes the majority would be turned off.
My friend plays Pokémon Go for hours every day while walking his dog. I asked him about this and now we’re both confused. The in game scanning is only for major landmarks in the game. Even in his dense city these landmarks are few and far between. The world model would only have sparse information in the area immediately surrounding these landmarks. I don’t know if there’s much substance to the delivery robot story. This could be a journalist trying to make the story relatable.
•
I was thinking the 'scan a pokestop' data would be very patchy but I guess they also have images from people catching pokemon in AR mode?
> I don't think many players are doing it. Do we have to think ? Apparently they amassed 30B images. :)
•
30B images isn't that much in the context of Pokemon Go playerbase of ~50 million (conservative estimate based on users today). That's about 600 images per person, in a game that has been out since 2016... that's pretty low adoption as the previous user said. I don't think the quest has been out since 2016, but considering a large fraction of users are basically daily users, it's still quite a small number of images.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Starlink Mini as a failover (jackpearce.co.uk)
I have a GL.iNet travel router. When I am not travel, it connects to the router's second WAN port. If my main internet goes down, it takes me 30 seconds to tether my phone and failover manually. My carrier detects and throttles hotspot traffic by measuring packets TTL, so I tweaks the router's iptables to dodge that. Typically I get over 400 Mbps. From time to time I get the itch to improve my home network uptime, and I have to keep reminding myself that the current setup is fine.
•
(Tangential, regarding GL.Net routers: I find it satisfying that these routers run OpenWRT out of the box, and top the "Travel routers" category on Amazon: "Overall Pick" and "Amazon's Choice".)
TFA specifically calls out not wanting to depend on 4G/5G coverage, which is anything but ubiquitous: > It has the advantage of working pretty much anywhere with a view of the sky so no relying on mobile network coverage. I'm also not sure if $25/month is anything close to the global average for unlimited 4G/5G data (if even available).
•
Sounds way too high to me, I am paying €8.80/month for unlimited 5G, calls and texting
Sure, and anyone who thinks that was a Nazi salute fell victim to clickbait. "My heart goes out to you" with a throwing gesture that ends with your arm outstretched. Of course, only the final position was blasted all over the press.
•
please, defend mechahitler and the child pornography factory that is x.com the everything app
Sure, but my reply was specific to the parent comment about Unifi though. Most people who buy into the Ubiquiti/UniFi world want to keep within that ecosystem wherever possible, the integration between components is very good, it's just that some bits are vastly more expensive than they should really be. A generic $20 4G dongle won't be as easy to integrate nor report as many shiny metrics as a UniFi component. Right now I've got better things to spend the $480 difference on but if I had a lot more disposable income I wouldn't need to think twice about ordering the UniFi specific bit that's mostly fit and forget. > Starlink only makes sense as a last resort if LTE coverage is not available in your area. Again, the point is that LTE coverage can also disappear for exactly the same reasons why the primary FTTP/DOCSIS connection disappears. It's still reliant on local power and backhaul. Starlink has no local dependencies as long as you've got your own UPSes. Many people who really want to be sure they have Internet will probably go FTTP/DOCSIS -> 4G/5G dongle -> Starlink. My on-call plan is: FTTP Broadband -> 5G hotspot on mobile -> wifi in local cafe -> co-working space (24h access) My off-call plan is: FTTP Broadband -> pick up a book
•
>A generic $20 4G dongle won't be as easy to integrate nor report as many shiny metrics as a UniFi component. Neither will Starlink.
Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn (politico.eu)
When I was a child, I was spending my summers at my grandparents. They had a cozy house in the village. They worked the land, they had a few animals. They grew their food. They sold some wine and fruit at the market. They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy. They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc. Villagers always greeted them and stopped for a quick chat when they met on the street. Now compare with life in a big modern city. I design complicated distributed systems using AI in order to provide shelter and food for myself. Those are tools which other people use to achieve their goal of providing shelter and food for themselves. Tons of cars, the air is polluted, constant noise, fake bling, restaurants selling food at 20x price, stressed, depressed, lonely people. Each in their own digital rabbit hole on their phones all the time. Smiles for money only. I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' than what people have had for millennia without destroying nature in the process.
•
What you describe also matches exactly my grandparents. Moreover, I also encounter the same problems in the big city where I work and live. Hard to be optimistic.
Your problem is that you were happy as a child and unhappy as an adult. That's a personal problem, and has little to do with rural or urban living. As other commenters have pointed out, you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle. I suspect you don't, because it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades on end, and to choke off your access to most of the joy and beauty in the world.
•
> you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle Revealed preference wins all the time. See also the massive rural to urban migration in literally every country since 18th century Britain to present day Asia.
