Unlurker|Replay|About
Germany to Ban Huawei from Future 6G Network in Sovereignty Push (bloomberg.com)
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https://archive.li/18QJs
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Better late than never. China has so many anti-Foreigner laws for doing business in China. West has made China rich and powerful in exchange for cheap labour.
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I'd more say: they made clear rules if you want to play business in China. Europe never set any boundaries. Honestly our fault.
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Our leaders in the West have been very naive. Also the Chinese "elite capture" program has been very effective.
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Well, people will buy Huawei routers at home anyway.
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Is that commonplace in Germany?
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Sadly yes, cheap crap tends to be Huawei. Everyone with a modicum of technical understanding goes for a Fritzbox though.
You misunderstand what it means to be poor (blog.ctms.me)
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I once saw people start their month with 0 on their bank account, and live in the negative monthly credit their bank allows. Them having a job (luckily), means they just about manage to fill that debt back at the end of the month, covering the debt and the small bank interest. They end up paying the bank money bit by bit every month, yet they stay locked in that negative money pit. It’s like being permanently broke, and it all started with one a bad month of extra payments…
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This is talking about philosophical liberalism. It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed. It's a type of thinking that does not take into consideration peoples material reality (even their own) and manifests as narcissism and egotism in those who employ this thought. It seeks to detach material reality from peoples life and simply judge based on merit or other attributes. It is an idealist ideology. To counter this idealist thought: I assure you, if you were me you'd be doing exactly what I'm doing. The real explanation for life is to look at the material basis of said life. Poverty is a hole full of material and psychological ills. Stress, coping mechanisms and just straight up lack of knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of someone to teach you, lack of a proper learning environment, the psychological effects alone could kill a rich kid, let a lone the material ones.
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I understand the sentiment. I grew up lower middle class but with financially illiterate and neglectful parents and had a great deal of food scarcity and other things that caused me to leave home at 17. It was really difficult. The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin. What I ended up doing was finding a cheap place to live in a crappy area with a buttload of roommates, started searching for promotion at my job, got one, which gave me more financial leeway and time (more flexible schedule) to pursue a degree at a community college, which was free because of my income. From there I went to a good state school which was also free due to my income and did well and got a degree in CS and was hired by a professor's startup. This whole process took like 15 years of brutally difficult grinding. A lot of people in my spot, that have "made it" (although I still bear the scars all over the place, and I am handicapped in habitual ways, especially financially, that I may never get over without hundreds of thousands of $ of therapy), will look down on people like this author for "not trying hard enough." I think it's bullshit. I got extraordinarily lucky and had a streak of nothing too "bad" happening (didnt get a crippling illness, car mostly stayed good, grades stayed stable, didnt get laid off), plus innate talents not everyone has. I think it's a myth a lot of people tell themselves that they "made it" because they just worked hard enough. The truth a huge amount of the time is you got lucky. Hard work + luck yields opportunity, but not all opportunities pan out. My career may dead end because of AI and I may end up in the same spot again for all I know. All I can do is keep trying.
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"All of the general guidance to escape being poor is actually advice for getting through being broke." Paragraph level upvoting needs to be a thing.
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I "like" when ppl talk about UBI and say "but ppl on UBI are not happy and lack purpose". Compare with being poor.
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It's interesting how many comments here are knee jerk annoyance at this blogpost, which in my mind does a good job outlining two different financial situations and how flippant suggested solutions for escaping poverty don't make sense. The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.
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“How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich I feel like we generally compare ourselves relative to those around us. The US enjoys incredible amounts of comforts (for which I'm grateful for), but one need not travel far to understand how much potable water, breathable air, and electricity are very much not a ready given in other countries.
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Understanding poverty starts with empathy. People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. It's not that simple! You can't just mind your way out of poverty! This isn't a math problem.
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Too many people buy the American dream of "If you just work hard enough, you'll be successful.". If you believe this, then you'd have to believe the opposite: "If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.". And too many trust-fund kids or kids from rich parents who could afford to send them to expensive schools (or rich enough to live in a district with a well-funded school) dismiss their luck and believe "I'm successful, that must mean I've been a diligent and smart worker.". Also, beware of survival bias, most of people in here will have similar paths (born with smarts, good education, high-paying IT job, great success) and probably have similar beliefs about hard work and luck...
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It's way more nuanced than this. Ultimately poverty comes down to an individual's ability to be self-sustaining. Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again? Probably pretty quickly: - Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc) - Get a new programming job - Build a small nest egg - Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario - Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place) - Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex) - Can't build a nest egg easily Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.
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I see the steps. What if they have no family members or they do not give a damn? Start again please from the state of being homeless but assume this person has no family members, or has relatives, but they do not give a damn. It crumbles, IMO.
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Maybe you didn't read the whole comment?
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"Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people. There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.
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Sure. That’s the theory. Then I read the book Evicted and I understood. One of the people gets a small windfall. Enough to stop the treadmill. What she does is buy something nice for herself because she “deserves a treat”. Also the sums of money here are humongous. Someone is net -$40k? They need $40k more per year to not be poor? That is the British median income. So this shortfall in money a person needs to be not poor in the US is what half of the people in the UK live under, total. Heck even in Germany that’s the 40th percentile or so. This shows how poor Europeans are compared to Americans. Some half of them are in this comparative state of misery.
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Even the US median household income is "only" $83k. Looking at stuff like this + the rest of the blog I'm not convinced the author is any less out of touch than the people this post is criticizing.
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The geographic variation on the semantics of poverty always amaze me. Poverty and having a credit card, a van, and a house to live in. No matter how maxed out or broken all of those are, having them automatically means you are not poor in most of the world's point of view. Not to say that the struggles aren't real or that we shouldn't empathize, of course. Just that what strikes me most about these kinds of posts is how the semantics simply implode if you expand your context window just a bit, looking at a broader perspective country-wise.
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On Reddit, I once saw someone saying something like “You never hear about the Chinese having to live out of their cars.” with respect to a pro-communist take. Forgetting the politics, it really brought home to me how mind-blowingly wealthy Americans are. The poor man this guy conceives of has a motor vehicle.
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There are countries where you can have none of those, but still visit a doctor and not worry about violent crime. The dynamics vary.
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That is a great point and probably the most valuable take out of this discussion. We often use wealth as a proxy to well-being, but these kinds of posts shatter that concept. The author is, objectively, _not_ unwealthy. He has a credit card, a large car and a house. But still he struggles and is not well. Well-being is not just wealth, it is also (and more importantly) social safety.
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Our poor people are fat and carry iPhones.
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I'm confused whether the author is poor, has been poor, has never been poor but has deep understanding of what it's like for other reasons (friends, family, etc.). He writes > I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do. but I think that should be read as "Imagine that I have ...", because, from his About page, he seems to have an irrigation and landscaping business and plays around with technology on the weekend. I think the article would have been more effective it had been clearer exactly on what basis the author is writing about the experience of poor people.
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I think the ambiguity is leading to a better discussion. Many commenters are struggling mightily with the urge to dismiss the author as a lazy moral failure, which would allow them to ignore his arguments as originating from an unreliable source. Since there's not enough information to do that, we're getting a certain amount of discussion of the actual ideas.
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Hmm, possibly, but from my point of view the fact that he might not be speaking from experience, or at the very least from the experience of someone he has been close to, makes me disinclined to put a lot of weight on his opinions.
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I like this guy’s backstory[0]. I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development. There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes. I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, today. Almost every major issue we face, can be traced back to poverty. Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast, and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous. [0] https://blog.ctms.me/about/
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There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes. Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards. There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes. I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom. No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons. Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.) Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz. Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements. I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby. These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.
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There are Americans who have open sewage in their yards [0], because their counties are predominantly Black or Latino, and their state deprioritizes any infrastructure work. It’s structural racism. Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.” 0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-belt_n_5a33baf5e4b040881be99da5 1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-justice-alabama-dei-1a47e990d804300229206feb01e44e27
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Is this the photo? https://navajotimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/dq-no-wifi-for-school16.jpg
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Not the exact photo, but it looks like it's from the same photo shoot.
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The post does a good job of describing a phenomenological difference between being broke and being poor, and its account seems plausible to me. But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two. I've known working class folks who seem like they're getting by fine, even if they're occasionally "broke", and I've known working class folks who are constantly in financial crisis, and definitely fit in the category of "poor". I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
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I actually think a lot of it comes down to self control. Can you resist the allure of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses? Are you buying liabilities that actually make your life harder? Are you living outside of your means? IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.
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The only dirt poor people I've ever met in my life were either mentally ill or doing drugs (or both). Immigrants arrive here with little resources and a good part can do a legal job, earn some money and live a life. Unless you have problems which prevent you from working, you will be able to do something valuable in society and earn your bread.
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Maybe someday you'll be poor starving on the streets, and you can use your anecdotal bias to keep you warm and feeling full.
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> But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two A majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expenses might be a good place to start looking. You can be "broke" living paycheck to paycheck and "making it", but you're on even more of a razors edge than most. One medical emergency, one car accident, one removal of work hours etc and you start to fall behind, and that's when late fees and compounding interest work to make sure you never get out of the hole.
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> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places? External factors (aka luck), perhaps? Someone gets their resume into a job just after they made the last hire for that position. Or the car they can't afford to fix breaks down on the way to the interview.
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> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places? I don't want to sound dismissive but sometimes it's just luck.
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think of this way, the less capital you have the more you depend on luck
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I have poor friends, they spend more on Netflix, Gym, Starbucks, IPhones, steam games etc then me, and they are poor for atleast last 10-20 years. I almost never have any of these and I have given them that classic suggestions like the cancelling the gym membership that he/she rarely or never uses, and it doesnt work, they keep spending money on garbage with money they don't have.
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This argument is baseless. All those things add up to a couple hundred a month, let's be extreme and say it's $1,000 USD/month. That amount will never move you up in the socioeconomic ladder. You're two-three orders of magnitude away(!). "But it adds up" could argue the midwit, "why don't you just get a job that pays you more", "just invest", "why didn't you buy bitcoin in 2010", "why don't you just buy the winning lottery ticket". I wrote all those in order of increasing stupidity. Not aimed at you @merth, it's just stuff that I've actually heard. Nobody who is wealthy these days got there by skipping Starbucks and instead throwing that dollar in a jar. Nobody. You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero. As TFA states, people who have not experienced poverty have ZERO idea of what it is like.
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> You need to cross a threshold of (income/purchasing power) to be able to start building things that matter. It's extremely difficult these days because the denominator there is almost zero. I agree, but you should do both I think, increase your income and decrease your expenses.
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Ah all you had to do was mention avocados and we had boomer bingo.
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Very true but I also think that being poor is a mindset to change. I've known of people that would couch surf but they were never poor. We knew, they knew, that at anytime they could turn it around, and they did. They wanted to do things that were not the norm so they chose not to follow society's norms so they lacked money and they lived day to day. Once they changed their mind set they were able to work their way to an American middle class. It was not easy but they did it. They had little money but they were never poor. Then there's the other side. Families that can never get out. Families that have been poor for generations. Sure there are valid reason but I also think it's a mindset that needs to change. The multi-million dollar question is: how?
