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Don't Wait for Claude (jeapostrophe.github.io)
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Hackernews needs to nominate an elite crew of individuals who can tell when an article is AI slop and flag it.
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Wasn't there some recent discovery that context switching is harmful to your brain?
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“Don’t pay attention to what Claude is doing, just spam your way through code and commands and hope nothing went wrong and you catch any code issues in review afterwards” is what this sounds like. I will run parallel Claude sessions when I have a related cluster of bugs which can be fixed in parallel and all share similar context / mental state (yet are sufficiently distinct not to just do in one session with subagents). Beyond that, parallel sessions to maybe explore some stuff but only one which is writing code or running commands that need checking (for trust / safety / security reasons). Any waiting time is spent planning next steps (eg writing text files with prompts for future tasks) or reviewing what Claude previously did and writing up lists (usually long ones) of stuff to improve (sometimes with drafts prompts or notes of gotchas that Claude tripped up on the first time which I can prompt around in future). Spend time thinking, not just motoring your way through tokens.
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This looks absolutely wonderful. Is it possible to run against Claude remotely (e.g. on a VM?). Or should I ask Claude to add that?
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Or, wait and take a little break so you don't burn out. I miss the days where you had to wait for code to compile or for your "big data" job to run, so you could give yourself a little mini break. Of course there is a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/303/
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> The fix is obvious: work on something else while Claude runs. Disagree. The fix is actually counter-intuitive: give Claude smaller tasks so that it completes them in less time and you remain in the driver's seat.
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Wtf is this LLM slop
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Lots of LLM-isms in the article from a very casual scan so going to assume nothing interesting here
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Very painful to read.
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Yes. I agree with the problem statement, but have no idea what the solution is BUT it does involve lots of key bindings.
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The old saying is "don't multitask" but apparently that time is gone. I wonder what people think about this. I know there is a class of SWE/dev who now consider oneself as "the manager of agents". Good luck to them and articles like this would work for these people. I'm not there yet and I hope I don't have to. I'm not a LLM and my mental model is (I believe) more than a markdown. But I haven't figured out the mental model that works for me, still staring at the terminal Claude blinking the cursor, sticking to "don't multitask" dogma.
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When computer works, it's sword fighting time. I don't make the rules
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I'm not slacking off, Claude is shmorgalizing.
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For younger people, just in case: https://xkcd.com/303/
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And for those scoffing https://xkcd.com/1053/ And for those who are feeling smug, that last one (which I still consider fairly recent) was 14 years ago
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> jc is open source. If you have improvements, have your Claude open a PR against mine. I don’t accept human-authored code. Is this sarcasm? If not, I wonder why.
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I'd offer a different approach: think about how you're going to validate. An only-slightly-paraphrased Claude conversation I had yesterday: > me: I want our agent to know how to invoke skills. > Claude: [...] > Claude: Done. That's the whole change. No MCP config, no new env vars, no caller changes needed. > me: ok, test it. > Claude: This is a big undertaking. That's the hard part, right? Maybe Claude will come back with questions, or you'll have to kick it a few times. But eventually, it'll declare "I fixed the bug!" or summarize that the feature is implemented. Then what? I get a ton of leverage figuring this out what I need to see to trust the code. I work on that. Figure out if there's a script you can write that'll exercise everything and give you feedback (2nd claude session!). Set up your dev env so playwright will Just Work and you can ask Claude to click around and give you screenshots of it all working. Grep a bunch and make yourself a list of stuff to review, to make sure it didn't miss anything.
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If you are letting Claude run for seven minutes at a time, you aren't thinking hard enough about what you're building. If you start trying to juggle multiple agents, you are doubling down on the wrong strategy. https://hbr.org/2010/12/you-cant-multi-task-so-stop-tr
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Why should Claude finish complex tasks in less than seven minutes?
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The need for "complex tasks" should be exceptional enough that you're not building your workflow around them. A good example of such an exception would be kickstarting a port of a project for which you have a great test suite from one language to another. This is rare in most professional settings.
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Computers are fast. If a physic engine can compute a game world in 1/60 of a second. The majority of the tasks should be done in less than 7 minutes. Whenever I see transcript of a long running task, I see a lot of drifting of the agent due to not having any context (or the codebase is not organized) and it trying various way to gather information. Then it settle on the wrong info and produce bad results. Greppability of the codebase helps. So do following patterns and good naming. A quick overview of the codebase and convention description also shortens the reflection steps. Adding helper tools (scripts) help too.
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I'm not sure I'm understanding this workflow. Perhaps a small tutorial / walkthrough hosted on YouTube or asciinema might help people understand.
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It's just a process to loop over a number of cycle prompting each thing taking minutes to run. It's a recipe for a massive headache as context switching costs more than 7 minutes (that arbitrary number the article came up with)
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was this written using a LinkedIn skill
Just show us the prompt you used to produce this post instead of the output
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I disagree with this take. I get that LLM produced text is filled with crappy, over the top writing in pretty much all cases, but if a prompter/writer/blogger is using it iteratively, the LLM output is going to be way better than their writing. Also, if a person is using LLMs to write articles, do you really want to see their likely even worse writing?
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Nice catch. Look at this at the end: > jc is open source. If you have improvements, have your Claude open a PR against mine. I don’t accept human-authored code. So it seems not only does the author reject human-authored PRs, they also refuse human-authored blog posts.
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I wonder if they also only want agents to read it, not people.
Don't really agree, in my experience the switching context is extremely costly. I personally have trouble having even a couple of sessions running in parallel,Especially when I'm talking difficult hard to solve problems. Of course it's easy for trivial jobs, but it's not always the case. I have been much more successful in making my time worth by taking a look at the model's output and actively participating.It gives me time to think as well.When I have a list of simple tasks I just tell it to the model and it executes one after another.
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There's a lot more "telling" than "showing" going on. By that I mean - the people claiming hyper-productivity from their GasTown setup never have actual products to demo.
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Perhaps they earn $500k and worry spending any less than $250k in token may raise suspicion.
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Something would be deeply wrong!
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I can do two or three at a time. I treat them a bit like queues: Last in first out, sort of like we do with our human peers. We delegate work, we tend to some other work, and we code review much later in the day. The secret to this mindset is that it doesn't always have to line up. Let your agent wait for you; You'll get to their output next.
Iran-linked hackers have breached FBI director's personal emails (cnn.com)
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I’m surprised no group has hacked the Epstein files, given the extreme interest.
GMail, like Apple, has specific enhanced security programs available for Politically Exposed Persons: https://landing.google.com/intl/en_in/advancedprotection/ The fact the Director of the FBI did not avail himself of this just reiterates how incompetent he is, in addition to being corrupt as heck.
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It would be poetic justice to get the unredacted Epstein files via Iran...
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It's possible it was breached in 2022 and they've held on to it until now.
I know someone who will be interested in bigger hands--big beautiful hands.
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I must say, i'd prefer if my hands remained the same size they are now. I dont want to lose my dexterity. Slightly offtopic
>just a slow decline into incompetence. Give them some credit, it’s been quite rapid.
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when were they anything other than incompetent?
Gone are the days of the strong silent type running the roles of high power in the government. He is a real embarrassment and I feel sorry for his mother.
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> Gone are the days of the strong silent type running the roles of high power in the government What, like J.Edgar?
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Gone only because current leadership kicked them all to the curb and told them to get out of Washington. Only loyal talking heads are wanted there now.
Did they find those non-existent Epstein files? @vrganj No, the opposite. The Trump admin with Kash Patel, was claiming early on that the Epstein files are a hoax, that he's seen the files personally and there's "nothing there". @vrganj It makes sense if you know the context.
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The DOJ acknowledges that over 100,000 files are still withheld.
Is it legal to download something like this?
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I dont know. I think downloading it with Tor would make it almost impossible to find out you downloaded this stuff anyway.
Maybe something fun about his book. https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/1955550123
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What a weird looking book. The cover shows Trump as the king, lol Anyways, if i were a parent, i'd certainly try to do everything to prevent my kids (under 10) from getting into politics. Let them live as normal kids should.
Think about it this way, this administration is the most competent administraion we've ever had at being incompetent.
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I dont know why your comment got grayed out but it made me smile.
I am leaving the AI party after one drink (lara-aigmueller.at)
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That's true for new projects, I've found that as a bootstrap mechanism it is not ideal, takes away your hard earned preferences/know-how abs leaves you barely engaged on the technical path. On the other side I already have quite big codebases, some legacy and inherited, there exist vast amount of context to work on and figure out stuff/fixes/bugs/improvements and Claude Code excels 95% of the time in figuring the existing flows and functionality, if a vague or precise issue is known that's facing some files elaborations or user work flows it can do a good job in pointing out what are, with a high chance, the issues.
For what it’s worth (ie, absolutely nothing), I agree with her 100%. I didn’t get into this field in order to prompt an AI to take care of the details. I got into it because I love the details. I’m a strong performer on a good team at a company many people would want to work at… and I know the clock is ticking. Sooner or later, I will be too slow. I’m not going to claim that this is the wrong way to go. It’s obviously the future, and the future doesn’t care what allenrb does or does not want. I’m somewhat hopeful that power and cooling requirements will come down by multiple factors of 10x over time, reducing the environmental damage. The fact is, I love what I’ve been able to do “the old way” and just don’t feel the urge to move on. So it goes.
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Someone the other day was talking about there being two kinds of builders. One likes the details of doing, where the other likes the things they produce. The idea was that one likes AI and the other naturally hates it. I thought about that for a bit and decided that, like most things, if you’re any good at something the “hard way” you probably have some of both. Or at least I’m sure it’s true for me. I LOVE that I can produce the things I want to create without spending months crafting lines of text. The “I know how to architect this, I know what a decent data model looks like, I have a good idea of where someone is likely to introduce security or scaling problems. I can pilot this plane and produce something GOOD.” But, I really also HATE looking at the final product and forever measuring, in my head, how much of it is even mine. Which parts I haven’t thoroughly reviewed, or would have spent a week learning and didn’t, or maybe wouldn’t have accomplished correctly at all? Am I a fraud, now? I wasn’t before… It’s a really painful trade for me.