Folks, "Limits to Growth" was published _over fifty years ago_ ( https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/ ) and revisited repeatedly since, each time in so doing effectively confirming their worst-case hypotheses. Yes, their website is...unconvincing. Which is poetic in its own way. Wikipedia's take on the original report at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is probably a better read. But we've been able to take a highly systems thinking-inflected, as quantitative as possible approach to looking over how human's current perspective of what "growth" means and applying it over time to the resources of the planet we live on, and conclude with decent confidence and error bars that it's not just unsustainable, but that we're past the point of overconsumption and will have a very uncomfortable "correction", and we've been able to indicate that for decades.
•
Looking at this somewhat critically, did the predictions not turn out to be completely incorrect? Specifically the industrial output and food per person, as well as the "available ressources" curve. In my view, this should have been expected from the very start. Every single fixed-reserve + extrapolated usage rate calculation that we ever did produced incorrect predictions from what I know (and I'm not even really exaggerating here); this happens because increasing scarcity provides a lot of backpressure against both assumptions. Just consider e.g. fracking or oil sands for the "fixed reserves" of something like gas (from a 1970 perspective), and things like aluminium conductors for the "extrapolated use rate" for something like copper. I'm not saying that the whole concept is wrong. Long term exponential growth is obviously going to run into a wall basically by definition. But I think for humanity right now, current population trends (i.e. negative growth everywhere) is all we need to keep ressource usage physically possible for the next centuries at least (and probably going to cause negative economic growth simply from population decrease).
The people at the layoffs side when growth doesn't meet the exponential quarter targets, or destroyed villages to build a few hotel chains that deplet water banks for their golf fields, haven't noticed it.
•
A real problem, but a different one. Bad decisions, bad government, bad distribution of resources. It does not alter the underlying trend which is better for the vast majority of people.
Is "roughly exponential growth" being used as a synonym for "growth"? Exponential is used as a scare word. It's not just growth, it's exponential growth! Run and scream in fright! Because if you don't do what I say you must do, we are exponentially doomed. Dooooomed!
•
I've done enough computer science work to be afraid of exponential growth.
i can't speak for everyone, but in the above assertion am using 'roughly exponential' to mean that world population between say 1880 and 1960 followed a curve that is, roughly, exponential, in the technical sense. much of the discourse 50 years ago, e.g. the population bomb, was predicated on this observation.
•
Rough is doing heavy lifting there, so much so that I suggest it doesn't have any meaning except to say the population was growing. The growth from 1980 to 1960 certainly was not exponential: the percentage growth per year was all over the place, varying on the same time scale as the doubling time (or even faster). https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8yG0N6HnOy8g/2d3c25c3-b784-4c9c-454f-14d8d304ee00/w=1350 I suspect it's not a coincidence that the population bomb scare occurred right after the collapse of European colonialism, although teasing out the causation could be interesting.
Lazycut: A simple terminal video trimmer using FFmpeg (github.com/emin-ozata)
•
On MacOs I just press space and trim with finder. Even avoids re-compressing.
•
Invoking ffmpeg, gzip and tar commands is a sort of reverse Turing test for LLMs
•
Could have really used this a couple days ago. I had to record a video an assignment, but due to lack of global hotkeys on OBS with wayland, I had to start and stop the video on the OBS GUI. I tried to figure out ffmpeg but I was too tired and it was getting close to the deadline so I spent some time learning how to to do it with kdenlive.
Missed opportunity to reference the famous Dropbox hn comment. I just think there are other closely related use cases where a separate program can add more value, especially in the terminal. I wouldn't suggest most people should use ffmpeg instead of a gui, those are too dissimilar. Another example is cutting out a part of a video, with ffmpeg you need to make two temporary videos and then concatenate them, that process would greatly benefit from a better ux.
•
> with ffmpeg you need to make two temporary videos and then concatenate them It can be done in a single command, no temp files needed.
Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story (timesofisrael.com)
•
I sense a large number of Polymarket apologists in the comments. Polymarket's existence is a symptom of the ubiquity of Adam Smith's "free" market thinking. We ought to take it to its natural extreme -- where Polymarket encourages gambling upon when specific celebrities, politicians, or even random individuals might die (there is already a name for this: "death pools"). I am sure if they followed through on this openly there would still be advocates and defenders of the practice and counter-claims "there wasn't unequivocal evidence that Polymarket influenced their murder" etc.
•
“who decides” whether a fact is true or not - Apparently, this is an unsolved problem. Also, I’m curious, who actually decides in this case? Someone who works at Polly market, who is immune to propaganda no doubt?