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I can give you an example. Single divorced mother with two kids. Working in social care for minimal wage, often earning lower amounts than the people she cares for. There are no savings, no relatives to help. Job change is an uncertainty that could introduce homelessness for the whole family if it doesn't work out. Not many options there. Now if you move this scenario out of rich countries it will get even worse
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It's also owning lower quality goods, that plague you by breaking all the time. So the maintenance cost (time and energy) is quite high. It's almost better not to have things when you're poor, because the things you have are just a big headache. I think it's also that increasingly working people are living in old houses that were never built properly, and now have lots of problems. And even new things you buy, are just kind of annoying. I have an LG electric stove. Instead of modulating heat, it pulses the burner top. So you can't effectively lower the heat, just extend the time it takes to cook. The oven timer doesn't turn off, it tries to keep the food warm, and plays chime every minute. Exactly opposite of what I want, since I cook food for my dog and want the food to cool off. And it's stuff like that, the constant annoyance of dealing with badly designed products, and things breaking. I had 2 driers break (all plastic parts), and a washing machine that started leaking oil inside that damaged the clothes in the last year. It's the cumulative effect of dealign with lower quality things.
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Poor people also can use a washboard and line dry their clothing. Not as convenient as having machines but just about everyone did it like this till the ‘40s & ‘50s.
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I've heard it described that being poor is expensive. The poorer you are the more expensive it is. Being poor in a poor country is the most expensive. You can't just buy coffee, you can only afford a sachet of coffee. So per gram you're paying double. You can't afford medical care, so the condition gets worse and thus more expensive to do something about. You're in debt most of the time, which is expensive. You have to travel for work, again expensive. You rent, expensive. It must be awful.
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When I think of so many people who can least afford to do so buying everyday items at dollar stores, CVS, gas stations, and other convenience stores with such high unit prices it bums me out.
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I don't understand what am I supposed to do with this information. Now that I know what it means to be poor what should I do?
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This information should inform your political and personal decisions relating to poverty going forward.
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You are now educated about being poor. Enjoy!
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I feel like this is an AI summary of https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/on-the-experience-of-being-poor-ish ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26300139 )
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If it is then his AI policy lies..
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Not an summary, I think. TFA said something cancel Netflix as "advice for getting through being broke". This is not in the "original" article you linked. Could be AI (I honestly don't know), but it is not a "summary".
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Well the other article is 10 times better, so everyone should go read that one instead :-)
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https://blog.ctms.me/about/ It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category: - auto mechanic - digital tech - landscaping I'm not trying to dismiss the difficult realities associated with being poor. But if you have the skills to make more money and bring your family out of the "poor" category, why wouldn't you do that? IMO, basic financial security for your family should trump "I like to work outside." He obviously has different priorities, which is fine. But I'm not sure the search for sympathy/empathy in the blog post is warranted.
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I'm pretty sure the author's membership in the "poor" category is in the past tense.
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I was unconvinced he was writing about his current state, but a prior state / maybe his family background.
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You did not read the article.
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The article directly mentions that the author has done complete engine rebuilds. Mechanics who can do things like engine rebuilds (efficiently) can crack six figures in a MCOL area although this industry does tend to expect quite a bit of work (e.g. 50 hours a week probably and not just M-F). Similarly the about page of the author mentions that they didn't like working in tech and left. The author seems to have all of the tools to make well above the median national salary and afford the proverbial white picket fence house with a wife and two kids. Therefore it seems that the author is making a choice to be poor and many of us would find this choice questionable. Coupled with the author stating things like "Should I kill myself for capitalism" this reads like a fairly typical far-left rant against the inhumanity of actually having to work for a living. The author should check their privilege. There are many rungs below what the author describes and people in this environment would kill for the job of doing engine rebuilds 50 hours per week to earn a six figure salary and support their family. Hey Dom we all find work tough a good chunk of the time and none of us would do it without the paycheck so we aren't exactly feeling sympathy that you don't like it and are choosing to force your family to live in miserable conditions because you don't want to embrace the grind.
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I read every word of the article and the about page.
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Then why did you present fallacious arguments which were already discussed over several paragraphs?
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What was fallacious about my OP? He asserts that being poor is different from being broke. The former being tied to a permanent state. But, if you have the skills and opportunity to make better-than-poor money, then in most cases, I presume, you aren't really poor. It's only a matter of time until you can make additional money. And if you need to charge the $300 of parts to your credit card, on the presumption that if you have a running vehicle you can go to an interview of do the next landscaping job, you have a reasonable expectation of being able to pay it off. It's an investment in that case. There are all kinds of reasons why you might find yourself poor anyway for reasons outside your control. Health issues, weird economic situations, whatever. I'm not discounting them. And maybe they apply here. I just feel like there is a disconnect between the earning potential of the skills he has and being truly "permanently" poor. I'm not arguing there isn't a legitimate reason, just that it wasn't clear to me what that reason would be. You may not like the reasoning or think I'm being too critical, but it's hardly fallacious.
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Perhaps you could elaborate, because I read the article and the About page too, and I don't understand what you're getting at.
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”It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category: - auto mechanic - digital tech - landscaping” cf. ”The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.”
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> The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.” There are more options than the "mindsets" given in the article. It is legitimate to ask someone who believes they are poor why they are poor. Maybe they truly are. But maybe they aren't and they just don't know it. Questioning whether or not someone has a higher earning potential does not imply they are currently lazy.
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So is it your belief that the author currently considers himself poor? (FWIW, I don't think he does.)
Moving Back to a Tiling WM – XMonad (wssite.vercel.app)
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Configuring your WM in Haskell seems fun, but I suspect "fun" is the primary motivator, not any kind of practical reason. Type-checking keybindings is cute, but you're going to discover that the keybinding doesn't work when you go to use it, so how much time are you really saving? That's not helped by the fact that many WMs/compositors have validators for their configs, so you're getting much of the same benefit with much less trouble. For reference, Niri's config is very approachable: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/blob/main/resources/default-config.kdl
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The only reason I used manjaro and thus arch was that it had really nice I3, bspwm, and xmonad distributions. It's very fun to rice a setup and make something worthy of posting on r/linuxporn.
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Tiling WMs are dead. Long live tiling WMs. Scrolling WMs like Niri/Paperwm are where it’s at now.
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Niri has been really nice over the last week since I moved to it. It has allowed me to get down to ~2 persistent workspaces instead of the usual 5-6. Workspace 1: Browser, Email, Music Workspace 2: Running project, editor(s) On sway/i3 I always had these things split across multiple workspaces it could get tedious switching between them at times.
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Looking at a video demo of Niri for an example: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri Conceptually, it's like an infinite 2D canvas windows, divided into strips (strip is a workspace), and you then scroll through an infinite ribbon of windows in each strip. Seems interesting, but also slower and less flexible than traditional tiling WMs (least of all because of the slow scrolling animations, but also because it seems to prefer scrolling instead of jumping-towards). Like most of the 'tiling with gaps' patches I see, these feel like trying to look fancy without necessarily delivering big value. I'd be interested to hear why people want a scrolling WM. Is it merely more visually pleasing?
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Just moved to Niri, it's incredible how snappy it is. The animation makes what you did with the window much clearer vs. other wms where it just teleports, the scrolling just compounds to that effect. The scrolling is great because it tends to work at getting things out of the way when they're not relevant and bringing them back when they are, while not ending up with tiny windows like dwm/AwesomeWM/Sway (what I've been using for the last ~15 years).
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I used Xmonad for a while, then switched to awesomewm used it for years. It was good on a 1366x768 screen to use space efficiently.
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Recent versions of KDE have pretty good tiling support, so it's possible to have a rich DE and good tiling.
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when you say tiling support, do you mean automatic tiling, or sending it to a corner via key combo?
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Even xfce will tile windows to 4 quadrants, left/right-halves, top/bottom-halves. I have not studied other tiling window managers enough to know what I'm missing.
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I also find KDE to be good enough for my personal taste. I have tried different WMs, but always found the huge configuration effort to not be worth the marginal productivity gains I get over KDE + some custom keybinds
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Why is there no Uber for plumbing/HVAC? (and why there ought to be) (nikolaihlebowitsh.substack.com)
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We called this a "handyman" back in the day.
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India has this thing called as urban company Does this and much more https://www.urbancompany.com
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Exploitation already runs rampant in the trades, so does incompetence (see CyFy Home Inspections on Youtube). The last thing the trades need is the profiteering, abuse and unsustainable race-to-the-bottom that Uber brings with it.
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task rabbit is sort of uber for a lot of non driving things, many house repair/handyman people available. not sure if they go all the way to major things like hvac
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I can't comment on this idea but I will say that I would have expected press fittings to have brought down the cost of plumbing because they don't require soldering up to certain diameter. But they don't seem to have had any impact on the cost of plumbing despite not requiring as much skill. https://www.ferguson.com/content/ideas-and-learning-center/trade-talk/why-use-press-fittings/
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Skill isn't the issue though time is and soldering itself is pretty fast.
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It’s called home warranty companies.
Learn how to fix your own stuff. Problem solved.
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"All you need to remember for plumbing is that s*t runs downhill" - Tony Soprano
'No One Lives Forever' Turns 25 and You Still Can't Buy It Legitimately (techdirt.com)
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Copyright kills works when rights cannot be negotiated, usually because the rights holder is not to be found, but in this case because the situation is just "complicated".
Everybody is waiting for HL3. I want NOLF3
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This. This was such a charming game series.
So say someone decides to produce a remaster of NOLF. Does Activision have to produce this piece of paper once they sue to establish standing? If Activision's version of this piece of paper was chewed up by rats in the 90s, does their ownership stake vanish in a puff as well? If the potential victory from a lawsuit is $20K and Activision estimates it will cost them $50K to find this piece of paper, is the company relatively safe from a lawsuit?
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They would need to prove that they have the rights to it to win court, yes. The chances of Activision actually pulling the trigger and suing if you made a remastered version are definitely less than 50-50. They'd have to actually have owned the rights in the first place, they still have the documentation to prove it, and that they'd find a suit a profitable idea? Let's say it's a 1/3 chance. That means if you publish it, you'd have a 2/3 chance of not getting sued by Activision, that can have a positive E(V) if you just go ahead and YOLO it. But the killer is that WB and Fox (now Disney) also are sitting out there as maybe rights-holders. Let's say that each of them also has a 1/3 chance of suing and that they are all independent. Now you have a 8/27th chance of not getting sued- less than 1/3. So the expected value has to be twice as large as with a normal, single company situation to justify the increased risk of lawsuit from one of three companies. And so no one pencils out the choice as a good one, compared to the opportunity cost of working on some other game with a clearer rights situation.
Marc Andreessen as Avatar for Societal Decay (infinitescroll.us)
Sounds like the traits of a psychopath?
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I don't know how to define psychopath, and I only know a handful of extremely rich people, but every single extremely rich person will be like this in their professional persona. And quite likely in the public persona, if they maintain one, because why maintain a public persona except to enhance professional success. Interactions with friends and family could easily be different.