> Do you drive an automatic car? Do you use a microwave? Do you buy food from a grocery store? Do you own power tools? None of these things allow you to turn your brain off while the machine does the work. I still have to DRIVE the car and all the thinking that goes with that. It's not a robotaxi. I still have to acquire and prep the food I am microwaving. It's not a replicator. I still have to know what I want to eat before grocery shopping and prepare the food. It's not a take out restaurant. I still have to know how to use the power tools to carefully shape something into a fine piece of furniture and not a pile of splintered firewood. Power tools can't operate on their own unless aliens (see Maximum Overdrive.) These are better analogies: Do you take a taxi or public transport? Those let you turn your brain off while someone or something does the driving work. Do you go to a restaurant where you can pick what you want, turn your brain off and wait for a delicious (or not) meal? Do you order takeout where you can order what you want form the comfort of your home, turn your brain off and enjoy the meal when it arrives? Then reheat the leftovers in the microwave. Do you use a fabrication service where you send them a drawing, turn your brain off, and they ship you an assembled thing?
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All of your examples involve you sitting and waiting. That doesn't seem like an apt analogy for what AI can do. You don't have to sit there and come up with other things to do while the AI does the work. When AI works (and technology in general) that's kind of what it's like. You'll never perceive that you are not doing the work anymore because you won't perceive the work.
This is purely a matter of perception. Cooking a meal is a deeply intellectual process. If I buy a meal from a restaurant, yes I am losing a skill. But if making a hollandaise is not a skill I ever need in my life, it's not really a practical loss. AI is taking problems and putting them in a drawer so we never have to think about it again. Matches de-intellectualized making a fire. A washing machine de-intellectualized doing laundry. These are now solved problems. Our brainpower spent on them is effectively worth nothing. The only reason we need to learn to make a fire from scratch is for the intellectual satisfaction or for emergency situations. The same reason we would choose to work on the problems that AI can now solve. It only a loss if you think the skill and ability you are losing is intrinsically valuable, and the only thing you are going to replace it with is leisure.
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>What exactly did AI take from me? Spending hours of research on Google and Youtube to glean little incomplete bits and pieces? Calling a yard service? An opportunity for a deeper understanding of gardening? If you spend hours researching on gardening and come away with an incomplete understanding of what you were attempting to do, I'm not sure that's immediately the fault of the research available. It could be that you just didn't do a good job searching for the necessary information. In this way, AI can be a boon. It helps figure out what you actually want to know in the moment. But I think it would be a step to far to say that a smattering of specific questions can replace the sturdy foundation povided by a typical education--e.g. through apprenticeship, books, etc. >It's also clearly obvious when AI gives bad or incorrect advice Is it? Isn't this a __core__ problem that researchers around the world are trying to solve? Also, __how__ could you make such a statement unless you already possessed the knowledge ahead of time to make such a judgment? I think it's hard to know if something is bad advice by looking at just cause and effect. It could be that you just lack the understanding to put the advice into practice.
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> It could be that you just didn't do a good job searching for the necessary information. How can you? The existing resources are terrible. > But I think it would be a step to far to say that a smattering of specific questions can replace the sturdy foundation povided by a typical education--e.g. through apprenticeship, books, etc. I am not going to go through a college program for my own garden. And I have books! But unless you can read a tiny and perform a small research project, you are not going to know how all of the plants in your specific garden in your specific region in your specific weather are going to behave. The best I could do is hire an expert - but again I am learning less by hiring it out. > Also, __how__ could you make such a statement unless you already possessed the knowledge ahead of time to make such a judgment? "Use X to kill the moss". It didn't kill the moss. I will now use AI to find a list of alternative things to try to kill the moss, and learn what works in my garden. The idea that AI is going to make people stop learning I don't think is born out in practice. It might make some people stop researching as an activity though.
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying (theguardian.com)
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Isn't it a more reasonable explanation that the IDF deliberately had this school bombed because those schoolgirls were the children of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers? The intentional murder of enemy children is a tactic of the IDF. They've done it for decades.
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Had Iran done anything to the US as heinous as this one "mistake" in the last 50 years that compares? Imagine if some country did this to us and just brushed it off as a mistake.
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Its not a war crime if the AI does it?
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Turning a military building into a girl's school, and then having this school right next to other military buildings - is this something that happens often? Or were there ulterior motives behind it?
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Yes, the US has 160 schools on military bases: https://www.militaryonesource.mil/education-employment/for-children-youth/what-schools-are-available-to-children-on-military-installations/
[dead]
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> This was a choice to use children as human shields Perhaps we should have, you know, just not bombed that particular fucking site until the end of the fucking school day if it was such a vital target. God forbid we act like a vaguely intelligent country, instead of drunkly screaming "maximum lethality" at every conceivable opportunity.
I couldn't find a web site for the school when I searched for one and I also noticed that while schools are generally marked on Google Maps in Iran this school was not. Both are IMO not really relevant or reliable sources of targeting data anyways. I found very little evidence searching online for the school but I did find something that looked like a blog about a school trip. Again though the Internet is not a reliable source of data for targeting - should be obvious. The main way targets should/would be selected is by direct intelligence. E.g. the targets should be identified through satellite or other observations. It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns. You also don't just randomly attack structures in this sort of surprise attack, you're presumably aiming for some specific people or equipment with some priority/military goal in mind, so you really want to have observed the targets and patterns and have up to date information on their usage. I think what likely happened here is that the entire base was the "unit" of targeting and the mistake was in identifying which buildings were part of the base. In the satellite view the military buildings and the school look very similar (since the building as I understand it used to be part of the base but was repurposed as a school). It's not true that whoever made the error had all the time in the world. Presumably once the order was given there was time pressure given that the strike was to be timed with the other intelligence. In theory the US military should/is supposed to have good processes around this stuff. So we are told. Obviously failed in this case. It is a tragedy.
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Missing the forest for the trees, are you? Wars of aggression are against UN rules, and US is in the wrong regardless of what it hit. Feels like we're talking here about whether rapist should have known that the rapee was a child or an adult, and they had a good reason to believe it was an adult person (there was mother of the girl standing next to it, so, hard to distinguish...), so yeah, obviously a tragedy they raped a child instead, but it happens sometimes when you rape a lot of people at once. A tragedy, but let's get on with raping more...
I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate. TFA discusses 50 specific strikes all of which missed via automated analysis. That doesn't seem the same. I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground. However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target .
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The New York Times are the same people who spread the lie about Iraq having WMDs, they are not credible, and in fact have been proven to be incredibly biased when it comes to wars in the Middle East. Israel and the US targeted many schools in Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. This strike was clearly intentional and very much in line with all other Zionist actions.
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For someone that interested in precision of supporting claims with evidence, you make pretty ridiculous and completely unsupported claims yourself, like "there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties".
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Wouldn't have been looking for targets if senile old fucks looking to deflect from their personal liabilities hadn't started shooting. AI didn't do shit here. Stupid people built the AI and the weapons and applied them. Any other argument is intentional obfuscation. You all are falling for propaganda.
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What are you doing?
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So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it. > there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes. > so this already is a low error rate As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here. We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple. > However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?
How many American schoolchildren have Iran killed in the last 25 years? How many Iranian schoolchildren have America killed? Where's your moral justification for this war of choice if "oops, 137 dead kids is a normal expected outcome"?
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This feels like moving the goalposts. If the argument is that the war was unjust to begin with, then do you really need a school getting bombed to push you over the edge? After all, even if they bombed an IRGC compound and only killed soldiers, those soldiers are still people's sons, fathers, husbands. Even if there's no deaths, you could still make the macroeconomic argument that any economic losses are impoverishing the Iranian people.
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Iran's regime is directly responsible for untold war crimes and suffering through their proxies. You can say the same about the US, which is why I dont think it would be immoral for Iran to launch a bunch of rockets at the US. 1/1000 being mistargeted isnt unexpected. Accidentally killing a bunch of kids would likely be worth it, morally speaking, if it led to the destruction of the Iranian regime.
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If we had all military bases next to elementary schools, things might be different.
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We do. Grocery stores (commissaries) and residential units as well.
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The us has over 150 elementary schools on military bases. If you use a more colloquial definition of military base, many many national guard armories are on the same block as elementary schools or even right next to them. Can you cite anything that says all iranian military bases are next to elementary schools? If they are on ALL bases, that makes hitting an elementary school on base less forgivable, not more, because if its a fact of every iranian military base, it's a lot harder to claim good intelligence and also that they didn't check that the part of base being bombed was the school. Also, how is that relevant?
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There are plenty of military bases next to elementary schools in the US. Where do you think the kids of soldiers go to school?
Meh, that sounds like a cargo-cult to me ;)
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[delayed]
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Don't go there.
Check out this example: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjw4egp7lwno "As we pass through Khan Shaykhun, we come across a street painted in the colours of the Iranian flag. It leads to a school building that was being used as an Iranian headquarters." "On the wall at the entrance of the toilets, slogans read: "Down with Israel" and "Down with the USA". It was evident that these headquarters were also evacuated at short notice. We found documents classified as "highly sensitive"." This is a BBC reporter reporting from Syria after the fall of Assad. It is strategy for the IRGC and Hamas to operate from civilian infrastructure like schools to gain immunity. That's what's "not a human error".
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Help me understand how this justifies the collateral damage.