•
No, they have a decentralized crypto-based system where people propose a resolution to the bet, then token holders vote. https://docs.polymarket.com/concepts/resolution
I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here --- prediction markets as they are now where the odds are public really shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called "outcome-shaping markets" because largely that is what they do, they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity. If instead these were privacy protocols where you can see how much liquidity is on a specific market, but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes (i.e. using threshold encryption, commit reveal, etc), you'd have a very different situation where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"
•
>outcome shaping markets I heard something remarkable many years ago, that there are websites on the dark web where you can bet on which day someone is going to die. In other words you can pay to have them assassinated in a very indirect way. It's like kickstarter, for assassinations. When enough funds are raised, a willing volunteer simply places a bet on the day when they plan to carry out the deed. So they win the bet by default. Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors. But I have to wonder about the model itself. I often thought about an inverse Kickstarter. Where you post an idea, people fundraise the idea, so the idea itself is validated. And then worthy contenders step forth to build it. (I guess donors could vote on who ends up getting the money to actually build it, or if there's enough they could even get divided between them for prototypes.) For example, there seems to be a lot of interest in e-ink laptops, and a successor to flash. People have been complaining for decades, but not much gets built. How much interest is there? Well we can measure that objectively! You vote with your wallet. Right now, it's a "pull" system. You have to hope and wait for a small number of highly motivated people. You have to hope they will launch something you're interested in. But what if you could push? I think we could do a lot more proactiveness on the crowd side of things. As a recent article here mentioned... people actually do know what they want. And of course this idea isn't just limited to products and services. I think there's a lot of potential for this idea in government as well.
•
> but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes This would remove the supposed purpose of prediction markets, where you can get information about the probability of an event based on how much people are betting on it.
•
Why would anybody make a bet if they don't know the odds or payout?
Surely I am misreading what you mean here. But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10. I'll search the space of other interpretations in the mean time, but if you could help me out here and clarify…
•
Maybe not directly so clearly, but there is some influence factor for sure. For example we see this with sports betting, at the far end of the spectrum it is literally players or coaches fixing games to satisfy bets. But somewhere in between that overt fraud, there is influence making going on. Submarine stories on ESPN or sports blogs highlighting a players bad shoulder, hurting their perceived value going into a free agency period. This applies to governance as well. Note how there was a bet placed on polymarket on maduros capture mere hours before the raid were conducted, and this has lead to legislation moving forward in effort to combat suspicious prediction market activity based on whitehouse insider knowledge. https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspicious-polymarket-trade-preceding-maduro-operation-rep-ritchie-torres-introduces-legislation-to-crack-down-on-insider-trading-on-prediction-markets
I'm not parent commenter, but any example of an event that actually matters? Elections, wars, the economy, healthcare systems, laws, court cases? The example you provided does look like some insider trading type of stuff, just like how 1v1 professional sports players will sometimes intentionally lose after receiving a bribe to do so, but both your example and sports don't really seem to have any kind of meaningful impact on anything or anyone who isn't gambling, no?
•
I don't know. I imagine if someone was going to adjust the timing or targets of strikes in a war in response to a prediction market bet, or the decisions of a high-profile court case etc, they wouldn't say so in public the way the CEO of Coinbase did on that earnings call. It's pretty rare that someone would actually claim they're taking an action specifically with the purpose of altering the outcome of the prediction market bet, rather than giving some other reason. So even if it were happening, the only evidence I might expect to find would be suspicious prediction-market trades around low-probability events. In situations like this, where you wouldn't expect to see evidence of something even if it were happening, you're basically left to make a judgement based on prior probability. So here that would come down to: is the financial incentive provided by the prediction market high enough relative to the decisionmaker's perceived risk and penalty of being caught? IMO, the answer is currently 'no' for most high-profile cases, but in a future where more money is riding on the bets, or where decisionmakers are insulated from consequences, that could swing to 'yes'.
This is a major example why we can't have these things, unfortunately. It sucks because they can be powerful tools, but you're never going to be able to fully police this behavior as one of these platforms.
•
Gambling has a heavy association with criminality. By allowing open gambling we must also accept the externalities. Or we could, you know, not legalize gambling.
The reason no one responds to this list is because it's just one big gish gallop It's enough to see that you brought a link to the Israeli Military Censor to hint at a conspiracy, to understand who you're dealing with. But even if you go into the list, you'll see at the top that those who were shot were in the middle of the battle, where Israeli forces were surprised, to the point of massacre alongside civilians. And there, it turns out, they didn't shoot to save themselves by the skin of their teeth, but simply wanted to kill journalists. Also, a quick search shows that "Mohammad Jarghoun" ("מוחמד ג'רגון") was not a journalist at all, but a media worker, that according to the CPJ [1], during wartime he receives journalistic status. (Also not mentioned in AJ [2]. what a surprise...) Another comment to the pantheon of "the most logical failures, in the fewest words". And then no one understands why the ICC will never consider such reports.. [1]: https://www.the7eye.org.il/501320 [2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/10/at-least-six-palestinian-journalists-killed-in-israeli-strikes-on-gaza
•
There's no conspiracy, free press does not exist inside the State of Israel.