" I am deeply on Marc Andreessen’s side when he makes the basic point that society should aim to build more things like vaccines, housing, manufacturing, and new technologies. Andreessen has, over the past few years, been engaged in a battle with people he calls ‘decels’, the enemies of growth." Watching Marc Andreesen talk, I noticed everything he says is sort of strategic cosplaying. In the interview with Joe Rogan, one thing that jumped out at me was when he says, Democrats are now the party of the rich and the poor and Republicans are the party of the middle, but like, I could just vibe he didn't give a fuck about what he was saying, it just sounded good and was useful to him to say in that political moment. I've listend to two interviews with him, and while he's obviously very smart and well read, he sort of obviously bias' everything he does to how he feels in the current moment, very adolescent in the elon musk / trump way. On the one hand he's able to write the it's time to build manifesto that does seem to say alot of the right things, while I think sort of secretly just trying to destablize the US / take down institutions / deeply nihilistic.
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> In the interview with Joe Rogan, one thing that jumped out at me was when he says, Democrats are now the party of the rich and the poor and Republicans are the party of the middle, but like, I could just vibe he didn't give a fuck about what he was saying, it just sounded good and was useful to him to say in that political moment. What does it mean for you to have vibed that he didn't give a fuck about what he was saying? This pithy observation about contemporary US poltical parties isn't unique to him and doesn't seem obviously incorrect. This seems like a pretty normal thing to state on a podcast like the one Joe Rogan does.
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It seems obviously incorrect that all the billionaires supporting Trump don't see themselves as part of the "top". He's not making an observation, he's trying to confabulate a vision of the world that will appeal to people who will upvote him fake internet points.
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The world we live in now is one where fake internet points can be redeemed for political and social capital. The worst people we know figured this out before the sane ones and that's why we're in this mess we're in.
Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet (ft.com)
I can’t wait for the apocalyptic razing that’s coming.
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Very unlikely (are you a greybeard? you should know this, unless we're at some sort of resentment > rational local minima)
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sam altman just needs another trillion dollars and then we'll finally have AGI and then the robots will do all the work and everyone will get a million dollars per year in UBI and everything will be perfect promise
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If you're a greybeard, you would have lived this with many, many, companies, and I extremely doubt you'd be so fixated and angry as to mumble through a parody of what you perceive the counterargument as. Mine were Uber/Tesla, fwiw.
What do you call Larry Ellison losing enough wealth to equal the yearly economic output of a small American metro area? A nice start. EDIT: Downvote it all you want, he's not going to increase your pay.
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If Oracle implodes because of their debt (or any other reason actually), it'll make my day.
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Bankruptcy is an integral part of capitalism to free up resources to be allocated to productive businesses. It prevents bubbles driven by malinvestment. A state bailout is antithetical to free market capitalism.
Oracle stock down 25% for the past month, but still up 35% for the year and 300% for 5 years.
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Yeah.. I came hoping to find a silver lining to AI, but completely expecting I'd find this comment.
Unfair. Oracle excels at some things, like extortion, blackmailing and litigation.
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Just think about what they could accomplish if they had more engineers than lawyers.
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Imagine all the patents they could hold to extort over!
How do you mean? Have they succeeded at squeezing any profit out of anything thats not Oracle DB?
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I meant they've always had a reputation for being ruthless business people. Charging license fees based on the amount of memory in the host machine instead of the VM running Oracle, and things like that. They nickle and dime everything. https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2025/Oracle-Announces-Fiscal-Year-2026-First-Quarter-Financial-Results/default.aspx They don't break it out into products in the results, but it looks like hardware, software, cloud, and support were all profitable.
Previously: Oracle's credit default swaps surge as Barclays downgrades its debt rating https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45910711
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annoying as hell as usual
> When it was all announced I was very very vocal that using an inexperienced startup for the sovereign compute capabilities seemed a very poor choice. Cohere raised from Nvidia. Cohere spends on Coreweave. Coreweave raised from Nvidia and buys Nvidia chips. This is why they buy from Coreweave.
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You're not implying there is corruption in the form of circular deal making in the AI/Tech industry, are you?
are you suggesting bailouts for the AI data centers are the new too big to fail
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Coreweave can default and be liquidated and the data centers will keep running just fine.
I’m bullish on AI as tech but folks are starting to sniff out that the financials of everything going on at the moment aren’t sustainable for much longer. I hope we have more of a “reality correction” than full blown bubble bursting, but the data is increasingly looking like we’re about to have a massive implosion that wipes out a generation of startups and sets the VC ecosystem back a decade.
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I don't know about a decade... the dotcom bubble bursting was pretty close to normal within 5 years or so. Still a long time, and from personal experience the 50% pay cut from before and a year later was anything but fun.
> I’m bullish on AI as tech I'm not bullish in the stock market sense. Which isn't the same as saying LLMs and related technology aren't useful... they are. But as you mentioned the financials don't make sense today, and even worse than that, I'm not sure how they could get the financials to make sense because no player in the space on the software side has a real moat to speak of, and I don't believe its possible to make one. People have preferences over which LLM does better at job $XYZ, but I don't think the differences would stand up to large price changes. LLM A might feel like its a bit better of a coding model than LLM B, but if LLM A suddenly cost 2x-3x, most people are going to jump to LLM B. If they manage to price fix and all jump in price, I think the amount of people using them would drop off a cliff. And I see the ultimate end result years from now (when the corporate LLM providers might, in a normal market, finally start benefiting from a cross section of economies of scale and their own optimizations) being that most people will be able to get by using local models for "free" (sans some relatively small buy-in cost, and whatever electricity they use).
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I think this is the rational take that everyone seems to be ignoring.
Well, Genshin Impact is at the forefront of predatory B2C business practice. It is a gacha game, engineered to extract as much money from its prey as possible. On the other end, most AI company can afford to be generous with their user/consumer right now because they are being bankrolled by magic money. The real test will be when they have to start the enshitification. Will the product still be enough to convince consumer to spend an amount of money guarantying a huge margin for the service provider ? Will they have to rely on whale desperately needing to talk to their IA girlfriend ? Or company and people who went deep into the whole vibe coding thing, and can't work without an agent ? I think it is hard to say right now. But considering the price of the hardware and running it, I don't think they will have to price the service insanely to at least be profitable. To be as profitable as the market seems to believe, that's another story.
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Isn't AI just as bad if not worse here? I'd bet there are far more people who have been duped by ChatGPT (and others) to think it's their friend, lover, or therapist than people who are addicted to Genshin Impact.
The tech is way underpriced right now. It's basically a subsidized market right now, with the money flowing in coming from the private sector. The problem here is that it remains to be seen who is willing to pay for the service once it's priced at cost or even with a margin. And based on valuations of AI companies one would expect a huge margin.
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It's not subsidized, lol. Generally, I worry HN is in a dark place with this stuff - look how this thread goes, ex. descendant of yours is at "Why would I ever pay for this when it hallucinates." I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that. I'm worried for those who do, genuinely, I hope transitions out there are slow enough, due to obstinance, that they're not cast out suddenly without the skills to get something else.
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> It's not subsidized, lol. It's subsidised by VC funding. At some point the gravy train stops and they have to pivot to profit so that the VCs deliver return-on-investment. Look at Facebook shoving in adverts, Uber jacking up the price, etc. > I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that I don't know how you can afford not to realise that there's a fixed value prop here for the current behaviour and that it's potentially not as high as it needs to be for OpenAI to turn a profit. OpenAI's ridiculous investment ability is based on a future potential it probably will never hit. Assuming it does not, the whole stack of cards falls down real quick. (You can Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V OpenAI for all the big AI providers)
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This is all about OpenAI, not about AI being subsidized...with some sort of directive to copy/paste "OpenAI" for all the big AI providers? (presumably you meant s/OpenAI/$PROVIDER?) Google. Boom.
It's hard for me to imagine paying real money for something that gives me a maybe-hallucinated answer that I need to check every single time. A flaky test is worse than a failing test.
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Plus I can run a reasonable LLM on my own hardware, so I don't even need to pay anyone else. And what I can run locally is only going to get better and better.
_sigh_ Yes LLMs hallucinate, no it's no longer 2022 and ChatGPT (gpt-3.5) is the pinnacle of LLM tech. Modern LLMs in an agentic loop can self correct, you still need to be on guard but if used correctly (yes, yes, holding it wrong etc. etc.) can do many, many tasks that do not suffer from "need to check every single time".
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Apologies that you're taking on the chin here. Generally, I'll just skip fantastical HN threads with a critical mass of BS like this, with pity, rather than an attempt to share (for more on that c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929335 ) Been on HN 16 years and never seen anything like the pack of people who will come out to tell you it doesn't work and they'll never pay for it and it's wrong 50% of the time, etc. Was at dinner with an MD a few nights back and we were riffing on this, came to the conclusion is was really fun for CS people when the idea was AI would replace radiologists, but when the first to be mowed down are the keyboard monkeys, well, it's personal and you get people who are years into a cognitive dissonance thing now.
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> Modern LLMs in an agentic loop can self correct If the problem as stated is "Performing an LLM query at newly inflated cost $X is an iffy value proposition because I'm not sure if it will give me a correct answer" then I don't see how "use a tool that keeps generating queries until it gets it right" (which seems like it is basically what you are advocating for) is the solution. I mean, yeah, the result will be more correct answers than if you just made one-off queries to the LLM, but the costs spiral out of control even faster because the agent is going to be generating more costly queries to reach that answer.
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If a coworker is wrong 40% or 60% of the time I’ll ignore their suggestion either way
I wonder if a price correction would be a boon for open source, with the economics of smaller / self hosted models making a lot more sense when API prices have to surge.
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It's not actually subsidized and the economics of smaller/self-hosted models are a much, much, worse nightmare (source: guy who spent last 2 years maintaining llama.cpp && any provider you can think of) (why is it bad? same reason why 20 cars vs. 1 bus is bad. same reason why only being able to use transportation if you own a car would be bad)
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> It's not actually subsidized Source?
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Source on it being subsidized? :) (there isn't one, other than an aggro subset of people lying to eachother that somehow literally everyone is losing money, while posting record profit margins) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor )
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor (linuxcontainers.org)
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I’ve been running an Incus cluster of 3 fairly beefy servers for about a year now. It’s my go-to recommendation for anyone wanting to setup a new virtualized environment. One of my favorite features is how you can tag different cluster members for different architectures. In the same cluster, I can have traditional dual-socket x86 servers with a dozen DIMM slots as well as Raspberry Pis. The architecture tagging lets me strategize execution of ARM-based container workloads to be only on the Pis, or opt to run them via QEMU on the x86 platforms if that makes more sense in a particular scenario. Since I deal with a lot of embedded firmware, this offers a nice, flexible platform. Stephen Graeber is also a long time contributor to the LXC project and his reasoning behind this fork and other changes are quite sound. I hope the project sees continued success. Stephen’s business model of offering consulting services for Incus systems also seems quite sound.
I used Proxmox for years to run a fairly comprehensive homelab, and a few months ago replaced the entire thing with Incus (on a debian host, haven't tried IncusOS yet). Incus is amazing and it makes so many things so much easier compared to Proxmox. One thing in particular is permissions in unprivileged containers. In Proxmox, you have to do a bunch of somewhat confusing ID mapping. In Incus, it's as simple as setting "shift=true". Also the profile system in Incus is really powerful and allowed me to deduplicate a ton of config.