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I am countering the parent's statement that seems to indicate the US and Israel are intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure systematically for no reason. A lot of this infrastructure is targeted for good reason because it is used for military purposes. This is totally unrelated to the topic where it seems the one school in question was incorrectly targeted based on what we know today (though not intentionally). The general framework for justifying collateral damage is that enough care has to be taken to minimize it vs. the value of the military objective being achieved. Attacking an IRGC headquarters intentionally based in a school (e.g. if the example in Syria was to be attacked by Israel for example) still needs to pass this test. I.e. Israel would have to take measures to minimize collateral damage which would be proportional to the military value it gains by hitting the IRGC. But the (Syrian) school would have been considered a legitimate military target and the outrage should be towards the IRGC setting up camp there.
You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened . Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press. IRGC is making claims that no other party can verify first-hand. Everything from the number of explosions, the extent of the physical damage, the number of wounded and dead, the number of civilians wounded and dead - these are all unverified claims and should be treated as such. Not only is the IRGC obviously biased and incentivized to maximize media pressure on the US and Israel: they are known for information warfare of exactly this nature. To take their statements at face value, and present them as established facts in the opening paragraph, as this article does, is journalistic malpractice. Again, the basic facts on the ground are not known , yes all parties are projecting narratives with a certainty that we should all be suspicious of. Without this stable foundation of knowing what actually happened, and why, the very premise of this article collapses on itself. EDIT: the flurry of responses to this post illustrate the problem. It's difficult to even have a respectful, fact-driven discussion on this topic, because everyone is tempted (and encouraged) to rush to their political battle stations. Nobody wants to discuss information warfare, because they're too busy engaging in it. I think that's worrying and problematic. No matter which "side" you're on, it should be possible to distinguish what is known and what is not; and implementing basic information hygiene. Or do you think you are uniquely immune to disinformation?
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You're not wrong but what we can tell from open sources is: - The building does seem to have actually been a school and "detached" from the rest of the military complex. - The school the Iranians claim it was does seem to exist even if it's not 100% clear that's the identical location. - At the time of the attack school would have been in session. - The signature of the attack seems similar between all the buildings attacked and we have footage showing a Tomahawk hitting the area. Another thing we can tell is that the US has to know the truth here and isn't coming out with an official statement. And I'm saying this as someone who thinks the Iranian regime is evil, needs to be struck down, was trying to acquire nuclear weapons etc. As to the numbers I agree they are to be treated with suspicion. The Iranians are obviously motivated to lie, inflate them, and treat all casualties as civilians. But we can still try and estimate given the size of the building what would be the number of students. We can also estimate the outcome of the missile hitting the building and correlate with the photos and satellite imagery, and until we have better data use those estimates.
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I agree with all of that. My worry is that the Guardian article is not doing any of it , and in fact is damaging the framework for even having such a conversation.. Instead they are repeating IRGC statements without attribution, and establishing them as background truth in the first paragraph. Then building an entire article on that flawed premise. Essentially, their article exists in the narrative universe create by the IRGC. I find that incredibly worrying.
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My bar for present day journalists and the Guardian specifically is pretty low. The goal for the Guardian is apparently to get clicks and advance their agenda. Journalism and real news reporting is apparently dead. My commentary is more on the specifics of the incident. Agree the first paragraph is garbage journalism.
You are the one engaging in "information warfare", intentionally trying to spread doubt about an event that was confirmed by both Iran and US. What does it feel like to deny the murder of 150+ children out of nationalistic pride? Do you simply have no conscience? No sense of guilt, no concept of morality?
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I feel very bad for the children and their relatives. What happened is really terrible. I wish there was the same level of rigour and energy applied to investigating the 40,000 deaths in early January. There are countless videos online. I simply don’t understand why 150 people receive so much attention while 40,000 don’t. This saddens me because it feels like the focus is on who was responsible rather than who lost their lives.
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I feel like an intellectual god to have been gifted the brain power to recognize that 150 kids being killed is a awful tragedy, and that converting a building on a military base to a school is recklessly stupid and borderline purposely done as a trap. It's like letting your child play in the road at night, and then being upset when a drunk driver hits them. Anyone can look at the satellite images from the bombing and see how ridiculous whatever Iran was doing was.[1] [1] https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop/1600x900+0+63/resize/1400/quality/85/format/jpeg/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fc6%2F45%2F6674da344d7e85243a94d6630f4e%2Fwide-after.jpg
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The US maintains over 150 elementary schools on military bases around the world. Although it does make sense that the land of school shootings would use the children of it's military as bait.
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There are schools on military bases all over the world. Here's one at Joint Base Andrews: https://maps.app.goo.gl/iMm4QSZJYAaLLSLh9 Are the children in that school a legitimate military target? Is putting that school on Joint Base Andrews "recklessly stupid?" Why is it perfectly fine for the United States to do this but "recklessly stupid" for Iran to do it?
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I'm just gonna assume you are an American, just because this is a website who's audience is in large part American. But I might be wrong. Anyway, as such you must at least in passing be familiar with the concept of a "military base" as it is practiced by American society. > Everything that the average family needs is there; a grocery store, shopping mall, bank, post office, theatre, religious centers, outdoor activities, community center, clubs, dining facilities, gas station, quick stop markets, and, if not a full size hospital, medical clinics. The majority of bases do not have schools physically located on the installation, but the children are educated in the neighboring school systems. src: https://militarybases.com/military-housing/life-on-a-military-base/ I just googled that so I don't have to write the text myself. So while you might be technically correct about schools, do you think housing on a military base for personnel and their families is akin to playing on the road at night ? > I feel like an intellectual god HN rules prevent me from writing anything snarky here.
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"I understand that the officer killed your unarmed teen son. But you have to understand, in the dark, he appeared to be reaching for a weapon, and the officer feared for his life." "It's a tragedy that she was raped. But you have to understand, the way she was dressed, she clearly wanted it, she was sending mixed signals, you see." Anyway. Here's a preschool right next to a military base, it took me about 3 minutes of scrolling around on google maps to find this. https://maps.app.goo.gl/2TP32tYqRZxthSFF8
I think it's likely that the explosion was caused by a US strike. But we don't actually know for sure that that's what happened - the US government has not confirmed it. We also don't know anything about casualties - we only have the IRGC statements, and they are not reliable. > Have those investigations been launched? Yes, according to the US government, an investigation is underway. But its starting point is determining what caused the explosion .
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How long does it take to look at the coordinates programmed into the cruise missiles? Or to review existing satellite imagery for the location and other intelligence sources? If this was a school (which seems likely at this point) and if this was a US TLAM that hit it (which also seems likely at this point) then we should expect a lot of casualties when it's hit during school time (which also seems likely). And yes, we shouldn't trust what the IRGC is saying. I think I'm on your side but in this case the correct course of action for the US would have been to quickly own up to the mistake. There is really not a lot of ambiguity here. This doesn't seem to be a case like "shots were fired from the school window" or some sort of dual use with IRGC having offices in the school. If there was a reason for the targeting then presumably we'd have a statement about it already. Mistakes can be made and are always made in war. Leaving this open like this is damaging to the war effort.
No. The only thing that the US government and IRGC agree on, at the moment, is that there was an explosion at the site of the school. The US did NOT confirm that they are responsible for the bombing, or that children (or anyone) died as a result. This is a verifiable fact. So, applying your own principle: the only thing you should treat as fact, is that there was an explosion at a school.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-missile-strike.html > An ongoing [United States] military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.
Holy gaslighting bootlicking
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How is this a useful comment?
Netflix raises prices for every subscription tier by up to 12.5 percent (arstechnica.com)
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Honestly, having parted for the seven seas years ago, every time I check I'm surprised how much the frog's been boiled. General quality seems on par with soap opera slop, shows look like they've become a genre itself with different structure and even lightning, there's more trash tv there than there used to be in cable (which saying something), etc.
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I won't be cancelling by subscription because I don't have one :) I have found I get way more value out of subscribing for 1-2 months to a service and then switching to another or going a few months without any. At this point, netflix will keep raising prices. Because they can, and because they have to as a public company beholden to shareholders. I'm not sure there are other markets or other products/services they could expand into, i think they've already reached a point of saturation.
Good for them, I cancelled my subscription simply because Linux support is so awful. It's impossible to watch in 4k, and even with 1080p you frequently get automatically downgraded to lower res bitrate whenever the window isn't focused. Absolutely daunting.
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You know it's funny. Awhile ago I subscribed only to watch Stranger Things, I paid for the 1080 HD plan. 4K is clearly incentivized. Any how, I called to complain at the time. My opinion is the picture instantly got notably better when I tried standard HD again. There seems to be different degradations of 1080 and 4K.
I cancelled Netflix long ago, they started cancelling their best shows (like 1899, etc) and producing absolute garbage. I mean just look at the quality of early/peak Netflix to now. Stranger Things is a great example, the decline is visible not just in the story but in the visuals. The documentaries are also bad now, I watched the "Manosphere" at someone's house, and while you can agree with the premise that these people are deranged, it was clearly a cash grab and didn't really move the needle. Then the catalogue has been gutted, and it's just mostly garbage now. Just awful stuff. The last truly remarkable series they had was Dark. Everything since has slid into being for low attention span people on their phones, and for that reason I no longer give it my attention, or money. I guess it's working out for them, since they keep printing money...but I think it won't last forever. Look at Disney, the decline can come quick once the cracks turn into fault lines.
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While I haven't watched it, the fate of _1899_ is why I've pretty much given up on TV --- I'm _not_ going to watch anything until I know that: - the story has been completed (_Dark Matter_ is the poster child for this) - the ending makes sense as part of a coherent whole (the _Battlestar Galactica_ reboot still enrages me) then, maybe I'll find time to devote to something --- until then, I've got books to read, code to write, projects to build, home improvements to make, and a yard to weed/maintain and trees which need to be harvested for lumber....