Polymarket and similar platforms are a cancer and need to be shut down. This is an early symptom of something that will become much, much worse in an increasing manner. Stories like these make more people aware of the platform, adding users and further degrading humanity.
•
It's impossible to shut them down without implementing completely totalitarian internet controls that would make even the Chinese government blush. That's the nature of the defi ecosystem.
•
Making them illegal is perfectly sufficient. Underground gambling has always existed, it’s just not accessible so few people do it. A couple high profile convictions for criminals like the polymarket guy should help to limit bad actors
People are getting death threats for writing news articles as part of their job. How is this comparable?
•
Profession athletes get threats for winning games which is part of their job. It's exactly the same. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/09/sport/athlete-abuse-betting-sport-intl
>Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats? Subpoena Meta for all of the IPs of the account. Subpoena the ISPs for data who was using the IP. Bring in the likely people who were sending the message for questioning.
•
And when the people sending the messages turn out to be in a different country?
Polymarket's founder is Shayne Coplan, 27-year old "youngest self-made billionaire" (why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?) A sane system would just throw him in jail until his illegal betting market implements KYC.
•
Polymarket is banned in most first world countries (including the US). It's not particularly tough to get around with a VPN, but they do enough that they have plausible deniability. I'm sure if the US wanted to they could go after them and prove that they're still letting US customer sign up, but it's not the open and shut case you're making it out to be. Polymarket US is starting to roll out in the US and other countries where Polymarket cannot operate, but that's a separate company and they do abide by KYC laws similar to Kalshi.
•
> (why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?) Because no ethical person would accumulate a billion dollars. An ethical person would share the wealth they're creating with those around them instead of hording that wealth. What can you do with 100 million that you couldn't do with 10?
•
>A sane system would just throw him in jail until his illegal betting market implements KYC. There's nothing sane about KYC, it's a fundamental assault on the right to financial privacy. And the people with power can always bypass it; only the little people suffer.
•
I think it's important to look at the context of the discussion around this comment. Someone has received credible death threats - clearly the current situation is one where the little people are already suffering.
> in what world does anything give you or anyone else the right to decide to probe people up their rear end A world in which these people bet on heinous things while insider trading/influencing those very things. Privacy in gambling or insider trading is not a constitutional right.
•
Insider trading itself is only a crime when someone's betraying their fiduciary juty to an organisation, e.g. their employeer. There's nothing morally or legally wrong with using one's private information to make informed bets on other things, and economically speaking it produces better market prices/predictions because they reflect more information.
A lawsuit would just be the "cost of doing business" for Polymarket. Until there is no skin in the game, there will be no change or accountability. If CISOs can be held criminally liable for data breaches, the rest of C-suite can be held criminally liable for their own decisions as well. In this case, the guy knowingly operates a betting market that illegally does not require KYC.
•
>In this case, the guy knowingly operates a betting market that illegally does not require KYC. It's not illegal where he is. You can't go around arresting people in other countries just because they don't follow your country's law.
Happen to have any links?
•
Please dont sealion. You can start simple and work from there to make your case. It's not compelling to declare facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
I don't know. Certainly the underlying mechanisms of capitalism remain the same, but it does not hurt to clarify the context that it exists within. The world is very different today, than say the 1960's, but the "rules" were the same. Capitalism has been accelerated a lot by the rise of information technology, specifically the internet, and today it is a whole different beast with unique "opportunities" and consequences.
•
I think the differentiating feature is that capitalism used to be tethered to producing things that were useful. The current model of wealth acquisition, so called "late-stage" seems to have shifted more towards rent seeking and extraction.
If you can't do a thing safely and without harm, perhaps you should not be doing the thing? It blows my mind the number of tech people who just say "it's too hard to do it safely and without harm so we'll just do it anyway and externalize the damage to other people." Lazy, greedy, amoral douche bags.
•
Cars? Airplanes? Motorcycles? Child birth? Life itself? Nothing could be done 100% safely and 100% without harm. Obsession with safety is what helps governments become totalitarian even in traditionally-democratic countries. Obsession with safety is the reason terrorists win. Edit: Personally I think betting on war is immoral and should be condemned by all sane people, but saying that everything needs 100% safety and 100% no harm is very naive.