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Can Incus do regular vms too, or only LXCs? I think I looked at it before but wrote it off because I still have some workloads that have to be in VMs.
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Yes, it can do both. The image server will build for both options if possible, so you have to specify “—vm” on the command line creating the domain.
Incus is more comparable to LXD than proxmox. IncusOS is different though. LXD containers also are unprivileged by default.
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Incus was an LXD fork in the very beginning but it's evolved a lot since then. Incus is far superior than LXD in number of ways
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Incus is specifically an LXD fork.
You might be mixing up LXC and LXD
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From Incus main page: > The Incus project was created by Aleksa Sarai as a community driven alternative to Canonical's LXD. Today, it's led and maintained by many of the same people that once created LXD. Thé confusion si real
Though IncusOS itself is based on Debian so for the first point against Proxmox I guess using Incus on your OS of choice would be better?
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IncusOS is different. You can use incus itself on all the major distros: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/installing/
Linear Algebra Explains Why Some Words Are Effectively Untranslatable (aethermug.com)
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There is a better thesis coming from the late philosopher W.V.O Quine: indeterminacy of translation [1] [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/#IndeTran
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This article assumes that concepts are somehow precise coordinates within a single language; that's not the case, at best, speakers of a language mutually approximate a relatively consistent representation, but like, look at a word like yeet or whatever: we decided as a society on its meaning while it was being developed, as it were. Furthermore, it never rigorously defines what it means by translation. It claims 上京 is a single basis meaning moving to Tokyo, for example, but that isn't even an accurate translation: the individual components represent superior/greater/above and Tokyo and as an idiomatic phrase it represents the concept of moving to the capital for a better life. Something like "moving on up" or the like in some vernaculars of English, and idioms translating to idioms is a form of translation. It's disingenuous to represent the first concept as a single basis but not the second. Similarly, it claims mono no aware (物の哀れ) is unable to be translated, but, again, more literally "translated" is saying "the sorrow within things" character by character, and, only as an idiom has the full contextual understanding. It's not really a single point even if it's rather accurately located in a hypothetical embedding space by Japanese speakers. Imo, an English translation of the concept is "everything is dust in the wind", only 2 more individual conceptual units than the original Japanese phrase, and 3 of them are mainly just connecting words, but it's understood as a similar idiom/concept, here. Concepts are only usefully distinguished by context and use. By the author's own argumentation: nothing is translatable (or, generally, even communicatable) unless it has a fixed relative configuration to all other concepts that is precisely equivalent . In practice, we handle the fuzziness as part of communication and its useless to try and define a concept as untranslatable unless you're also of the camp that nothing is ever communicated (in which case, this response to the author's post is completely useless as nobody could possibly understand it enough internally for it to be useful. If you've read this far, congrats on squaring the circle somehow)
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> If the mere sight of the above is like a punch in the face for you, don't worry. I'm not going to math you to death in what follows. I will only remind you of a tiny basic part of it that I think relates to languages. Yes, that mathematical expression is like a punch in my face, but not for the reason you think. I am offended that the rank of the matrix does not match the dimension of the matrix, not that I'm seeing a matrix.
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I think a succinct way to describe my thoughts on linear algebra/language is that language has high dimensionality (ie many different basis vectors that may not necessarily be orthogonal) and that individual languages use a unique coordinate system to express thought. Each language is a lossy approximation of all conceivable thought and some languages can more efficiently represent the “all thoughts” vector space because they have basis vectors that point in more uncommon directions (like the go to japan example). So while you can more or less point to any thought in any language, some thoughts are easier to express in certain languages, which the post (and me) agree to be untranslatable words. I tried to find the really interesting article about language and color that describes how some cultures use different naming schemes for colors but couldn’t find it. It talked about how back in the day we don’t know orange as a color, we just thought it was red-yellow and only after the fruit was distributed did the word for the color catch on. Here’s the best article I can find that talks about this phenomena https://burnaway.org/magazine/blue-language-visual-perception/
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> Each language is a lossy approximation of all conceivable thought I'm not quite sure I understand this—I do have mental sensations/processes sans language, but I would not characterize them as "thoughts".
That's just a difference in orthography. English could easily have had an orthographic standard where we write "compoundnoun" for compounds. This is in contrast with a language like French, where compound nouns are relatively rare. Compare English "Olive oil" and German "Olivenöl" with French "huile d' olive". In French you need to have a preposition to combine the two nouns, whereas English and German do noun-noun composition.
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You are right but neither yours nor those of the previous posters are good examples of compound nouns. These examples have just the meanings of a noun + adjective or of a noun + noun in genitive case, where some languages are lazier than others and omit the markers of case or of adjectival derivation from noun that are needed in more strict languages. There are also other kinds of compound nouns, where the compound noun does not have the meaning of its component words, but only some related meaning (usually either a pars pro toto meaning or a metaphorical meaning). Those are true compound nouns, not just abbreviated sequences of words from which the grammatical markers have been omitted. Such compound words were very frequent in Ancient Greek, from where they have been inherited in the scientific and technical language, where they have been used to create names for new things and concepts, e.g. arthropod, television, phonograph, basketball and so on.
That isn’t a proof. Synonyms can bolster the enumeration sans augmenting novelty.
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I think the reasonable reader will conclude it's unlikely for any two languages to share exactly the same vocabulary, accounting for synonyms.
Are they multiplying a 3x3 matrix by a 2 component vector ?
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It also has mixed square brackets and curved parentheses. I stopped reading the article when I saw this.
In that one case, yeah; I don't think they're going for anything more than general illustration here.
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The text that follows does take on a new meaning though, for those that know linear algebra: If the mere sight of the above is like a punch in the face for you, don't worry. Almost makes me wonder if it was intentional.
Wealthy foreigners 'paid for chance to shoot civilians in Sarajevo' (thetimes.com)
The world does not exist and cater to your whims and likes/dislikes
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That does bot answer. The question: how is that relevant in this forum.
I mean serb snipers were already shooting the civilians en masse in Sarajevo. Its not a huge leap from that to lending the opportunity to a few depraved rich idiots. The Epstein files absolutely show you how depraved some rich folks are...
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Doesn't this logic just cause a cascade? eg. "we all know group X is depraved, so it wouldn't surprise me that they did something even more depraved, which lends further evidence for them being depraved!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade
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I think you mean “depraved” here, not “deprived”.
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thanks, edited.
How do you feel about Quillette? https://quillette.com/2025/02/27/four-years-zero-graves-now-what/
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>[Quillette] has been described as libertarian-leaning;[2][3][4] the Columbia Journalism Review called Quillette "the right wing's highly influential answer to Slate",[5] and it has been criticized as an "anti-PC soapbox"[6] and for being "reflexively contrarian".[7] People who were skeptical at The Fraser Institute are probably also skeptical of Quillette
I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla (manualdousuario.net)
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we respect your privacy, except for when we dump it into a publicly shared LLM
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The only people who want AI in anything are AI companies...
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why not AI integrations that are not built-in but rather externalized like LSP?
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Got to hold on just for a few more months until Ladybird release. Servo, hopefully will be still catching up. Worst case scenario - move to Dillo.
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Please make AI disappear altogether until I want it. No pop-ups, no floating "Help me..." in fields, no spinning flashing icons on toolbars. I submit feedback on all products that do this that I would like a way to turn it all off. AI is useful when I want it, otherwise it's just annoying and gets in my way.
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The sidebar where I can integrate my own locally hosted LLM? So I can quickly grab summaries and stuff? THAT'S helpful. The rest, get the hell away.
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"We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and free from the everyday disruptions that break your flow." You can almost taste the hand-waviness here. Smoother, helpful, free from disruptions - has absolutely no meaning, and that's intentional because they have no idea what the actual value prop is of having "AI" - whatever functionality and capability that actually is - in the browser.
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I would personally never use an out-of-the-box browser because of this. Instead of Firefox I use(d) LibreWolf which strips out all the Mozilla trash. I'd argue that all gecko-based browsers are "bad" and Mozilla has been largely incompetent for many, many years now with failing to modernize their browser engine. As I remember, their current CEO fired the entire team responsible for a modernizing their browser codebase in order to focus on the type of crap described in this article. I strongly believe that by far the best browser out there right now is Brave. However, as with Firefox, it's pretty terrible out-of-the-box and you have to add "local company policy" files in order to be able to strip out all of its web3, AI and other crap that nobody wants. In a way, all modern browsers are the same. I can't wait for more serious competition although I'm doubtful that's it's really possible due to the sheer complexity of the problem, but I do realize that there are some serious contenders coming up in the next few years.
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Speak for yourself, I do want to see Mozilla experimenting with new features and functionality opened up by new technology. Politically motivated technological stagnation is little more than a slow death, Mozilla should at least be trying new things. And yes, they will get some of it wrong. It's new technology, nobody really knows how to use it yet. Mozilla should be on the forefront of figuring it out.
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Problem is, a chatbot sidebar isn't something new to try, it's a tired dead-end idea that never delivered any value to the multiple competitors that tried the exact same thing. Firefox's implementation of a chatbot sidebar is especially cookie-cutter because it just plugs into existing LLM APIs, it doesn't make use of local AI the way the alt text generator and local machine translation features do. What were they thinking?
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I'm certainly open to AI in my browser. It has to be done well though, to be a net positive for the user experience. A local model for naming a tab group or something as I've heard off sounds like a very reasonable thing (though it should be said I wouldn't personally use such a feature as I don't group my tabs at all). I think it's a good thing they are experimenting with this.
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> I think nobody wants AI in Firefox I think the author does not speak for me
> The Mozilla team seems to have struck a perfect balance with that so far, even going so far as to add "turn this off permanently" options directly in every AI-related shortcut and menu. It's weird that so few people point this out and instead go straight to about:config. I don't use LLMs and I think too that is the best approach they could take: those that want to use AI can, and those that never want it can disable it immediately.
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How about it leaving it disabled and letting me enable it immediately if/when I choose.
I want a browser to prioritize speed, standards, stability and security. All other features should come via add-ons. Plus, if I want an AI in my browser I don't want it locked to Mozilla's AI.
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What do you mean by "locked to Mozilla's AI"? Mozilla doesn't host an AI chat bot to my knowledge.
I wish they rely more on OS features, like the built-in, system-wide spell check. I know it's a bigger task for them, since Firefox runs on multiple OSes, but maybe it's worth it. It dreads me how “un-macOS” Firefox feels, and I guess this feeling extends to Windows, Linux and elsewhere.
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Firefox has always felt rather bad on Mac. Ages ago they made Camino, which was basically "aqua Firefox" and it was nice.