I remember signing up to Netflix to watch house of cards back in the early 2010s and being absolutely blown away. I don’t think there’s been a single show on Netflix I’ve genuinely looked forward to in the past couple of years. It’s like they completely gave up on quality content and just shovel out the most mediocre slop. I’m amazed people still pay these ever increasing prices.
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I am still trying to recover from whatever Witcher season 3 broke in my brain by its audaciously low quality. I was kicked out of the suspension of disbelief so hard I can't unsee things about the production process now, like makeup, continuity, costuming, sound design. It was like the whole crew from script to editor just gave up, totally bizarre for headliner content.
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In the early days, Netflix benefited from other media companies not recognizing streaming for what it was: their replacement. They licensed content to Netflix cheaply without thinking about how it would impact DVD sales or cable tv subscriptions. It's kinda like how IBM didn't see the value in software and that let Microsoft become Microsoft.
Severance (Apple TV) and Fallout (Amazon Prime) are pretty amazing TV shows that came out somewhat recently. Nothing on top of my mind came out of Netflix for which I really felt the need of resubscribing. I miss the quality of TV shows we reached with Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Utopia (UK), and Westworld :(
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* Silo (Apple TV) * Pluribus (Apple TV) * Paradise (Paramount+) * Landman (Paramount+) * A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO Max) First few seasons Netflix keeps it together before crapping the bed: * Witcher (Netflix) * Stranger Things (Netflix) * Mindhunter (Netflix)
Cue up people shouting about how this is horrible and that they're totally going to cancel, only to be followed by Netflix making even more money next quarter.
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Do you think they think they're going to meaningfully effect Netflix's bottom line? Or are they just trying to chat online about the purchase decision topic at hand?
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Well they'd have to lose a huge percentage of people for this not to be profitable quarter over quarter. But it likely cuts in to future growth substantially. And with what seems to now be an unavoidable economic storm as in-transit tankers dock and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz starts to be felt, there might be a larger than normal amount of people looking to cut costs in the coming year. Or maybe not, people seem to have stopped responding to economic pressure by cutting costs in the US! When vacations got super expensive, people still spent, and increased their complaining. We will see what happens in 2026.
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Netflix, cable, etc. and other at home subscriptions tend to be the last things cut because people generally stay home more when the economy is bad so they want their in-home entertainment.
Speaking from experience, I had Netflix for years without thinking about it, starting at $8/month. At that price I didn't care if I watched it or not. Then it went to $10, $12, etc. Once it got to $15-16 (I forget), I cancelled it. I now sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on shows I like and just rotate which streaming services I have. Yes, this is anecdotal. It's hard to find data on how common rotating streaming services is. I would guess not common. I found this from 2021 showing the number of streaming services the average US household has [1]. It's worth noting that this was based on lockdown-era data. The number if still quite high. I still have 3-4 mainly because my ISP gives me 1 and Amazon Prime bundles it. Were it not for those, I'd probably stick with 2. This is imperfect data because is it the same 4 or are some or all of these rotated? We just don't know. Most of the data around this is how streaming is cannibalizing satellite and cable. But at this rate Netflix will cost $30+ in 10-15 years. Will it still have growing revenue and the same subscriber numbers? There is price elasticity here. [1]: https://www.thewrap.com/u-s-households-with-4-streaming-services-doubled-in-the-last-year-chart/
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I think this is a lot more common and I suspect people decide to do monthly and that they'll cancel after catching up on shows ... and then they don't cancel. So I'm sure the streaming services don't care that people do this because they might come out ahead anyways.
> Pirating is honestly, by-far the least painful experience to watch things. No it's not. It's just the cheapest. Except for a few outliers like you describe, streaming is an order of magnitude less painful.
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I worked at Netflix, I'm a huge Netflix Stan, but even I have to agree pirating is way easier. Especially now that they started cracking down on account sharing. Having to constantly re-authenticate in my own home is annoying as hell.
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It’s 2 clicks with tools like Stremio. I use Plex with the arr stack and sure it has more configuration needed upfront but once that’s done you no longer need to figure out which streaming service has what. Plus things like realdebrid mean you don’t even need storage anymore.
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nah, it's definitely a better UX if you do it right. There are "shitty" ways to do piracy (usually the sketchy streaming alternatives). But the media management and playback tooling is genuinely great right now. I still buy most of my media, but I pick up cheap physical copies of things and put them on a NAS for playback through jellyfin. It's... MILES better than netflix/amazon/hulu/etc. No ads, no bullshit, no marketing, no "self-promotion that's totally not an ad, wink wink". Just your media. Playback is per-user, it keeps all your stuff just fine, you can resume later from wherever you left off, I can shuffle series (great for kids shows like Arthur or magic school bus), and it's never offline, down, or unavailable. --- Basically - you're very confused. I have "streaming" it just comes out of my own equipment, playing my own content. All the affordances are there and it has none of the bullshit.
Apple says no one using Lockdown Mode has been hacked with spyware (techcrunch.com)
There are more weasel words "we are not aware" - means they actually don't know if such attack was successful, "successful" - what is the definition of success? Maybe attackers got access, but didn't find anything interesting? Apple is digging itself into a hole.
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I think you are, the words make perfect sense. They know of a lot of attack attempts, and so far they have no reason to believe any were successful. Success can mean a lot of different things, why list it all out (were able to extract data, install malicious software, encrypt files with ransomware, delete any data, etc).
TechCrunch misrepresented Apple's statement.
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Yep. It's business as usual for that rag.
how many users are using lockdown mode
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This doesn't answer your question, but I use lockdown mode and know many others who do the same. I use it on my personal phone and laptop, but I have another phone and laptop for development work. I did this because I think many more people have the ability to find and exploit security gaps as models get better, to the point that attacks might done "for fun" by individuals rather than from someone using NSO's products for gain. Lockdown mode lessens that surface. So far, the impact has been negligible, though some apps and websites just don't work.
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I turn it on when I travel overseas, and have considered turning it on when I’m near border regions in America. It’s mostly that I don’t want to be that guy that leaks my company’s secrets.
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I’ve been using it for more than a year. Parts of it are pretty inconvenient, like with iMessage and FaceTime not working normally, but aside from that it’s not noticeable for my use case. Despite the inconveniences, unless animated emmojis are important to you I don’t know why you wouldn’t enable it given how strong its protections are.
Desk for people who work at home with a cat (soranews24.com)
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I'm sorry Japan, but this is not how cats work. Cat "flight or fight" response is to run and climb a tree. They prefer to be up high, not down low in some cabinet. Feels safer for naps. Something like https://desknest.com seems much more likely to work.
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I cannot tell if this is real or satire, but it is brilliant for online cat people.
All fun and games until the cat ends up sitting in front of your monitor, just like my cat is doing right now because it is warm. Had to move my browser up to see what I am typing.
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You need a stand such when the cat's weight is detected in front of the monitor, the monitor is lifted up.
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Then the source of heat will disappear and the cat will simply move to the 2nd monitor.
If only we could plug our cats in and use them to type. Call it a purrallel port.
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They prefer cat-5 cabling.
I can foresee a design flaw, which is that the cat will ignore all the specially designated areas and sit on your keyboard instead.
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I have two cats. I came here to say this.
Exactly. Contrary to popular belief cats don't sit there because a laptop keyboard is warm. They also sit on external keyboards or even in front of a tablet without a keyboard (blocking the view to the screen). They just want your attention.
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i came across a manuscript once that had a bunch of inky paw prints across a page. the scribe clearly tried to blot one of them, merely smudging it, then decided to let the rest be. it was in a very beautiful hand, and the full page must've taken hours to write. that scribe's exasperation echoes through the ages. i wish i could find that MS again. to be fair, the page was probably arranged in a nice sunny spot at the time of the incident.
Past experience with cat-wrangling over the years have taught me one thing (amongst many): It doesn't matter what the object is, if human cares about it, cat will use said object as a cat would, in order to communicate with human. Communications from cat tend to be along the lines of: I'm hungry, or in most cases, I want attention (play/stimulation). Past objects observed: Keyboards, houseplants, pens & pencils, kitchen area counter and anything on it, pet ants, rock and fossil collection.. the list goes on. And related to cat areas, the secret that I've found was to never rely on buying fancy cat furniture but rather making a unique spot for cat every few days. Blanket for comfort, areas always in sight range of the work desk but not in it (to be distracting for work). Bonus points if you visit and pet cat when they're sleeping in those spots to reinforce that this is their spot and all is well with safety and comfort. And same for toys, makeshift toys are cheaper and more effective than overpriced pet store shenanigans (Eg: elastics, pieces of string tied together, sandwich bag clips, small bouncy toys). The secret there is also reinforcing playtime with those toys by simply playing with cat! Edit: written with cat at arm's length distance in makeshift bed in a chair~
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They are incredibly communicative animals. Their problem seems to be that I am a very stupid creature that often does the wrong thing, like not feeding them every time they’re hungry, sitting at a desk instead of playing with them, carrying them out of the room when they were clearly trying to get on the kitchen counter, and so on.
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Yeah after investing in countless cat toys from the pet store, I found out that my cat's favorites are (in no particular order): - McDonald's paper straw - Bird feather from outside - Empty toilet paper roll - Shoelace - Strap of Velcro - Bottle cap
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I think variety is the key, and we've had really good outcomes by having a few pet shop toys (feather on wand, squeaky mouse, ball with bell) that we bring out for a few hours every few weeks and then put away, so it doesn't turn into something normal for them to ignore.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Sand from Different Beaches in the World (magnifiedsand.com)
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This is just amazing to look at. Incredible, that there are shells as little as grains of sand. These pictures would make great wallpapers.
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I’ve had a sand collection for many years. I keep small vials on my shelf. From the Namib desert, to the slope of Mt Fuji, to Alaskan tundra. It’s a fun way to catalog places I’ve been.