I truly don't know how you wake up, read this story with your morning coffee, and go to work at a company like this.
•
same as you. wake up, go to work, waste your day on hackernews, collect a big fat pay check, take a 2 week vacation to Disney world with the stacks your bringing in.
The source is a company that works with Polymarket and sells Polymarket data (as well as Kalshi and other gambling platforms).
•
Marginal revolution has been talking up prediction markets since before they existed. In fact polymarket probably was created after it's founder read Cowen's thoughts on prediction markets.
It does mean you probably shouldn't listen to them, because the expected value of listening to them is negative.
•
It means I shouldn't listen to them in general . The LessWrongers are mainly wrong about things they think they understand: when they aren't overconfident, their improvisational skills tend to be decent. They were an excellent source of information about COVID-19, but they're a terrible source of information in the areas where they think they have expertise. When there's a crisis, it's still worth checking in to see what the LessWrongers are saying about it, because it might be very useful, and it's pretty easy to tell: you just check whether it looks like they're doing science, or Rationalism™®, and only investigate further in the rare cases where it's the former.
I know roulette is random enough but here is a fun book by some physics whizzes who tried to make money off the game. The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.
•
Yes if you hold a camera and capture the speed and position of the ball and wheel you can gain an edge, people have tried it. Good point.
MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security (thenerve.news)
Can someone explain why Palantir are seen as such a threat? My understanding is their product is a PowerBI++ and they don't host any user data themselves. Are people scared of backdoors?
•
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Distribution_of_PROMIS_software_to_facilitate_Israeli_spying It’s just the latest implementation of a winning formula.
•
I’ve only had their platforms explained to me by them (palantir) at a conference but the mental model that stuck with me was more of an operating system than a single tool. Think AWS managed services + databricks + whatever library of ready made intelligence software they have already built for others. They also have “forward deployed engineers” to help organizations actually use the platform. It looked complicated enough to probably be completely useless without these specialists, even in a “self hosted” setup. The managed hosting also seems like a major selling point so many deployments that probably should be self hosted probably aren’t because muh managed services added value. And the backdoors of course. There is no way it isn’t full of plausibly deniable “metrics endpoints” that helpfully spew out all the internal data if the right key comes knocking. There’s no way it’s auditable at the level of detail you would need compared to the value of the data and the sophistication of the potential attacker (NSA).
Uh… have you heard Thiel talk? If that’s not evil, I don’t know what is.
•
I honestly haven't heard him talk much, so would appreciate specific quotes for my analysis/interpretation.
The United States is no longer a reliable ally. That is the reality that the world is having to adapt to. Even when Trump is gone, it will take a long time to rebuild that trust.
•
You shouldn’t assume trust will naturally just regrow. This may be it, we may have passed peak USA.
•
Would you trust Palantir if you're I'm the US?
Always interesting when you criticise Palantir on here you get downvoted, almost as if they have an "outreach department"
•
No the downvote is from smearing an individual for the political activities of his grandfather.
Sometime back, someone described in a way that was interesting to read. So, I bookmarked it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44896367 Reproducing it verbatim; “Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs. For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.”
•
This is a somewhat misleading description. The first half is true. They bring in their FDEs to clean and organize your data. But the difference in what they leave behind is what separates them from classic consultancies and pure tech companies. They don't leave behind "insights." They leave behind a suite of operational (ie have write capabilities not just dashboards) applications that are "custom" built to actually solve those insights. I put custom in quotes because while the applications are usually bespoke to your company, they are built in Palantir's app-building product Workshop, which significantly lowers the cost of building these custom apps. https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/workshop/overview So in the end, your company's processes are improved because your employees are using the apps that the FDE's built. This is distinct from traditional consultancies because those will only leave behind the insights. Also distinct from most SaaS because those have a one-size-fits all approach, so you wind up having to change your company to fit the design of the application, where as Palantir builds its applications to fit your company.
> And the EU cannot work with China as long as China backs Russia and undermines European industrial exports. I mean, that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA (lifting sanctions against Russia, no tariffs there either, but plenty tariffs for "allies"; threatening NATO members in several ways; taking over Russia's "peace" plans for Ukraine 1:1 and putting the pressure solely on Ukraine; (I could go on for pages)). I am not sure Americans really understand how much trust is already gone.
•
> that is not that huge a difference compared to the USA It is for the EU. The EU dislikes the current deprioritization of the Ukraine Conflict by the US, but also recognizes that the PRC is directly providing material support and subsidizing Russia's military industrial complex [0]. That is the red line for much of the EU. [0] - https://www.ft.com/content/268b2852-e83c-4676-9f3c-7ca41c12c1ba?shareType=nongift
If it quacks like a duck...?