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In Windows-land everything is so inconsistent that it doesn’t really stand out like it does on MacOS. 97% of Windows users wouldn’t notice if it followed OS conventions and the remaining 3% would complain that it was following the current conventions instead of copying Word 2003 :)
This is the fictional hallucination that somehow makes it into every comment section about Mozilla. So let's go through the facts one more time: (1) They spend more on browser development now than they ever have in their history even after adjusting for inflation. (2) The majority of things claimed to be "money sinks" don't actually cost that much or siphon resources away from core browser development with some exceptions (we'll get to those). (3) The market share losses happened from 2010-2015, the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses. (4) The narrative that a failure to keep up/push new features drove market share losses paints a picture that's entirely zoomed in on Mozilla and ignores Google leveraging its search and mobile monopolies to muscle its browser onto the map, which likely would have happened regardless of how good Firefox was. (5) The narrative that the browser was broken and behind is somewhat outdated - it was true in the market share loss era, but then they did the dang thing and launched a major engineering effort, fundamentally rebuilt the major parts of the browser via Project Quantum, a monumental engineering transformation that delivered speed and stability, the thing everyone asked for. It's obviously not perfect, but in terms of performance and stability its certainly good enough to be a daily driver in most cases and not in a state of tragic disrepair. (6) Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight. That said, yes, there are bad things: the dabbling in adtech is bad imo ("privacy preserving ads" seems to be category error), dabbling with AI doesn't seem to have an obvious point in its current iteration, Pocket was understandable as a revenue grower but seems have been a wash and annoyed users and they didn't bother to maintain it, Mozilla nonprofits broader advocacy for privacy seems to be confusing some people, and Firefox OS genuinely did seem to have cost engineering resources at a time that they lost market share. That said, I would love if there was a 10 year old Firefox OS project right now given Google's pushing of developer certification. So, yes, there's stuff I don't love. I don't feel like this iteration of Mozilla has the innovative spirit of, say, Opera back in its heyday, and it's not as polished as Chrome. But the comment section rhetoric has spilled over into fever dream territory and not is even pretending to map onto any coherent historical timeline, factual record, or story of cause and effect, and often contradictory in its declaration of demands.
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>The market share losses happened from 2010-2015 According to this site,[0] Firefox was at 16% of the desktop market share in January 2016 and is at 3.8% now. Its peak was at 31% in 2009 according to the same site. If we include mobile it was at 8.9% in 2016 and is at 2.2% now. So they have been continually losing market share. >the side bets era is approximately 2020-2025. The side bets didn't retroactively cause the market share losses. I see your point, but Mozilla bought Pocket in 2017.[2] In any case you are right that they would have lost basically the same market share even if they never invested in any side projects. And that they lost market share to chrome even before (to my knowledge) investing in random side projects, mainly due to Chrome's superior performance and interface at the time. I think what people are upset about is how they add random features to their app in a way almost no other open source project does. I don't expect FFmpeg or Blender to load an ad for their new cloud service of the month or latest context menu clutter. People want them to behave more like a normal open source project rather than as a company. >Despite it being supposedly so obvious, no one can explain what missing browser feature they can add that will restore all their market share overnight I personally don't see their market share ever returning unless some new regulation changes something with Chrome development. I want them to focus only on browser features not because it will increase market share but because that is what I expect as a user from open source projects. I think Ladybird (and I assume Servo as well) will fill this niche much better than Firefox does, and many power users and developers will move to those browsers once either of them releases officially, even if they are slower, simply because they fit the mold of what people expect from projects now: a GitHub repo that is easy to contribute to, GitHub issues, no telemetry or ads on startup that you need to disable on first install etc. Personally I plan to move to ladybird for everyday sites like HN, Google, GitHub, etc. as long as they mostly work, and then I will use Chrome (or Firefox) for bank sites and broken or slow pages. Basically, I don't want to have an antagonistic relationship with the functionality of the software I am using. That to me is a prerequisite to caring about performance, otherwise why not not just use chromium or webkit? >often contradictory in its declaration of demands Unless you mean within the same comment, people have different opinions. Many people are upset at Mozilla, not all for the same exact reason. Or maybe they don't have the facts or timeline fully correct, but their main criticism can still be accurate. Lastly, I don't see "adding AI" to the browser as inherently bad. When I saw it in the update they added it in I just thought "Oh another Mozilla feature to ignore." Same as when they added translations. They keep trying to get me to use their translation, but it just isn't as good as Google Translate, so I never use it. It's just another annoying pop-up that appears from time to time. I also don't have an issue with proprietary software or even software that tracks you, as long as it has some value add I can't get anywhere else. But when something is open source I expect it to be a certain way and will try to use it instead of the proprietary option where possible. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-202510 [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide#monthly-200901-202510 [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/mozilla-acquires-pocket/
>refocus on the one thing that still gives the organization a reason to exist: building a great browser Considering their existence depends on Google's money, it's to their best interest for the browser to lag behind Chrome.
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I keep hearing this, but I haven’t seen any convincing evidence there are no alternatives.
doesn’t 3 imply 2? aren’t people just affectively asking for “something like chrome but with ad blocking”? what I’m most concerned about is that pretty much all browsers except safari and firefox use Chromium’s rendering engine. for me that alone is a reason for firefox to have to exist.
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If you have ublock enabled 3 does not imply 2. I strongly suspect that 3 does not imply 2 generally, but I don't know enough to put any weight behind that statement. It's a regular occurrence that I visit a page with firefox either on android, or desktop linux, and a basically default ublock origin that fails to render. I generally then try the page in an incognito tab, and then try the page in chrome and it loads, and displays properly. I'm also maybe moving the goal posts from "have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly" to "I never have to use vanilla chrome, because vanilla firefox just works". There are cases where sites claim DRM issues with firefox which I can kind of understand, but there are other sites that just refuse to work with vanilla firefox that work with chrome. I of course can't really point to any examples, because they're not sites I regularly visit, but they definitely exist.
that doesn't matter, grandma isn't a beta tester. I can tell you first-hand a lot of people are installing these ai browsers, even in enterprise environments. You get ahead of it or get left behind.
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Statistics disagrees with you to such a degree that this statement ignores reality. If you poll 52 people, and you get 52 identical results, even with population bias , you're done. If there was a mix of "yes" and "no", less so, but 100% "no" after 50+ samples is statistically damning. Because remember, the bias is towards people who care about Firefox enough to use a forum, so that's the core audience, representing the existing user base that you're going to lose if their poll result is a unanimous "no". So unless Mozilla thinks losing part of their existing user base over this and attract enough new users with AI, then this result should be all the evidence they need that this is the wrong direction. Firefox hasn't been relevant in the larger browser space for years now, it's a "nice that it exists" for a niche audience. It used to be the poweruser's browser, but that got axed. It used to be the privacy browser but insanely Safari now fills that roll. So what's left? Either you play to what strengths Firefox still has, or you have a management layer composed entirely of ex-Facebookers that are coming up with nonsense ideas that are just going to make Firefox fall off the map completely.
how is 52 users representative??
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It was 52 OF 52, 100% of them. That's what makes it significant. Literally not a single dissenting voice. is 52 definitive? No, but that early it's unusual that 100% said no.
Are we even living in the same universe?? In mine, Claude and Gemini Pro outperform classic machine translators by orders of magnitude, that's not an exaggeration. I can finally rely on correct machine translation when reading articles in languages I don't speak and when talking to people in their native language. They still miss some nuance in the informal talk, but I can be reasonably sure it adapts the cultural context pretty well, and tolerate the rest. >replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries I'm talking about actual deep (re)search that cites the sources, not simple summaries. For example I'm considering a KTM 890 Adventure R as my next motorcycle but the reliability and TCO are worrying. I've prompted and launched an agent to recursively scan YouTube travel videos, or rather the transcriptions, to look for actual issues with this bike, without all that KTM marketing bullshit and paid reviews, and provide me with timecodes. And it did, finding a ton of extremely non-obvious non-English channels in the process (Russian, Afrikaans, Spanish etc), scanning dozens of hours of videos, and providing timecodes for me to verify. That saved me insane amount of time. Normal people actually pay money for this, I'm pretty surprised to see this in the wild but it's true. Reducing this to "techbros and influencers" is pure wishful thinking.
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Maybe talk to the recently resigned Japanese translation team leader about how good AI translations are.
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They are miles better than the ordinary machine translators. That's all that matters. Human translation is obviously better, but not by much. I know because I'm testing LLMs for pretty complex translations all the time, in languages I understand well, and two persons occasionally communicate with me in my native language using an LLM. It's accurate enough to not have any troubles, especially if you don't prompt it naively and use a strong multilanguage model. It's not the same as slop generation, as the input is from a human. That guy reacted to them ignoring him and overwriting his hard work, which is terrible but not related to the point I'm making.
World class open source browser, A+ ad blocker, better tab-style tree extension, more free/open extension store, no corporate overload, on and on.... Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D
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I do, but I also benefit from the fact that Chrome is basically everywhere already, so I use Firefox as my primary browser, and just break out Chrome when I need to flash some devices with ESPHome or something.
On Linux and Windows it is IMO the best browser and it's pretty good on MacOS too, although Safari is still my fave on that platform. It's stable, got good UI and light on resources. The excellent adblocking is a huge feature. For the average Joe user, they might want some AI features but most techy users have already got that figured out.
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I can’t figure out why they couldn’t just fund a first-party extension to add AI features.
> you don't use it compositionally. I would if I could!
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Nothing really stops you from doing curl | awk , but you probably aren't.
I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.
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I've used Firefox as my daily driver for years on a high end gaming laptop and have the same gripe. The dev tools are truly bad. Even outside of dev work, there's sites where I want to hide paywall or login banners by simply setting a container to "display: none;", but opening up the inspector (slow) and doing so causes the browser to freeze.
I've had to stop using FF as my development browser because it chokes on large source maps. I used to find lots of issues in our web app that were only ever tested on chromium browsers. I don't anymore because the devtools are unusable past a certain point.
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Can you please file a bug on Mozilla's bug tracker? They are usually quite responsive on well-documented dev related bugs - especially ones around edge-cases related to fundamentals like resource allocation. You'd be doing a good thing that would help others.
Personally, I don't really see the value proposition in being able to load and serve you ads faster, compared to a browser with a proper ad blocker.
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The average user does not care about ads being present. Speed is paramount .
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I disagree. I have installed adblockers on different relatives machines. Without fail, they mentioned how much better surfing now is. They did not not mind the ads, they just didn‘t know there is an easy way to get rid of them
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Shouldn't getting rid of all the ads make things notably faster?
I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy? Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).
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I tend to use Chrome over Firefox although I have both. Plus points - better translate, google lens, slick and consistent. Minus points - Firefox containers are good. Re privacy it comes across to me as a bit tin foil hat worrying about the evil doers tracking my thoughts. I mean sure I don't want criminals to know my home address and bank account details but re Google knowing say I use mac and advertising some Apple stuff to me - what's the problem?
Amen. Friends don't let friends use Firefox in the manner prescribed by Mozilla in its current state. It's horrid. I have LibreWolf and Chrome installed, but not Firefox, and I like part of Firefox in spite of, not because of, the rest of Mozilla. I'd be interested in Ladybird except they threaten to use Swift.