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I come from a island where its common to pain with sand. About one hundred beach, around two hundred colors, green is hard to make. I learned that local sand composition is very affected by local geology.
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I mean it makes sense that the sand is made of the same stuff as your local rocks, that's where it came from. Sure it washes around a bit in the surf but it's not like it's floating around the world on the ocean currents, at least not in massive quantities. I'm sure there are bits stuck in driftwood or whatnot but the vast majority should sink to the bottom.
No sand from Brazil with such a huge coastline?
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Only one from Mexico, definitely need more.
I think the rotating photos create a poor UX. The purpose of this layout it seems is to let users view the images carefully and study the details, but the slideshow effect makes that difficult.
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From a casual browsing perspective, I liked it. However, it'd be nice to have it pause when you hover over one - or something like that. To get the best of both worlds.
Rank the 50 best Apple products (theverge.com)
I think this list is lacking without the iPod Socks. Clearly the highest rank textile product Apple ever sold, which has to put it somewhere on the master list, no?
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This is $19 Polishing Cloth slander!
I think the MacBook Pro 2015 was probably unrivalled as a laptop for around 6 years, in terms of build quality, specification and… sheer love. I had a work issue machine and absolutely worshipped it, so I was sad not to see that here. I remember when Apple unveiled the first ever MacBook Air. That was one of Jobs’ all-time greatest presentations, and it was a huge step forwards that still influences the laptops we use today. Also missing… the white Apple earphones that came with the iPod! They didn’t sound great but they carried so much COOL for most of the noughties. I think FaceTime ought to do well here too. That’s done more to bring the 1980s vision of “everybody will video call all the time” into reality than anything else I think (I know Apple weren’t the first, but they made it ubiquitous).
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> They didn’t sound great but they carried so much COOL That's the trick Apple during the second Jobs tenure was most brilliant at: turning consumer electronics into a fashion accessory. Literally, making the sound of the earphones a secondary consideration, relative to their earring value.
QuickTime and FaceTime are useful but I never thought of them as especially innovative. HyperCard, OSX, the phones, those really moved things forward independently of the rest of the industry. Perhaps I don't appreciate the software side enough.
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QuickTime at the time it was introduced was revolutionary. There’s a reason it was a standard. It made video playback available to systems without accelerator cards, allowed for synchronous DV import and more. A lot of these technologies seem quaint in hindsight but at the time they were big deals.
Meow.camera (meow.camera)
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This is an interesting looking cat: https://meow.camera/#7374059059738047159
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For people reading that later: a dog (pug) was feeding right now
If there was a button to feed them for a small donation id be broke.
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There is in the Purrr app if you install and open that.
Last gasps of the rent seeking class? (geohot.github.io)
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I don't understand how you can look at LLMs and how you think they will result in less time wasting bureocracy? Sure the users can use LLMs to talk to call centers, but businesses will absolutely block the sun with the amount of LLMs they'll throw back at you, try to literally do anything on the phone, it's starting to be all LLMs. In an LLM arms race, corporations will win bud, sorry.
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> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They can hire people in India at scale to waste your time. That is the market being free, George.
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> But for decades, the American market has not been free. The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic property of free markets in practice.
I wish I could be this optimistic. The reality is that as we speak the average consumer doesn't have access to cheap electricity or affordable inference hardware or powerful models that work out of the box on existing computers. The only realistic option for the 99% is to buy a $20-$200 monthly AI subscription, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. A couple decades ago people used to think that since anyone can build a website internet businesses will never have a moat. In a hyper-capitalist system the top players will always find a way to dig a moat.
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You should be more optimistic. 92% of the world has electricity. 74% of the world has internet access. 58% of the world has a personal mobile internet device. That means the median consumer can access the free AI chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. Moreover, if you compare this to the world in 2000, you'll see that things have only gotten better. ~25 years ago, only 78% of the world had access to electricity, and only 6% had access to the internet. Effectively 0% had access to a personal mobile internet device. I think, if you look at actual statistics, it is easy to be optimistic.
Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad. Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to. Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot would certainly not be the first person to suggest broadly applying private property rights to information makes questionable sense.
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Rent is charging money for access to an asset or property . The P in IP is Property.
> Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of the rent seeking marketplaces obsolete given enough time. Because LLMs can literally go straight to the seller and perform checkout, do market research to make sure the seller is legit, and the seller can sell for lower than on the marketplace since they aren’t paying a 15-20% cut.
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Amazon has brand value because both buyers and sellers trust it, aside from the shipping speed. An LLM can't evaluate trust for you, and it especially can't negotiate prices. Those are adverserial games it won't win.
Same here. It's been a while.
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DOS still works
Where does this hypothetical API live? Within a walled garden? We almost have that already with delivery apps and some credit cards. They're awful precisely because they are rent seeking in the form of convenience fees and artificial scarcity. What you call multimodal hell is what others call meaningful choice and market competition.
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I get it. Usually when there is the possibility of using an API team A is still fighting to log in while as a 1 man team B I have something using the plain web already running. Right now people are so angry about LLMs being a driver of enshittification that they aren’t realizing that LLMs are the first real threat to enshittification we’ve seen as they can wait for those stupid little anime girls and click on the street lights and the GDPR popups and ignore the ads and all of that. I still imagine there’s another world where there was an open API for e-commerce that didn’t suck and the choice was adopt it or go out of business.
This is a highly sensational take that is basically fan fiction. From "the era of purposefully frustrating humans is over", to "the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved." and "everyone in the world is rooting for the Chinese models"; nothing of that is grounded in reality. The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art. Once they catch-up or lead, they will likely close them down by a government mandate. Just like Meta was fine with Llama being open source but once they started to get close to OpenAI/Google/Anthropic, they shifted their language to "maybe we won't keep doing that." The idea that AI will end the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years is... not going to happen! The business model just adjusts. And if AI is going to be an economy-shaping super disruptor, the cloud-hosted models will continue evolving beyond what you could ever run at home under the desk.
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To be fair, the author does explicitly state that their blog is: > A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway
LLM inference uses on the order of 1 Wh per query. That's under 10 meters of driving on an EV or running air conditioning for under 5 seconds. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-2025
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One query is not going to be a useful benchmark when people are deploying AI swarms in loops to solve simple problems
I can’t always see the personal appeal, however when I view through the lens of businesses that buy very expensive enterprise software and other SaaS products (maybe blending into consumer market), well I think they’re toast. I think the acceleration of AI tools recently isn’t going to be indicative of how long the full transformation will take, but a lot of companies will start preferring Build over Buy. I have no idea the scope, but this is already happening at some partial scale.
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I think a lot of people will do this, it remains to be seen how the actual economics of this shake out in the long run, especially considering, it’s not like the existing vendors are going to remain static.
People used to call him "egohot" back in the day when he was cracking playstation games, because he was already incredibly arrogant even at a young age.
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Yeah. This has strong self-selection bias. Egohot thinks about this stuff a lot so obviously everyone does! Most people only care about money as they have no choice. Absent a cash-first system money has become a social construct. The valuation of a dollar is entirely ephemeral now. I see that social reality becoming more realized and the existing social system around money collapsing due to generational churns attenuation of the social significance. Tech bros are little more than disciples of a dogma being missionaries for their dogma. There are other dogmas.
Anatomy of the .claude/ folder (blog.dailydoseofds.com)
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Off topic but earlier today I asked Gemini to read this article and advise how to do the same things for OpenCode. I am fascinated with trying to get good performance from small local models.
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TLDR https://vectree.io/c/anatomy-of-the-claude-folder
In my experience fewer skills is significantly better. When you have this performative folder of skills the AI wastes a bunch of tool calls, gets confused, doesn't get to the meat of the problem. beware!
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Yea I went through my global claude skills and /context yesterday because claude was performing terribly. I deleted a bunch of stuff including memory and anecdotally got better results later on in the day.
I’m seeing this more and more, where people build this artificial wall you supposedly need to climb to try agentic coding. That’s not the right way to start at all. You should start with a fresh .claude, empty AGENTS.md, zero skills and MCP and learn to operate the thing first.
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this is true, but i think people are best off starting with SOME project that gives users an idea of how to organize and think about stuff. for me, this is gastown, and i now have what has gotta be the most custom gastown install out there. could not agree more that your ai experience must be that which you build for yourself, not a productized version that portends to magically agentize your life. i think this is the real genius of gastown— not how it works, but that it does work and yegge built it from his own mind. so i’ve taken the same lesson and run very, very far with it, while also going in a totally different direction in many ways. but it is a work of genius, and i respect the hell out of him for putting it out there.
I'd also go even further and say that you likely should never install ANY skill that you didn't create yourself (i mean, guided claude to create it for you works too), or "forked" an existing one and pulled only what you need. Everyone's workflow is different and nobody knows which workflow is the right one. If you turn your harness into a junk drawer of random skills that get auto updated, you introduce yet another layer of nondeterminism into it, and also blow up your context window. The only skill you should probably install instead of maintaining it yourself is playwright-cli, but that's pretty much it.
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> I'd also go even further and say that you likely should never install ANY skill that you didn't create yourself Ignore original comment below, as the post is technical so is the parent comment: for techies --- That applies to tech users only. Non-tech users starting to use Claude code and won't care to get the job done Claude introduced skills is to bring more non-tech users to CLI as a good way to get your feet wet. Not everyone will go for such minute tweaks.
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what? non techies are most at risk. There are a huge number of malicious skills. Not knowing or caring how to spot malicious behavior doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t be concerned about it, no matter how much they can’t or don’t want to do it. I am an adminstrator of this stuff at my company and it’s an absolute effing nightmare devising policies that protect people from themselves. If I heard this come out of someone’s mouth underneath me I’d tell them to leave the room before I have a stroke. And this is stuff like, if so and so’s machine is compromised, it could cost the company massive sums of money. for your personal use, fine, but hearing this cavalier attitude like it doesn’t matter is horrifying, because it absolutely does in a lot of contexts.