•
To an extent, but with caution and charity. A lot of exceptionally good people have come from bad families - one of the Borgias was a saint, for example. A lot of exceptionally nasty people seem to have perfectly nice families. Of course sometimes people who are, for example, brought up to be racist, are racist.
Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies (frontiersin.org)
•
thanks
Yeah just look at ycombinator, they are all infected with bots
•
and full of garbage ai related post.
In Mexico, you either pay the bribe or go to jail on trumped up charges. I don’t see what education level has to do with it.
•
That's why there are two pieces. You also need to push back. Collectively pushing back, not just individually. That's the only way.
The NGOs find ways to route the received money back to the politicians in the form of campaign donations, or having a politician's friend/relative being an executive at the NGO. The NGOs also subcontract to other NGOs, who take their cut, and eventually just a trickle winds up going to the purpose of giving money to the NGO.
•
The first part sounds like it's US-specific; campaign donations are less of a thing, and more strongly controlled, in Europe. The second could happen here too, though, and probably does.
Very well said. I live in Sweden, one of the world's highest-trust societies, but I have experience from a more corrupt environment and my whole family lived most of their lives in a corrupt autocracy. This means that in a corrupt society, it's extremely difficult as an individual not to participate. The corruption isn't something that happens at some level, it's a core part of the economy. If you try to do things by the book, you will just not get any result. You won't get to buy a limited product by waiting your turn. You won't get your kids into a better high school by having them display academic excellence. If you take a principled stance and refuse to participate in the many small-scale acts of corruption the society runs on, you'll have a harder life. I don't want to say it's impossible but I would compare it to living off-grid in a modern Western country. It's possible but it requires a lot of dedication and that lifestyle then determines many aspects of your life.
•
One thing that I want to add - Westerners have experience of this sort of corruption, every day. Not at a governmental level, and not powered by cash, but it is seen when working for companies. Managers are highly corruptible - it's got next to nothing to do with the output of a given worker, instead it's about their ability to "kiss up" (something framed as "soft skills")
It's interesting that you contrast Sweden and Russia, considering while I have not lived and worked in Russia, I've worked with Swedes quite a bit and my experience with them is that they don't really emphasize red tape that much - in the context of development, they don't really mind if you bend the rules if it's for a good cause - what I mean is there's a general attitude of pursuing sensible outcomes over blindly following processes. They're also not big on oversight and I got what it looked like to me a surprising amount of autonomy and responsibilty in a very short amount of time, that I felt out of depth for a while, but got accustomed to it. A very laissez faire way of work. I felt much of the system was informal, and based on the expectation of not abusing trust. Which was very refreshing, as most companies in my experience exist in a state of bureaucratic gridlock - you need to push the change to repo X, but Y needs to sign off on it, and it depends on changes by person Z, who's held up by similar issues etc. It's a very emotionally draining and unproductive way of working, and is usually overseen by bosses who create these processes, because they don't trust their employees, or to get a feeling of power and control, or they simply don't understand how and what their subordinates do, so they kind of try to force things into these standard flows. Which also doesn't work, but it accountably doesn't work. Even if a days' changes take a week, and still end up lacking, you can point to that Task A is blocked by deliverable B, which is at a low priority at team Foo, so lets have a meeting with that teams manager to make sure to prioritize that in the next sprint etc etc etc. This is how most places turn into that meme picture where there's one guy digging a hole and 5 people oversee him.
•
I didn't mention Russia, and I've never had the misfortune of living there - though I speak the language and am well familiar with the capture. The Swedish term for how you describe work is "frihet under ansvar" - translated, "freedom under responsibility". That's a common approach at workplaces where you're doing qualified work, like engineering, and the meaning is that you're given a lot of flexibility and freedom in how you do your work as long as you reach the expected result and you take responsibility if things don't work out. That's good, and yes companies here are very informal. We don't even culturally like things like managers instructing employees on what to do, it's all phrased very casually. In context of government work or the public sector, I'd say we take rules and procedures seriously, which is one of my favorite things about the country. To me, that makes interactions much more predictable than in countries with a "people before systems" culture.
None of those examples you gave sound like corruption to me, with the possible exception of tickets. It seems to me that the problem is when people who are in a position of power and responsibility abuse their power for personal ends. Plumbing or tutoring or cheese are privately held goods and surely the possessors of those goods can dispose of them how they want? Or perhaps in all of these examples the plumber/grocer/engineer is entrusted with responsibility from the government to ration a scarce resource?
•
> the problem is when people who are in a position of power and responsibility abuse their power for personal ends Is that not the definition of corruption?