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Exactly. I've never stopped using Firefox, I've stopped recommending it because I can't support it (literally, meaning guide the people I recommend it to through annoyances and problems.) I only use it myself through Debian, I cram it with extensions to get old functionality back and give me some measure of privacy, and make tons of userChrome changes to get everything to look halfway sane (i.e. like it looked out of the box in 2010.) I'm not helping somebody non-technical with that, and without that, I can't really recommend it over Chrome; they're both controlled by Google. I can tell them that Firefox is better for adblocking, for now, until they gaslight everyone and revert to following Chrome's tail on absolutely everything again. But if Firefox were a real public service browser, they would have brought uBlock in-house a long time ago by employing gorhill (along with a bunch of other extensions, especially Tree Style Tabs.) Instead, they danced around shutting down its APIs just like Chrome until they decided not to (or until Google decided for them, because Firefox doing that would have annihilated Google in antitrust hearings.) There is absolutely no reason to be confident that Firefox won't be "regretfully" or "unfortunately" right in on "Manifest V4."
Agreed! I think it should be a huge red flag to folks at mozilla, that there are several forks of Firefox that mostly just take out tracking and AI features from the browser.
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>that mostly just take out tracking and AI features Do you have any evidence they have a significant adoption by the market and aren't a vocal minority.
"but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important" Maybe the ideal technical solution would not require them to know?
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The average user is a moron. This is key to all tech and key to why complex shit like Mastodon will never see wide adoption.
> kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money Nitpick: Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp., not the non-profit.
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A distinction without substance
Mozilla Corp is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Tomayto, tomahto.
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[delayed]
> it's time to throw in the towel And do what? Use a Chromium-based browser, which is infinitely worse?
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Forks exist
Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.
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I work on a traditional product that has a lot of AI touch points and people use them, a lot. Like, a lot more than other newly introduced features.
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> Does anyone want AI in anything? I most definitely do. I want to be able to type into Finder on my Mac to rename all the files a certain way, without spending 10 minutes figuring out the right regex for it. I want to be able to type into Firefox to go through 50 different versions of the current URL, using a different US state parameter for each, and download the table it shows into a single combined CSV with an added column for "state". Every day there's 20 things like this. I absolutely want everything in my OS and browser to be exposed to an LLM that can do everything so much faster. Without the intermediate stage of having it write a script to do it. It would save so much time. Unfortunately we're not quite there yet because the GUI programs we use haven't exposed all the views and actions. But hopefully soon!
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Copilot completions in vscode are pretty great, and i think a lot of people are happy with that. in general i agree with you, adding an AI chat window to an app that isn't an AI chat app is almost always a detriment. but i think it's shortsighted to assume there won't be other important use cases for AI, and we're in the experimentation phase right now where companies are trying to learn what that looks like. it's just unfortunate that there's so much incentive for apps to frame their AI chat as the best new thing ever and you should really use it, instead of introducing it more subtly.
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I assume that most of the resources usage only kicks on once you start querying the ai. That being said the intrusiveness and general lack of utility or consideration is certainly irritating. I recently saw code completion options in my chrome devtool console, and in postman sigh
Gemini in GCP for SQL queries is mildly useful, as I’m rusty and forget how to write but generally know enough not to run a query that mutates the db.
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"How do I get a list of every resource in a project" "How do I change the resource limits for CPU core count" Beyond that I've never used Gemini for any actual purpose.
The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda. Now we’re seeing this in action.
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> I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
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Clippy at least was funny, not creepy. And I 'member that you could program it from VBA somehow. Think via OLE, but I was a kid back in the Clippy era.
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> It’s the constant nagging about them. If the nagging didn't work would companies keep doing it? Someone's KPIs must be increasing for them to keep doing it.
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The nagging is a feature, not a bug - to the shareholders. If you can show X number of users have adopted $AI_FEATURE or a % growth, whether it's by brute force, nagging, or (maybe just making a good product?), then that sells the AI growth story, and number goes up. That's really all it is.
> Part of the model of products like Adobe's Creative Suite [1] is that they are always adding new features -- and if you want people to keep renewing their subscription you want them to know about new features so they feel like they are getting more out of their product. This is the fundamental problem and it has nothing to do with AI. Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones. You get lots of features but performance takes a second seat. And sadly, I feel it works. I feel most would balk at paying a monthly subscription if only performance related improvements were made
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Yeah the sad part is that much of the reason we have to have subscriptions is that there’s a very real ongoing cost just to avoid the platform owner breaking the software with OS changes (and of course Apple is 10x worse than any others, most Windows XP-era .exe files work perfectly fine on Windows 11 today). Why do we need OS changes though? Well practically we don’t. But the platform owners all want to move new hardware so they need to shovel features in, which we could just completely ignore, except that they’ll abandon you to the wolves for security patches, which is about the only “new” thing we do need, if you’re not on the latest couple releases. And as for hardware, eventually you need new hardware and drivers only get created for current and future OS releases. So the end result is we’re being led on a wild goose chase of trend-chasing shitty UI changes, adware, and performance-killing crap we don’t need, purely because we can’t run the old hardware forever, and even when we can keep the old hardware going, we can’t safely run old software for lack of patches.
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Operating systems and the software that comes with them are a fat target for security problems. There's "new hardware" in turns of new phones, laptops and the core components of desktops but also peripherals from things you plug into USB and things like watches and AirPods that you might want to use with your existing phone. Both Linux and Windows run on generic hardware so they need to handle whatever AMD, Intel, Dell, etc. throw at them -- look at how Ubuntu is always coming out with new releases and occasionally makes one that is LTS.
The debacle that was Google Wave into Google Plus is... really hard to really come to terms with. I don't even know that Hubris is enough to explain how badly managed that time period was by them. Just so bad.
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Google Plus launched between the time I interviewed at Google and the time I started work there, and that really took the shine off the whole thing.
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Google Wave... what an amazing piece of work just thrown in the trash. I never used any of its collaboration features, just looked at them. I did use it as a friendly-for-non-geeks version of IRC for a group of people that lived in three separate cities as a virtual watch party for LOST. And for that, it was spectacular even if it was painfully slow on a netbook (so was everything else, but it was cheap and light and worked).
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Wave was an interesting jumble of ideas that just didn’t bring a coherent answer for why anyone should use it. Google Plus was 100% hubris. “If we build our version of Facebook, it course everyone will flock to it.”
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I don't see Google Plus as hubris. I just think they saw a threat in Facebook and felt they had to try and build a competing product (and happened to have the time/money to invest). Doing nothing while a competitor gains steam would've been hubris.
Gemini in Chrome reminds me of the over the top actions that MS has made with Edge to the point I just stopped using Edge though I really liked it from relatively early on. They just jumped the shark and now Google is heading down that same path rapidly. I want to choose the extensions that go into my browser. I don't even use the browser's credential manager, and I've gotten to a point where I'm just not sure anything is actually getting better. I will say that the Gemini answers at the top of Google searches are hit or miss, and I do appreciate that they're there. That said, I'm a bit mixed as the actual search results beyond that seem to be getting worse overall. I don't know if it's my own bias, but when the Gemini answer is insufficient, it feels like the search results are just plain off from what I'm looking for.
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Sometimes they are helpful but what irks me is that you cannot opt out of them.
1. AI is generating a lot of buzz 2. AI could be the next technology revolution 3. If we get on the AI bandwagon now we're getting in on the ground floor 4. If we don't get on the AI bandwagon now we risk being left behind 5. Now that we've invested into AI we need to make sure we're seeing return on our investment 6. Our users don't seem to understand what AI could possibly do so we should remind them so that they use the feature 7. Our users aren't opting in to the features we're offering so we should opt them in automatically Like any other 'big, unproven bet' everyone is rushing in. See also: 'stories' making their way into everything (Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, etc.), vertical short-form videos (TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc). The difference here is that the companies put literally tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into it so, for many, if AI fails and the money is wasted it could be an existential threat for entire departments or companies. nvidia is such a huge percentage of the entire US economy that if the AI accelerator market collapses it's going to wipe out something like ten percent of GDP. So yeah, I get why companies are doing this; it's an actual 'slippery slope' that they fell into where they don't see any way out but to keep going and hope that it works out for them somehow, for some reason.
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Great breakdown. I'm starting to think I'd pay to disable AI in most products. Similar to how I read about a bar in the UK that has an intentional Faraday cage to encourage people to interact with people in the real world.
> All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. But if users really wanted agenda-free products and services, then those would win right? At least according to free market theory.
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One of the problems with that idea is that sometimes it will be far more profitable to refuse to give consumers what they want and because eventually making the most amount of money possible becomes the only thing that matters to a company, what users want gets ignored and users are forced to settle for whats available.
The worst one w/Google is how they've highjacked long-press on the power button on Android, and you can change what it does but your options are arbitrarily limited.
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I hate it how they're gonna change the power button to something else that's not power options. Just to push their annoying google assistant
Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing around AI. I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right. That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as beneficial as they are trying to push. It has some uses but I think most of those uses are not going to be in your face AI as we are pushing now and instead in the background.
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> what used to be just called ML FWIW, 10+ years ago I was arguing that your old pocket calculator is as much of an AI as anything ever could be. I only kinda stopped doing that because it's tiring to argue with silly buzzwords, not because anything has changed since. When "these things were called ML" ML was just a buzzword, same as AI and AGI are now. I'm kinda glad "ML" was relieved of that burden, because ultimately it means a very real thing (which is just "parametrizing your algorithm by non-hardcoded values"), and (unlike with basic autocorrect, which no end user even perceives as "AI" or "ML") when you use ChatGPT, you don't use "ML", you use a rigid algorithm not meaningfully different from what was running on your old pocket calculator, except a billion times bigger and no one actually knows what it does. So, yes, AI is just a stupid marketing buzzword right now, but so was ML, so was blockchain, so was NoSQL and many more. Ultimately this one is more annoying only because of scale, of how detrimental to society the actions of the culpable people (mostly OpenAI, Altman, Musk) were this time.
For a while I made an effort to specify LLM or generative AI vs AI as a whole, but I eventually became convinced that it was no longer valuable. Currently AI is whatever OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, NVidia, etc say it is, and that is mostly hype and marketing. Thus I have turned my language on its head, specifying "ML" or "recommendation system" or whatever specific pre-GPT technology I mean, and leave "AI" to the whims of the Sams and Darios of SV. I expect the bubble to pop in the next 3-6 months, if not before the end of 2025, taking with it any mention of "AI" in a serious or positive way.
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> 3-6 months Wow, you are an optimist. I do feel "it's close", but I wouldn't bet this close. But I wouldn't argue either, I don't know. Also, when it really pops, the consequences will be more disastrous than the bubble itself feels right now. It's literally hundreds of billions in circular investing. It's absurd.
To be clear, it's not LLMs creating the captions. Whisper[0], one of the best of its kind currently, is a speech recognition model, not a large language model. It's trained on audio , not text, and it can run on your mobile phone. It's still AI, of course. But there is distinction between it and an LLM. [0] https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/model-card.md
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Whisper is an encoder decoder transformer. The input is audio spectrograms, the output is text tokens. It is an improvement over old school transcription methods because it’s trained on audio transcripts, so it makes contextually plausible predictions. Idk what the definition of an LLM is but it’s indisputable that the technology behind whisper is a close cousin to text decoders like gpt. Imo the more important question is how these things are used in the UX. Decoders don’t have to be annoying, that is a product choice.