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Yes this is the path I’m taking. Experiment, build your own toolbox whether it’s hand rolled skills or particular skills you pull out from other public repos. Then maintain your own set. You do not want to log in one day to find your favorite workflow has changed via updates. Then again this is all personal preference as well.
That's not a sandbox.
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there is a real one though — https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-sandboxing . needs to be enabled with /sandbox, not on by default.
Hong Kong police can now demand phone passwords under new security rules (gadgetreview.com)
It would be nice if phones had a feature where you can define more than one pin, but only one is for your actual phone contents - the other ones leave you to a completely harmless but otherwise indistinguishable looking smartphone interface that contains no or only completely bogus data.
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One should be able to define a PIN number that wipes your phone.
It's illegal to have any decently good arms in Canada.
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If you live in a country where the police will beat you to extract a confession, it may be time to start violating the law. (To my knowledge this is not the case in Canada.)
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> To my knowledge this is not the case in Canada. Not yet. But with them changing the law to enlist foreigners (who, of course, will care less about Canadians and their rights) in the armed forces, it will change soon.
Feature request: Make it default behavior on phones that you can have multiple passwords, connected to different profiles. With no way to determine how many profiles a phone have. I'm sure there's some people here working on mobile operating systems, might be worth considering?
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This whole PRC law (system) is designed to condemn already targeted individuals, there's no big difference if there's nothing on the phone. Chinese laws are specifically formulated in this pattern: "A, B, C, or at the discretion of the relevant authorities". Since there's no attorney-client privilege in PRC, once you're targeted, the "discretion" can always be found.
Do you ever travel outside your own country? Do you think you should retain some basic privacy rights while you do that? It’s not even good for business. Business laptops and phones have trade secrets to conduct regular company activities. Normalizing the surveillance dystopia we live in ON HN is beyond my understanding.
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>Do you ever travel outside your own country? Do you think you should retain some basic privacy rights while you do that? You already don't. Even in countries with protections against arbitrary search and seizure, those go out the window when you're at the border. "No" isn't a valid response if border agents wants to search your luggage.
If you're a US citizen, I believe they can seize your device indefinitely, and detain you for up to two days. They are required to let you eventually back into the country though. (If you're not a citizen, all bets are off)
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Here's what the ACLU says: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/can-border-agents-search-your-electronic I think the 48h detention is across the board (without a judge involved, border or not the border). ACLU says device seizure is up to 5 days barring "extenuating circumstances", whatever that means.
Depends, you can get NSL'd to disclose passwords. Good luck running that one up to the supreme court. And biometrics aren't as well-protected. Though, yes, in the UK it's a much more routine affair.
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>Depends, you can get NSL'd to disclose passwords Source? Given 5th amendment protections I'm guessing this only covers snitching on others, but that's standard subpoena law. If you're issued a subpoena to produce documents on someone else (eg. a customer of yours), you can't refuse. It's called protection against " self -incrimination" for a reason.
No citation needed, it should be common knowledge like stopping at a stop sign. People have been jailed for hate speech in the uk
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>No citation needed, it should be common knowledge like stopping at a stop sign. Sounds like you can't (or are unwilling) to produce evidence, and you're trying to handwave that issue away with "it's common knowledge'.
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https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-offences-and-concerns-over-free-speech/ How convenient that the government doesn't make the numbers public and then have to issue statements like this when journalists do some digging on the matter
Its five years with no limitations, so when you are due to be released; Whats your password? Another five years... Its such a poorly worded law you could literally spend your life in prison for forgetting your password. And Its mostly used against peaceful protesters.
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>Its five years with no limitations, so when you are due to be released Doesn't double jeopardy prevent this? Has this actually happened?
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It does and of course it's different happened. My pet peeve has to be the "it's a poorly worded law" argument about things that have obviously been considered by legal experts. The scares like "the psychoactive substances act will technically make coffee illegal" I've seen on HN are particularly egregious.
Oh just 5 years, that's OK then.
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It's not okay to imprison people for 5 years vs lifetime, but at the same time, facts matter, and we shouldn't get in the habit of allowing fibs to slip through just because they're directionally correct.
arrest == arrest You are most welcome to google "UK arrest for criticizing" and find articles you consider less biased. There are so many to choose from
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I did that. There are no arrests for criticizing on the first page of Google. Judging by your previous reactions, you're going to say that your Google is different, and link some news story about an arrest that isn't for criticizing and instead for supporting terrorism. Hate to break to you that not every arrest is the same. Some include beating, and lead to jail time. Some include questioning and they lead to the arrested walking free within the day. So you're hyperfocusing on the UK's online posting, which has nothing to do with the original subject of phone passwords, and doesn't even happen in other European countries, because UK has more proactive monitoring of online spaces by police. And this is your proof that Europe is a tyrranical dictatorship.
People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account (windowscentral.com)
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hmm MS killing off MS Windows by employing the Google AI and surveillance in everything push....who would have guessed that MS ran out of product ideas!
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For what it’s worth, `start ms-cxh: localonly` after Shift+F10 during installation still works. Another way is to prepare a custom installation image. Of course, such workarounds shouldn’t be needed, so this is nevertheless a good fight.
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I dropped Windows when Microsoft first added ads. My last Windows 7 machine was turned off last year. It's just better without Microsoft.
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My company is still on windows, but it's only because most of our users are over 60 and would stroke out if they had to learn something new. I predict within the next 10 years we will move to something else. The hoops I have to jump through to setup new devices without a Microsoft account are ridiculous. Every time we have a workaround they disable it and we have to do a deeper dive on it. The process right now requires using the command line to create an account with administrator permissions and no password and then create a password after logging in. Then we can create a non-admin local account.
Are people inside apple fighting to drop the mandatory apple account for iOS and various core apple features? I can buy a thinkpad and install linux on it without once creating a microsoft account. I can buy an android phone supported by GrapheneOS, and use it as a perfectly fine phone without ever creating a google account. I cannot buy an iPhone without creating an apple account, without getting ads shoved in my face by apple, without them deciding what I can and can't install on it, and them charging me for the privilege of writing my own software. Microsoft doesn't deserve as much shame here as Apple does since MS isn't requiring their hardware vendors to lock down the hardware to only be able to run Windows (even though they very well could). Apple, with iOS, is.
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Does iOS truly require it? I thought that was only if you wanted to use the store.
I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in). Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch. If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks. Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.
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I bought my mother in law a Lenovo Thinkbook for Christmas; I didn't know that the Macbook Neo was coming else I might have waited for that. Anyway, I installed Linux Mint on there. She has been using it every day and at least according to her there hasn't really been any jank (and I told her to call me any time if something breaks and I'll fix it). At this point, I think Linux distros have gotten good enough to realistically start stealing users away from Windows. Linux Mint is easy to use, runs fine even on modest hardware, and doesn't push a bunch of shitty ads at you. I think there is an option for telemetry, but I also think that disabling it actually disables it. Wine and Proton have gotten so good that outside of modern MS Office, most Windows things just run if you need it, but if you're not using MS Office heavily then you likely can get by with web apps and/or the Linux alternatives. Maybe it really will be the Year of the Linux Desktop!
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Buying a gaming laptop is like buying have a sports car. Sure, it looks nice, and you may even be able to wheel it around a bit. But it's not the ideal experience.
It actually is magic Mac memory. No joke. 8GB on macOS is good enough for 80% of people.
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Do browsers and Electron apps magically take up less memory on Macs? What is "good enough?" I never notice problems on my 16GB Windows laptop, so just for fun I closed all of my 6 always-on Electron-type apps, all of the 10 browser windows I had open, a couple other ever-present apps, and it looks like without anything else Windows 10 takes about 4GB, which I think is in the same ballpark as OS X. And I probably have some stuff running that I didn't close, this is very unscientific. Anecdotally also, my one laptop that I've upgraded to Windows 11 is a lot snappier. As a rule I haven't noticed memory pressure on any device I've owned ever as a "regular user," it only really applies to gaming and heavy development with lots of VMs, especially these days.
This "make Windows better" push is far more political than technological. It's a fight with other divisions about using Windows as a marketing and sales channel for other products and services. It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how enterprises ended up on Azure and are bringing big money. I'm still a Windows power user, MacBook is a wonderful piece of hardware and I'm typing this on one, but I'm not nearly as productive as on multimonitor PC with TotalCommander and Visual Studio where I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.
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go freely on Linux. did that switch myself few years back. Double Commander is an exact copy with the same (and configurable) shortcuts.
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And then there's me, hoping they don't realize that Windows is in danger. The world needs less Microslop.
+1 for Total Commander mention, its bizarre how many otherwise smart folks completely ignore this productivity enhancer. I keep showing it to colleagues but they all anyway revert back to basic clunky File explorer and variants. Doesn't matter if I show them that I can be easily 10x faster, do stuff simply impossible otherwise, has tons of plugins etc. its just ignored.
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Also a big plug for Far: https://farmanager.com/
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The only negative side of Total Commander is I'm extremly used to it - been using it since mid 90s. When I compare alternatives on Mac I'm searching for exact keyboard commands, navigation patterns, etc. I'm using Crax Commander, but it's not the same. TC is probably one of the reasons I don't care that much about problems in newer versions of Windows, I don't use Explorer, I don't use windows search, text is viewed with Lister and not Notepad...
For the AI frontier, I find my windows PC just about useless unfortunately. Too much tooling and package doesn't adapt to WSL+windows host well. I've shifted my entire dev experience to my mbp which used to be my backup. Can't imagine the new generation of vibe coder will even consider a windows box.
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> Too much tooling and package doesn't adapt to WSL+windows host well Curious about this, what specifically?