•
Yea, I guess I don't get it either. I know someone who can eat at a local restaurant for free whenever he wants because he knows the owner. In return, he helps the owner maintain his car and does little odd handyman jobs around the owner's house for him. Is this blat? Is it corruption? Or is it just friends doing each other favors?
•
They are all corruption, or corruption adjacent. The plumber is working for a company. He's supposed to be working on an official job. But he's doing the work slowly because he's actually working on your plumbing problem. You are working for the grocery store. You are stealing cheese from the store system that is supposed to allocate it, and making it available it to the plumber as payment for your plumber being corrupt on your behalf. Again, the wife "who can help you get tickets" is stealing access to them. That's corruption. The engineer who is tutoring, is paying for that act of corruption. This may or may not happen when the engineer is officially supposed to being doing something else as part of their job. If so, that's possible because people learn to look the other way for you, so that you'll look the other way for them. And in a society where everything works this way, what do you think happens to overall economic productivity? Exactly! Which creates scarcity. Scarcity that makes the ability to get things through the blat network even more valuable!
•
None of that was specified. As I said earlier, the problem is not with quid pro quo; it's in the stealing which you've now specified as additional context. I could just as easily specify another context where each of these actions are legitimate. (Perhaps free tickets are part of the theater worker's perks.) If I said "I baked a cake for my mother," then you could say "BUT YOU STOLE THE FLOUR!" It doesn't prove anything.
Well in the Soviet case, plumbing and cheese are most certainly not privately held resources. Doing such work as a plumber means you're essentially acting as self-employed or a business, which is illegal. The cheese is probably produced on a collective farm and sold at a state-owned store. But surely the cheese case would not be okay even in a Western capitalist context where the store is privately owned. Just replace it with a more scarce product. A store employee isn't allowed to tell customers the store is out of iPhones while keeping a dozen stashed for preferred buyers.
•
In Western capitalist context, An apple employee can't do that because they would be stealing from Apple. If they are reselling phones that belong to them, they can dispose of them however they like. I think the Soviet context is key. Because the state is rationing these items, it creates a black market based on personal connections. In Western society nobody cares because (ideally) the market is competitive and you can just buy from someone else.
It doesn't because their premise falls apart in democracies too. Civil servants in democracies are not elected and they have the same 'stopping power'. A planning officer in the UK could just as easily decide to arbritrarily block plans they disagree with as in an authoratian country.
•
Democracies are different from each other. There are many ways you can build a society from the same basic principles. One key difference is the extent the authorities have discretionary powers. Can they do whatever the consider necessary to do their jobs (until the courts tell otherwise), or do they only have the powers explicitly given by the law? Common law systems tend to favor discretionary powers, but they vary on how eager the courts are to keep the officials in check. Civil law systems can be anywhere on the spectrum, but it's usually a legislative choice made in advance rather than a judicial choice made after the fact.
Elected officials have significant influence they can bring to bear on specific decisions, general operations, and in many cases personnel decisions. That’s true at the level of individual house members and can be more true for other offices. The rule of law and checks and balances also means these elected officeholders don’t have arbitrary control, which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional and effective federal workforce) as well as some limits. I swear we have a problem where we quantize to caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and control theorists would probably anticipate this means things will start to swing a bit wildly.
•
Executive power over the civil service is an ant driving an elephant. You can say it's a good thing and it's intentional, but the fact of the matter is that the executive appoint a fraction of a percent of the positions and those positions have nominal personnel powers that they can't really use without fear of getting sued.
This doesn't make any sense to me. There are and have been numerous authoritarian regimes that lack "high public support", now and in the past. The entire idea for most authoritarian regimes is to slowly minimize the power of those who oppose them. And then, they spend a huge amount of resources looking for dissent (SD/Gestapo, Stasi, etc.) and trying to control the societal narrative.
•
Any government that lacks public support collapses. Democratic governments can operate without a plurality of support for the current government, because the population generally supports and is invested in the system of government. When democratic governments fail, there is usually very little danger of violence or economic and societal instability, because there is trust in those systems. Corruption and malfeasance harms trust in the systems of governance which democracies depend on. Authoritarian governments depend on confidence in the government to continue functioning. The system of government isn't necessarily trusted, the workers of government aren't necessarily trusted, but the leaders are in charge and doing things . Media manipulation and effective propaganda is certainly an important tool for these governments, but pointing out that it exists doesn't mean that it doesn't work! Propaganda totally does work, by almost all measures. Russia, China, Cuba, Iran all have high domestic support for the government.