DuckDuckGo has a great tool for dealing with those ones: "Block this site from all results".
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That doesn't get me their content.
AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering (tomwphillips.co.uk)
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"Reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao, I was struck by how people associated with OpenAI believe in AGI. They really do think someone, perhaps them, will build AGI, and that it will lead to either the flourishing or destruction of humanity." "I think it's remarkable that what was until recently sci-fi fantasy has become a mainstream view in Silicon Valley." I think the use of the term "believe" is remarkable According to the "AI experts" there are "believers" and "skeptics" Science fiction is exactly that: fiction For decades, software developers cannot stop using the word "magic", "magically", etc. Silicon Valley is a place for believers A place where promoters like Steve Jobs can, according to one Apple employee, distort reality^1 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum Some people enjoy science fiction and fantasy. Others may not care for it. It's a matter of taste
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I get the skepticism about the dramedy of burning future AGI in effigy. But given humans are a dramady themselves, I don’t judge odd or hyperbolic behaviors too harshly from a distance. It’s too easy to dismiss others’ idiosyncrasies and miss the signal. And the story involves a successful and capable person communicating poetically about an area they have a track record in that probably the author of this article and most of us can’t compete with. I am struck by any technical person that still thinks AGI is any kind of barrier, or what they expect the business plan of a leader in moving AI power forward significantly, with a global list of competitors, is supposed to look like? AGI is talked about like a bright line, but it’s more a line of significance to us than any kind of technical barrier. This isn’t writing. Although that changed everything. This isn’t the printing press. Although that changed everything. This isn’t the telegraph. Although that changed everything. This isn’t the phonograph, radio communication, the Internet, web or mobile phones. Although those changed everything. This is intelligence. The meta technology of all technology. And intelligence is the part of the value chain that we currently earn a living at. The artificial kind is moving forward very fast, despite every delay seeming to impress people. “We haven’t achieved X yet” isn’t an argument at any time, but certainly not in the context today’s accelerated progress. It is moving forward faster than any single human, growing up from birth, ever has or ever will, if it helps to think of it that way. Nor is, “they haven’t replaced us yet” an argument. We were always going to be replaced. We didn’t repeal the laws of competition and adaptation “this time”. Our species was never going to maintain supremacy after we unleashed technology’s ability to accumulate capabilities faster than we or any biological machine could ever hope to evolve. It isn’t even a race is it? How fast is the human biological intelligence enhancements department going? Or the human intelligence breeding club? Not very fast I think. Very few AI die hards ever imagined we would be anywhere near this close to AGI today, in 2025, even five years ago, circa 2020. Once we have AGI, in a few years, we will pass it. Or, more accurately, it will pass us. Don’t spend much time imagining a stable world of parity. Other than as a historically nice trope for some fun science fiction where our continued supremacy made for good story. That’s not what compounding progress looks like. Chaotically compounding progress has been the story of life. And then tech. It isn’t going to suddenly stop for us. What an odd thought.
> As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment). Me too. But, I worry this “want” may not be realistic/scalable. Yesterday, I was trying to get some Bluetooth/BLE working on a Raspberry CM 4. I had dabbled with this 9 months ago. And things were making progress then just fine. Suddenly with a new trixie build and who knows what else has changed, I just could not get my little client to open the HCI socket. In about 10 minutes prompt dueling between GPT and Claude, I was able to learn all about rfkill and get to the bottom of things. I’ve worked with Linux for 20+ years, and somehow had missed learning about rfkill in the mix. I was happy and saddened. I would not have k own where to turn. SO doesn’t get near the traffic it used to and is so bifurcated and policed I don’t even try anymore. I never know whether to look for a mailing list, a forum, a discord, a channel, the newsgroups have all long died away. There is no solidly written chapter in a canonically accepted manual written by tech writers on all things Bluetooth for the Linux Kernel packaged with raspbian. And to pile on, my attention span driven by a constant diet of engagement, makes it harder to have the patience. It’s as if we’ve made technology so complex, that the only way forward is to double down and try harder with these LLMs and the associated AGI fantasy.
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I think LLMs as a replacement for Google, Stack Overflow, etc. is a no brainer. As long as you can get to the source documents when you need them, and train yourself to sniff out hallucinations. (We already do this constantly in categorizing human generated bullshit information and useful information constantly. So learning to do something similar with LLM output is not necessarily worse, just different.) What's silly at this point is replacing a human entirely with an LLM. LLMs are still fundamentally unsuited for those tasks, although they may be in the future with some significant break throughs.
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> It’s as if we’ve made technology so complex, that the only way forward is to double down and try harder with these LLMs and the associated AGI fantasy. This is the real AI risk we should be worried about IMO, at least short term. Information technology has made things vastly more complicated. AI will make it even more incomprehensible. Tax code, engineering, car design, whatever. It's already happening at my work. I work at big tech and we already have a vast array of overly complicated tools/technical debt no one wants to clean up. There's several initiatives to use AI to prompt an agent, which in turn will find the right tool to use and run the commands. It's not inconceivable that 10 or 20 years down the road no human will bother trying to understand what's actually going on. Our brains will become weaker and the logic will become vastly more complicated.
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Has anyone tried putting the AIs to work cleaning up the technical debt?
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Distros do have manuals, they just usually come in the form of user-curated wikis these days. ArchWiki is usually my first stop when I run into a Linux issue, even as a fellow Debian user. Both https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth and https://wiki.debian.org/BluetoothUser mention rfkill and show you how to troubleshoot.
They're not asking about telling the difference in collected data sets, data sets aren't weather. The question is can you tell the difference between the rain you see outside your window, and some representation of a simulated environment where the computer says "It's raining here in this simulated environment". The implied answer is of course, one is water falling from the sky and one is a machine.
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You experience everything through digital signals. I dont see why those same signals cant be simulated. You are only experiencing the signal your skin sends to tell you there is rain, you dont actually need skin to experience that signal.
> Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) = very_large_value I haven't heard of that being the argument. The main perspective I'm aware of is that more powerful AI models have a compounding multiplier on productivity, and this trend seems likely to continue at least in the near future considering how much better coding models are at boosting productivity now compared to last year.
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> I haven't heard of that being the argument. The main perspective I'm aware of is that more powerful AI models have a compounding multiplier on productivity, and this trend seems likely to continue at least in the near future considering how much better coding models are at boosting productivity now compared to last year. This is the new line now that LLMs are being commoditized, but in the post-Slate Star Codex AI/Tech Accelerationist era of like '20-'23 the Pascal's wager argument was very much a thing. In my experience it's kind of the "true believer" argument, whereas the ROI/productivity thing is the "I'm in it for the bag" argument.
The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.
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I'm an atheist too. I grew up in the church, rejected it in my teens. The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part -- the centralized, inflexible human authority. I'm increasingly convinced that spirituality is a vital part of the human experience and we should embrace it, not reject it. If you try to banish basic human impulses, they just resurface in worse, unexpected forms somewhere else. We all need ways to find deep connection with other humans and the universe around us. We need basic moral principles to operate on. I think most atheists like myself have quietly found this or are in the process of finding this, but it's ok to say it out loud. For me it means meditation, frugality, and strict guidelines on how I treat others. That's like a religion, I guess. But that's OK. I embrace it. By owning it and naming it, you have mastery over it.
the way the pro nuclear crowd talk you might think they are a persecuted religion actually
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Or over-the-top proponents of clean intermittent energy sources. Mountains of batteries and lakes of pumped storage for the Sun and Wind god.
AlphaEvolve demonstrates that Google can build a system which can be trained to do very challenging intelligent tasks (e.g. research-level math). Isn't it just an optimization problem from this point? E.g. now training take a lot of hardware and time. If they make it so efficient that training can happen in matter of minutes and cost only few dollars, won't it satisfy your criterion? I'm not saying AlphaEvolve is "AGI", but it looks odd to deny it's a step towards AGI.
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I think most people would agree that AlphaEvolve is not AGI, but any AGI system must be a bit like AlphaEvolve, in the sense that it must be able to iteratively interact with an external system towards some sort of goal stated both abstractly and using some metrics. I like to think that the fundamental difference between AlphaEvolve and your typical genetic / optimization algorithms is the ability to work with the context of its goal in an abstract manner instead of just the derivatives of the cost function against the inputs, thus being able to tackle problems with mind-boggling dimensionality.
It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be small and fast and energy efficient enough with our manufacturing capabilities today. A human brain has something like 80 or 90 billion of them and there are other types of cells that outnumber neurons by I think two orders of magnitude. The entire architecture is massively parallel and has a complex feedback network instead of the LLM’s rigid mostly forward processing. When I say massively parallel I don’t mean a billion tensor units. I mean a quintillion input superpositions. And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and several KW to run. Given this I am not certain we will get to AGI by simulating it in a GPU or TPU. We would need a new hardware paradigm.
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It's even worse than number of input/outputs, number of neurons, efficiency or directional feedback. The brain also has plasticity! The connections between neurons change dynamically - an extra level of meta.
"To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function". This is very wrong unless I'm mistaken. A synthetic neuron is multiple input single output.
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Ten thousands of extremely complex analog inputs, one output with several thousand of targets that MIGHT receive the output with different timing and quality. One neuron is ufathomably complex. It‘s offensive to biology to call a cell in a mathematical matrix neuron.
Why not? A lot of people say that, but no one, not a single person has ever pointed out a fundamental limitation that would prevent an LLM from going all the way. If LLMs have limits, we are yet to find them.
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We have already found limitations of the current LLM paradigm, even if we don't have a theorem saying transformers can never be AGI. Scaling laws show that performance keeps improving with more params, data + compute but only following a smooth power law with sharply diminishing returns. Each extra order of magnitude of compute buys a smaller gain than the last, and recent work suggests we're running into economic and physical constraints on continuing this trend indefinitely. OOD is still unsolved problem, they basically struggle under domain shifts and long tail cases or when you try systematically new combinations of concepts (especially on reasoning heavy tasks). This is now a well documented limitation of LLMs/multimodal LLMs. Work on COT faithfulness shows that the step by step reasoning they print doesn't match their actual internal computation, they frequently generate plausible but misleading explanations of their own answers (lookup anthropic paper). That means they lack self knowledge about how/why they got a result. I doubt you can get AGI without that. None of this proves that no LLM based architecture could ever reach AGI. But it directly contradicts the idea that we haven't found any limits. We've already found multiple major limitations of the current LLMs, and there's no evidence that blindly scaling this recipe is enough to cross from very capable assistant to AGI.