> with how good gaming is on non-windows machines now, there isn't much for a home user to get locked-in with The options for the average user are not linux or windows, but only macOS or Windows. Gaming is abysmal on macOS on any of the current hardware. That said, I agree with you that there's less-and-less gaming lock-in on windows, but that's because the majority of gamers are gaming on iOS and android.
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>That said, I agree with you that there's less-and-less gaming lock-in on windows, but that's because the majority of gamers are gaming on iOS and android. I don't think you are aware of how much the landscape has changed regarding gaming and Linux.
Decline often happens slowly, gradually and then suddenly. Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This could happen to Microsoft and is probably already happening as we speak.
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Wait, I'm confused, are you calling moving from Windows to Linux a "decline"? Because I can agree with that ;)
most people are not willing to learn an entire new operating system for no reason, though. this might happen in tech-based companies, sure, but banks? accounting firms? ive never seen them offer macbooks. this is also ignoring all of the critical software that is windows-only (e.g. quickbooks, solidworks, bespoke programs in banks and government). point is: microsoft is not in "significant danger" today.
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An increasing number of people are coming into the workplace never having used a Windows machine, or only occasionally having done so when it was absolutely necessary.
The only tolerable Windows 11 experience is a corporate PC with Active Directory login.
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And an IT department vetting updates before they go out.
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the same IT department that got blamed not allowed user changing wallpaper or installing crowstrike
Don't forget the search that doesn't work. You have app "X" installed? You type X and it doesn't find it, but gives you irrelevant results about X.
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Same problem on MacOS.
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One of the first things to do on a fresh install is to disable the Web search results in Start menu search. There's a setting in the registry to do it.
Windows' search has been broken for multiple generations now. Some people inside Microsoft seemingly even know , that's why the PowerToys team created "PowerToys Run." A Windows Search that actually basically functions correctly. People act like it sudden was broken in Windows 11 when in reality it never worked correctly in 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 either. Instead of fixing it, they've only made it worse. It seems like nobody in Microsoft works on core stuff anymore.
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Yeah, I've never experienced Windows search ever working. Even on XP, it couldn't find commonly opened folders or programs for me. It always felt like some sort of joke feature just meant to fool me into wasting time.
At one point (last year?) internet search results would load in first so quickly typing and pressing "enter" from muscle memory would often result in opening some internet page instead of the app you wanted.. Then also in the past year or two the internet search results were lagging the entire search UI causing type jank and stutters. I disabled internet results in the registry but a recent update seems to have caused that setting to no longer apply ;(
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>> would often result in opening some internet page instead of the app you wanted. and even worse, in Edge!
It actually did run on MacOS until recently. Personally I like Rider over Studio, but yes, if that's a hard requirement they are stuck.
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No, it was not real Visual Studio on MacOS, it was rebranded Xamarin IDE.
I've used macOS for years and still don't understand their windows minimize/restore logic. I'm always hunting for my minimized window. Yes, the fault probably lies with me. OTOH the Windows UI is far better well designed and intuitive. But yeah... I'd rather fumble around in macOS: Windows is always trying to upsell a service that I don't need. If I say no it will helpfully keep reminding me (my answer is never going to change). I have 32GB ram and a recent processor being fed tons of wattage -- it feels so bog slow. Windows needs to fix itself fast.
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macOS does not and never has had a good strategy for handling minimizing windows. Keep in mind that prior to Mac OS X, you couldn't minimize windows at all, you could only roll them up. When OS X added the dock, they made minimized windows go there. Except, the Dock is an icon grid, so there's no way to see window titles, and the windows themselves are so small that it is difficult to identify them at a glance. Making things worse, the Dock is also a place you put app icons, so now you have an icon to show all your non-minimized app icons, right next to all your minimized window icons. Meanwhile, Windows had minimize since version 2[0], except for whatever reason windows minimized to desktop icons , and there was no desktop folder. They'd known they'd invented a worse version of Mac OS, and in Windows 95 they made sure that there was not only a real desktop, but also a list of all open windows. This design was so successful that the only major tweak that stuck was merging the taskbar and Quick Launch[1] into something that superficially resembles the OSX dock, but is just plain better[2] because clicking an app icon actually shows you all the open windows. [0] I don't have a Windows 1 install to check with. [1] Strictly speaking you could put anything in Quick Launch, but only apps go in the Win7 taskbar [2] Oldschool NeXT users will point out that in NeXTSTEP, minimized windows had an actual title on them, and the app icon instead of a screenshot of the window at tiny scale.
Apple also invented their own key “Apple” now “CMD” for operation like copy / paste to explicitly not have the issue to overload the already know escape sequences. Windows being on a system without a normalized keyboard had to reuse keys that are common to keyboards used back then. Vertical integration played into apples cards even back then.
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The location of the command key is also a lot more comfortable. Thumb vs pinky.
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I setup my Linux system to use it because it's more consistent for copy pasting in a terminal.
But what about our phones? Why are people so OK with an online account for their phone or tablet but not laptop?
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An Apple account also isn't required on an iPhone. They certainly encourage you create or link one on device setup, but it's not required to use the phone. Though one IS required to download apps, so you could argue it functionally is required.
What kind of answer is this? This seems condescending and literally provides no answer. Why even post this?
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You read what you want into the message, but have you considered turning your own perspective onto your own post?
Fundamentally, I think you are driving at a legitimate complaint and it should be a concern with Apple products. The direct answer, though, is largely one of execution. Microsoft isn't just pushing this heavily. They are doing so poorly.
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Mac doesn't require an Apple ID to use. iPhone only needs one for installing apps, and my only complaint is it's the strictest auth check on the entire phone besides disabling the account. Shouldn't need to input the Apple ID password just to install a free app, shouldn't even ask for passcode.
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Setting up an iPad was rather obnoxious on this front, though. So, fundamentally, it is still very similar.
The key difference is that you do not need an Apple account to use a Mac. Most people DO use one, though, because that's how you access the iCloud services that underpin the Apple ecosystem. But it's not MANDATORY. My understanding is that you cannot even log into a Windows machine without an MSFT account. That's a big difference.
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You certainly can log into a Windows machine without a microsoft account. It's actually still quite common in businesses that you log in with an account managed by your organization, although this is changing as more and more businesses migrate to MS Entra ID. This still isn't exactly a "microsoft account" but its similar. You can also still log in with a completely local account as well. It takes a few extra minutes to set up but once configured it works fine. The system is full of dark patterns and roadblocks that steer users towards an MS account, but you don't have to use one.
It’s impossible to install XCode without an Apple account. It’s only distributed through the Mac App Store, and downloads from Mac App Store require an Apple ID. And even XCode beta downloads are locked behind an Apple login. You can install XCode CLI dev tools without an Apple account, which comes with clang and swift for example. With this, you can build most Mac software, but I don’t think you can run Swift tests without a full XCode. As the sibling comment notes, you can install GCC/llvm and whatever other open source tools and build Mac software without full XCode. You can also install Apple container support without an Apple account.
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Xcode is also available as a standalone download from developer.apple.com, which requires an account too, but at least it's way more reliable than downloading from the store.
Too little, too late. I switched to Linux and I'm never looking back. Good riddance, Microsoft.
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The only two moats MS has for desktop OS usage are: 1) Kernel-level DRM for multiplayer games (looking at you, Marathon) 2) Intentionally nerfed MSO 365 apps on web and macOS You could make a strong case that MDM (which InTune uses as well) negates the AD + GPO advantages of the past 20+ years in enterprise.
This is the type of thing that AI is actually good at diagnosing in my experience. Haven't had anything similar happen but seems more of a router issue upstream. Maybe worth checking what Steam Deck's connection has configured differently given it's on the same network?
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100% With ssh access to the underlying arch/fedora fork, it'd be an easy fix with AI
That would improve things. Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine. When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only. And OneDrive was also affected by the Teams bug. Spent a good part of the day cursing in the direction of Redmond.
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This happened on my work machine. One day I noticed tons of important files had been deleted without my permission after being migrated to OneDrive online only. At no point did I authorize anything like this and it took some time to copy them all back and disable everything I could access related to this. Utter insanity that this can happen in a major OS. I switched to Linux for personal use years ago and have only gotten more grateful for that decision over time. My head would explode if a Linux distro tried any number of things that Windows regularly does to abuse their users, it's unfathomable.
That must be the free version of OneDrive that forces cloud only.
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It doesn't force cloud only. It defaults to cloud only. This is for both free and paid versions. It has been this way for 3 years.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
EMachines never obsolete PCs: More than a meme (dfarq.homeip.net)
Wow someone else from St. Louis? Found this blast from the past too: https://dfarq.homeip.net/building-a-computer-in-the-90s/ I only remembered a couple CompUSAs, Circuit City, and Best Buy selling computers growing up. I don't remember visiting any independent computer stores in the mid 90s. But talking to those in my parents' generation, most of them bought their computers from some local small shop (and sometimes went back there for computer training!). I count St. Louis lucky for at least having a Micro Center today, otherwise all my parts would have to come from online stores.
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I worked in one of those independent computer stores in the 90s, assembling white box PCs in a dimly lit back room, and systematically removing drivers on early Win95 machines until they'd stop crashing to identify which one was buggy. PCs were so dynamic at the time, half my paychecks were spent on discounted upgrades before I ever saw the paper. EDO ram? sign me up. 512K of pipelined L2 cache? yes please. HX chipset? of course. Dual socket pentium pros? I need a raise.
The author mentions Packard-Bell which always just had the whiff of 2 legit companies and was enough to trick uninformed shoppers at Walmart that they were buying high end. Remember in 1999 if you didn't read Computer Shopper the only thing you knew about PCs was what you saw in TV ads.
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My parents got a Packard Bell computer for a deep discount (maybe free?) for signing up for N years of Prodigy internet. It was one of my earliest computers. I didn't realize until right now that it had no relationship to Hewlett Packard. I guess I always assumed that it was HP's budget line.