Why I love FreeBSD (it-notes.dragas.net)
Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS, except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even though I posted to the bugs database and would diligently follow up and perform experiments. This also happened on different incarnations of server hardware, so it wasn't the same physical NIC having the issue, but different varieties. Anyways had enough of the random downtime, I just switched to Linux which didn't have these issues. I'd say the best part of FreeBSD though is freebsd-update which was a game changer from the previous make world shenanigans.
•
Intel has had a somewhat awkward relationship with FreeBSD forever. While they are forced to support it (for $reasons) they never have properly covered it. I would say as of FreeBSD 12-13 most major issues are addressed from 1gig up to current 100g. There is an odd bug in 2.5g igc where some users have interface stalls whilst others like Netgate are shipping large numbers without issue, waiting to hear if this is firmware or not. Source: I maintain several of the Intel drivers on a volunteer basis and use to send several Tbit/s to the Internet over them professionally.
FreeBSD is the macOS to Linux's Windows. Or better yet, the iOS to Linux's Android.
•
I mean, parts of FreeBSD literally are in macOS and iOS...
My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though). I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly. Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). When I set up the server, ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it works quite well on Linux, these days. But I appreciate the reliability, the good documentation, the community (when I need help).
•
> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Yes. Emulate traffic latency using IPFW and dummynet[^1]. There is no Linux (or OpenBSD, NetBSD) counterpart. The ZFS implementation is less buggy. [^1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?dummynet
•
You can emulate latency, packet errors, etc using netem tc [0] on Linux. [0]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/tc-netem.8.en
•
That is not really accurate? Linux traffic control (tc, [0]) exists since Kernel 2.2. It can introduce traffic latency and a few other network conditions, like packet loss. [0]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc.8.html
> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it in `/etc/` over every other system. This is a consequence of both FreeBSD's reliability in needing very infrequent attention and my limited use-cases to use it. As a NAS it is great but I can't touch it without full-text search of all my notes on the side! Either way, no regrets about learning and relying on it after ~18 months so far.
•
Lack of docker support? Docker is available on macOS through emulation yes but bhyve is a thing… so why not? :-)
What documentation does a distro even publish? I only ask because freebsd has the most solid documentation I've used of any OS I've ever encountered. I seriously doubt Debian has documented the linux kernel that well (which, tbf, would be an insane project to even attempt)
•
I've been surprised at times by what's missing. There are are some strange omissions, from most recent memory around the Bourne shell builtin commands and make(1). I've had to go hunting in other BSD distribution manuals at times to find what I need. I'd say the GNU core utilities sometimes have better docs for their equivalent commands. That said, for non-core utilities on Linux it's pretty hit-or-miss. The BSDs are generally pretty consistent in what they do offer, and that's what I love about them. Of course it's a different development model and it shows.
My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000. The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.
•
Exactly the reason why I switched from FreeBSD to Debian, 25 years ago
Theoretically yes, however still limited by how well the FreeBSD Linux layer handles syscalls. A year or so back I tried running .NET (just binaries, not via a container) since the port wasn't as far along as today and it crashed due to what I suspect was slight differences in signal handling defaults. And this is part of the situation that's going to get worse, io_uring will become more popular in language runtimes and iirc it's not trivial to emulate via existing FreeBSD mechanisms (kqueue). Iirc Mac docker uses xhyve (bhyve port/inspired) to run containers via Linux emulation, MS went for pv-Linux for WSL2, while FreeBSD has been "good enough" so far. But I think that for containers it's either time to shape up Linux emulation well (It's ironic that WSL1 ironed out their worst quirks just as WSL2 was introduced, although that was without io_uring) or just add an option for Podman to have a minimal pv-Linux kernel via bhyve to get better compatibility.
•
Indeed, ideally we could get docker on FreeBSD using the same approach as is used on macOS — automatically run (one or more) Linux VMs under bhyve. I wonder if FreeBSD ought to consider a WSL2-style approach to Linux binary compatibility, too. Keeping the Linux syscall compatibility layer up-to-date has always been a resource problem, especially when syscalls depend on large, complex Linux kernel subsystems that just don’t map cleanly to FreeBSD kernel facilities.
do you remember opendarwin? i was also at puredarwin but the project seams death
•
Yes, and Apple did kill it, unfortunately — but it was never an effort to push code upstream into the BSDs.
A consequence of the license, which allows Apple and Sony to do exactly that.
•
I and other FreeBSD developers are okay with that — if we weren’t, we’d be using a different license.
A week ago, I decided to set up my home server with FreeBSD, after the HDD failed, just to try it out. The setup was quick and easy and everything works fine so far. I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem. What if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself? FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecosystem are important.
•
You should avoid Docker, is the obvious answer, and grow to love FreeBSD jails.
 Top