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I worked tech support at an ISP and despaired when someone with a Packard-Bell called in. First, they'd let you know it, as though they were telling you they had a high-end Real Computer. Second, you instantly knew it'd have a cheap POS LT Winmodem that would only train up to 28.8 if the wind was blowing in the right direction, and would buffer underrun if the user tried playing an MP3 while they were downloading something. Ugh, I despised dealing with that gear.
Yeah.. late 90's to early 00's was pretty peak builder era. I learned through a relative fluke how much going a bit over the top on memory and faster drives really helped over even a faster CPU/GPU a lot of the time for general use. My current computer is literally the first I've built in decades that I didn't max out the RAM... I mean, I kind of did as 2x48gb was the most I could get in DDR5@6000 and only use 2 slots (or it would run much slower). 4th gen Core series was the longest I'd held onto a single PC (close to 5 years total for a 4790K). I did a mid-cycle gpu and nvme upgrade and that was it. I bumped to a 3950X/5950X and now 9950X since... AM3 is really the first socket in a long time I'd done an in-place upgrade for any CPU. My daughter's Ryzen 2400 to a 5000 series, and my own build from a 3600 -> 3950X -> 5950X... the 3600 was a placeholder as I couldn't get a 3950X for a few months. I couldn't even name half the CPUs I ran from 1998 to 2005 or so... it was such a blur of upgrades every 6-12 months... I'd upgrade my computer, my wife's, my son's... etc. Then, things just completely stagnated... I mean there's been progress, but it's over the course of years, not seeing 2-3x in under a year.
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I remember that it started to stall out on RAM before CPU (in that it became "reasonable" to have way more RAM than you really needed - Chrome didn't exist yet lol); that the very early move to multi-core was a bit of a downer (much couldn't use more than 2 or 3 cores so a "new CPU" with 4 instead of 2 cores but the same single-thread performance would be hardly noticeable). Then of course there was the huge "replace everything with SSDs ASAP" performance bump, but ever since the later Core and before the M1, everything felt incremental. Nothing like the "Wolfenstein 3D to Quake Glide in 5 years" era. Holy shit it was only 5 years - the M1 was released 6 years ago!
Oh man those first few generations of CD burners were rough. We had this old Pentium 2 that had so little memory you had to close everything but the burner software (Easy CD Creator or something, IIRC) otherwise the memory exhaustion would cause a buffer underrun and the disc would be ruined. A few years later my mom finally let us get one with buffer underrun protection (and some multiplier on the write speed) so I could make mix CDs with music off Napster for my girlfriend and life was good.
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I went as far as sourcing a SCSI drive with a dedicated card just to get results. Fond memories of clicking Burn and slowly backing away from the desk to let it do its thing.
Installing a Let's Encrypt TLS Certificate on a Brother Printer with Certbot (owltec.ca)
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For some reason I read "Brothel Printer". Would have been funny.
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Let's Enpimp!
Even before I clicked on the article, I had a strong feeling this person was using CloudFlare DNS and the related API. (They are.) Given the immense popularity of Cloudflare DNS + API + ACME DNS-01 challenge, why are not other DNS providers stepping into this foray?
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I have not used Cloudflare for ages, but remember the Cloudflare API key couldn't be restricted to just one domain, so if someone could get hold of the key, they could have gotten access to all your domains. So that made me not use them. Has anything changed?
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Yes, API keys can now be linked to zones or domains.
DNS-PERSIST-01 is coming soon https://letsencrypt.org/2026/02/18/dns-persist-01
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Oh wow, this will make self-hosting so much easier! I have so far issued probably about 30 different API keys for my subdomain zones for services I host, which you then have to configure with ACME/Certbot. This reduces it to a simple DNS record change!
The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner (sightlessscribbles.com)
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That left me with a big satisfied smile - hard to believe these people still exist, but they do, well done I say, well done!
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It was basically "** you" delivered with the power of 1024 middle fingers (512 pages times 2 hands).
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Robert: youre website is among the most visually attractive ones Ive seen.
I'm with you that TFA comes off as mean spirited and needlessly so. But having worked in large orgs in highly regulated and bureaucratic sectors (aerospace), sometimes things don't change until the process fails spectacularly. Policy like "we can't accept email for security purposes" comes from total fucking morons in sub-C level upper management who have no insight into how the business actually works, for whom it's easier to say "no" than it is to say "yes". It's entirely plausible that this episode (which I bet blew through a lot of PPNS budget in toner) caused some mid level manager to report the process breakage, kicking off a review of whether they really need fax.
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> sometimes things don't change until the process fails spectacularly. This. This is the only feedback the bureaucratic system can hear and sometimes even that is not enough.
> There should be a political call to action here A real problem in both benefits claiming and immigration systems is that there are voters on the other side loudly demanding that the system be made more hostile and kafkaesque.
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And bear in mind that there are quite a few politicians willing to monetize that by actually implementing those more hostile and kafkaesque rules.
How dare ! I'll assume you're misrepresenting me out of genuine misunderstanding, rather than snark, so to that end: I'm not suggesting no one every take a job they don't like (for any reason whatsoever!). I'm suggesting that everyone recognize the position they are in and make peace with it. You're in a job that isn't very nice? Got it! Been there. Feel for you. Honestly! But why, on earth, would that afford you pity when you take part in making life shitty for other people? You knew that was the job. You called the job 'not nice'. Recognize that you are being shitty to someone. Yes, on behalf of a company. That part goes both ways. You aren't responsible for the shitty things you're doing - that's the machine's responsibility. You are just doing shitty things. You don't get absolved from that just because you didn't make the call. It's still perfectly rational to resent the person that is being shitty to you. And, overall, it seems like we mostly agree. Not a lot of people "in the right", in this story. I won't discount that it's the caller's prerogative to be a jerk (even if it's just being a jerk "back"), and that's on them. Just want to stake the claim that while I accept that, the standard must reciprocate to the actual agent on the phone as well.
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It's not intended to be a misrepresentation, as much as it is to use exaggeration to call attention to how suggestions like > "You are the face of the machine that I am trying to deal with. If you don't want to be that face, go be the face of some other machine." might be barking up the wrong tree somewhat. Often people will be in any given job because they can't easily get anything else and they just have to make ends meet, and especially in the present circumstance (affordability crisis in a lot of places), I couldn't blame them for being the face of some such machine. Saying that they should quit on principle feels insulting to me, when they often have little to no sway and are treated as disposable cogs in said machine. That's why I wouldn't be upset at (or at least wouldn't take it out on) the people enforcing various asinine and straight up bad policies - since that's like blaming a line worker for the price increases of the product they just sell. I think the original post actually gets a lot of that nuance right - societal impact, the human aspect and so on. I don't wholly disagree with it, just that element. Of course, they shouldn't give you attitude either, but there's probably ways to handle that that aren't disruptive to the business continuity and others receiving their services. Ergo my suggestion that everyone in that situation could have handled it better. > You are a representation of an organization, and you will be treated as such. It's too easy to take this as a justification that leads to workers being treated like shit for the decisions of their bosses or even someone higher up in an org chart they haven't even met. > No amount of hostility will change the policy, but hostility will surely get different (sometimes better; not often) results than acquiescence. Recognize that it's not hostility towards you and - god forbid - enjoy the fact that someone else notices how fucking shitty the machine you work for is. This is okay when it's harmless banter and some camaraderie. This isn't good when you're just sitting there in a call centre with someone who's deeply frustrated and is cursing you out or is looking for an argument - you might even agree with their frustrations, but that doesn't mean that you yourself deserve that. One of my friends worked in one for a few years and there definitely are some stories that made me feel sorry for them. I'm probably reading into it too much. Maybe just ask to talk to her manager directly, on the account that they might at least pass it up the chain. At the very least, I do think that it would have been better to send the super long fax mentioned in the post to the person who made that policy, with a note saying "Since security is of utmost importance, I entrust that you will handle the attached documents appropriately!" blow up their fax machine (or their assistant's, for that matter) not the Karen that's just doing her job. Of course, there are limits to this - blatantly illegal or inhumane practices should still sway you towards quitting ASAP, but a Karen might not know the first thing about what InfoSec policies are good or not.
Per the story, the protagonist DoSed the fax machine. Fax machines are dumb, and employees often don't know how to operate them outside of the most common flow.
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Yes. But I understand that you don't literally need to print every fax request immediately, right? That's the dumbest part of this situation. This sounds like an 80 movies trope, but here we are decades later.
Whenever I read stories like this about how hard it is for US people to keep getting the little they've been getting I think of people on the other side. It takes an evil compliance to be the Karen in this article. Zero empathy, zero compassion, you're a row in a spreadsheet. If they'd start caring a little and standing up to what is very obviously wrong, the US would be a much different place. Apply that same logic to "the deep state", military men, etc. It's pretty crazy how much of their situation is their own making, yet they'll happily blame the other side.
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Maybe, you'd be absolutely rolled by fraudsters in the opposite case.
“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally” As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…
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People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can. Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences. I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible. You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe. They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers. This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.
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>Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences. While I agree that the market feedback is a problem with gov jobs, I've worked corporate and small company jobs with all these negative tropes and the same result, you build a hierarchy and some weirdos find a way past (or are) HR and nestle in the folds. I think the best solution is working for smaller companies that have a high standard for employee behavior enforced by everyone, strong boundaries are key. When people are seasoned and emotionally aware you realize that working in the vicinity of people like that takes way more energy from everyone then it's worth to be tolerant or ignore the problem.
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> with no market feedback It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows. government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"
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Some government employees do. Lots of local, state, and federal departments fall under more or less permanent bureaucracatic institutions, and while they might follow the lead of an elected official, often those officials are far more ceremonial than functional. When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops. Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership. They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it. Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians. What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.
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