Assuming you want to define the goal, "AGI", as something functionally equivalent to part (or all) of the human brain, there are two broad approaches to implement that. 1) Try to build a neuron-level brain simulator - something that is a far distant possibility, not because of compute, but because we don't have a clear enough idea of how the brain is wired, how neurons work, and what level of fidelity is needed to capture all the aspects of neuron dynamics that are functionally relevant rather than just part of a wetware realization OR 2) Analyze what the brain is doing, to extent possible given our current incomplete knowledge, and/or reduce the definition of "AGI" to a functional level, then design a functional architecture/implementation, rather than neuron level one, to implement it The compute demands of these two approaches are massively different. It's like the difference between an electronic circuit simulator that works at gate level vs one that works at functional level. For time being we have no choice other than following the functional approach, since we just don't know enough to build an accurate brain simulator even if that was for some reason to be seen as the preferred approach. The power efficiency of a brain vs a gigawatt systolic array is certainly dramatic, and it would be great for the planet to close that gap, but it seems we first need to build a working "AGI" or artificial brain (however you want it define the goal) before we optimize it. Research and iteration requires a flexible platform like GPUs. Maybe when we figure it out we can use more of a dataflow brain-like approach to reduce power usage. OTOH, look at the difference between a single user MOE LLM, and one running in a datacenter simultaneously processing multiple inputs. In the single-user case we conceptualize the MOE as saving FLOPs/power by only having one "expert" active at a time, but in the multi-user case all experts are active all the time handling tokens from different users. The potential of a dataflow approach to save power may be similar, with all parts of the model active at the same time when handling a datacenter load, so a custom hardware realization may not be needed/relevant for power efficiency.
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Hard problem of consciousness seems way harder to wolve than the easy one which is a purely engineering problem. People have been thinking about why the brain thinks for a very long time and so far we have absolutely no idea.
Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you complain about water usage I think it risks discrediting the rest of your argument. (Aside from that I agree with most of this piece, the "AGI" thing is a huge distraction.) UPDATE an hour after posting this: I may be making an ass of myself here in that I've been arguing in this thread about comparisons between data center usage and agricultural usage of water, but that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or for many other industrial purposes. I still think the way these numbers are usually presented - as scary large "gallons of water" figures with no additional context to help people understand what that means - is an anti-pattern.
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[delayed]
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Water location matters. Is the data center in a desert with scarce potable water for locals? Or is next to a large Canadian lake, plenty of potable water, with people who want to trade something for currency so they can put avocados in their salad?
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One of the biggest problems in environmental education (imo) is the lack of notion regarding the footprint of products and services we consume daily; from the water and CO2 costs of a meal, of a heated pool, of a car, etc. It is eye-opening. I first came across this type of info with the book "How Bad Are Bananas", from Mike Berners-Lee. I really enjoyed it, and I just saw that the new edition even includes stuff like hosting a World Cup, data centers, and space tourism! It should give a good foundation to start talking about it.
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>Tip for AI skeptics Assumptions you are making: - AI = transformer ANNs - People sceptical of transformer ANNs directly leading to AGI within any reasonable period are also sceptical of transformer ANNs directly leading to AGI any time in the far future This kind of generalisations don't help you as the huge number of comments underneath yours likely shows
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I don't think anyone who read my comment here misunderstood my usage of the term "AI skeptic" as applying to any form of machine learning as opposed to modern generative AI.
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What you think it is and what it is are 2 different things. You are once more making assumptions.
Does it route the hot water back into a river? In europe several power plants get shut down each summer because the heated water from those plants would have significant impact on the local wildlife.
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> Does it route the hot water back into a river? That particular one routed the hot water to a set of fan-cooled radiators (rejecting most of the heat into the air).
Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!). I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from local supplies - about the same as the entire city's consumption. If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so severe. It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view. I really recommend the book.
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I'm conflicted. Zooming out, the problem isn't with AI specifically but economic development in general. Everything has a side effect. For decades we've been told we shouldn't develop urban centers because of how it development affects local communities, but really it just benefited another class of elites (anonymous foreign investors), and now housing prices are impoverishing younger generations and driving homelessness. Obviously that's not a perfect comparison to AI, which isn't as necessary, but I think the anti-growth argument isn't a good one. Democracies need to keep growing or authoritarian states will take over who don't care so much about human rights. (Or, authoritarian governments will take over democracies.) There needs to be a political movement that's both pro-growth and pro-humanity, that is capable of making hard or disruptive decisions that actually benefits the poor. Maybe that's a fantasy, but again, I think we should find ways to grow sustainably.
Imnot sure why you're saying it would be less? All sources I can find say that evaporative cooling is a tradeoff of more water for less power.
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Just from a physics standpoint. If you discharge water into a river, there are environmental limits to the outlet temperature (this is a good thing btw). The water can't be very hot. That means yoo you need to pump a large volume of water through because you can only put a small amount of energy into each kg of water. If you evaporate the water on the other hand, not only is there no temperature limit but it also absorbs the latent heat of vaporisation. The downside is it's a lot more complex and also the water is truly consumed rather than just warming it up.
I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty. I think much of this may be a reaction to the hype promoted by tech CEOs and media outlets. People are seeing through their lies and exaggerations, and taking positions like "AI/LLMs have no values or uses", then using every argument they hear as a reason why it is bad in a broad sense. For example: Energy and water concerns. That's my best guess about the concern you're braced against.
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> On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. Zero obligation to satisfy HN audience; tiny proportion of the populace. But for giggles... Technical merits: there are none. Look at Karpathy's GPT on Github. Just some boring old statistics. These technologies are built on top of mathematical principles in textbooks printed 70-80 years ago. The sharding and distribution of work across numerous machines is also a well trodden technical field. There is no net new discovery. This is 100% a political ploy on the part of tech CEOs who take advantage of the innumerate/non-technical political class that holds power. That class is bought into the idea that massive leverage over resource markets is a win for them, and they won't be alive to pay the price of the environmental destruction. It's not "energy and water" concerns, it's survival of the species concerns obfuscated by socio-political obligations to keep calm carry on and debate endlessly, as vain circumlocution is the hallmark of the elders whose education was modeled on people being VHS cassettes of spoken tradition, industrial and political roles. IMO there is little technical merit to most software . Maps, communication. That's all that's really needed. ZIRP era insanity juiced the field and created a bunch of self-aggrandizing coder bros whose technical achievements are copy-paste old ideas into new syntax and semantics, to obfuscate their origins, to get funded, sell books, book speaking engagements. There is no removing any of this from politics as political machinations gave rise to the dumbest era of human engineering effort ever. The only AI that has merit is robotics. Taking manual labor of people that are otherwise exploited by bougie first worlders in their office jobs. People who have, again with the help of politicians, externalized their biologies real needs on the bodies of poorer illiterates they don't have to see as the first-world successfully subjugated them and moved operations out of our own backyard. Source: was in the room 30 years ago, providing feedback to leadership how to wind down local manufacturing and move it all over to China. Powerful political forces did not like the idea of Americans having the skills and knowledge to build computers. It ran afoul of their goals to subjugate and manipulate through financial engineering. Americans have been intentionally screwed out of learning hands on skills with which they would have political leverage over the status quo. There is no removing politics from this. The situation we are in now was 100% crafted by politics.
Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous. It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place. People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the tech" are, generously, either naive or shilling. Why would we only revisit these very important topics, which are the heart of how the tech would alter our society, after it's been fully embraced?
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The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the office. Why is this as special domain?
> I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics" The comment you're replying to is calling other people AI skeptics. Your advice has some fine parts to it (and simonw's comment is innocuous in its use of the term), but if we're really going meta, you seem to be engaging in the tribal conflict you're decrying by lecturing an imaginary person rather than the actual context of what you're responding to.
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To me, "Tip for AI skeptics" reads as shorthand for "Tip for those of you who classify as AI skeptics". That is why the meta commentary about identity politics made complete sense to me. It's simply observing that this discussion (like so many others) tends to go this way, and suggests a better alternative - without a straw man.
Well, I share your pain .. but was it ever really better in reality? Unfortunately it is not like human society in history had truth as the highest virtue.
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Human societies? No. Subcultures? Some are at least trying to (i.e. rationalists), though imperfectly and with side-effects.
It seems like there is a very strong correlation between identity politics and "AI skepticism." I have no idea why. I don't think that the correlation is 1, but it seems weirdly high.
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The adoption and use of technology frequently (even typically) has a political axis, it's kind of just this weird world of consumer tech/personal computers that's nominally "apolitical" because it's instead aligned to the axis of taste/self-identity so it'll generate more economic activity.
Once again, you are ignoring my (implied) argument: Humans NEED food, the output of agriculture. Humans do not NEED any of LLMs' outputs. Once everyone is fed, then we can talk about water usage for LLMs.
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Stop eating beef. With the water saved we can grow enough food for any realistic human population. Ok we solved this one. Or do humans NEED burgers as well? We can already feed all people, any starvation is strictly a political problem not a food existing on the planet problem
> sound scary when presented without context It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic, stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage at this point and creating the demand for all these datacenters. If it was just for us devs and researchers, you wouldn't need this many.
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Its not gigantic and its not a waste. Brainrot creates massive economic value that can be used to pay people for products you are more happy to consume.
You appear to be arguing against using technology to boost human efficiency on a forum full of software engineers who've dedicated their careers to building software that makes humans more efficient. If we aren't doing that then why are we building software?
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Does the future productivity growth that would have been gained later (due to more junior engineers not entering the field) outweigh the AI gains? If it's just the little productivity boost now, I think it's a net negative if hiring trends continue. I think it's a discussion to be had but talent pool is a tragedy of the commons situation.
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Because the stated goal of generative AI is not to make an individual more efficient, it's to replace that individual all together and completely eliminate the bottom rungs of the professional career ladder. Historically software that made humans more efficient resulted in empowerment for the individual, and also created a need for new skilled roles. Efficiency gains were reinvested into the labor market. More people could enter into higher paying work. With generative AI, if these companies achieve their stated goals, what happens to the wealth generated by the efficiency? If we automate agriculture and manufacturing, the gain is distributed as post-scarciaty wealth to everyone. If we automate the last few remaining white-collar jobs that pay a living wage, the gain is captured entirely by the capital owners & investors via elimination of payroll, while society only loses one of its last high-paying ladders for upward mobility. Nobody lost their career because we built a faster operating system or a better compiler. With generative AI's stated goals, any efficiency gains are exclusively for those at the very top, while everyone else gets screwed. Now, I'll concede and say, that's not the AI companies' fault. I'm not saying we shouldn't magically stop developing this technology, but we absolutely need our governments to start thinking about the ramifications it can have and start seriously considering things like UBI to be prepared for when the bottom falls out of the labor market.
Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.
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They are making an anti-disruption argument. I think it's bad though to be against growth, for reasons I've described in another comment.
Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone. This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity. What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?
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Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use. Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production, either. Your example would be even more extreme if you chose crops like the corn used to feed cattle. Feeding cows alone requires 21.2 trillion gallons per year in the US. The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have already been comparing the utility of different types of agriculture for years. Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can be made shelf-stable.
I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop. For every vegan/vegetarian in the US there are probably 25 people that feed beef products to their pets on a daily basis.
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While I agree, the "meat is not sustainable" argument is literal, and evidenced in beef prices rising as beef consumption lowers over the past years. Beef is moving along the spectrum from having had been a "staple" to increasingly being a luxury. The US never gave up eating lobster either, but many here have never had lobster and almost nobody has lobster even once a week. It's a luxury which used to be a staple.
Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components (tomshardware.com)
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This video shows the systems being built and shipped with cooling, cabling, etc. It’s pretty mind blowing what this crisis shows from the manipulation of atoms and electrons all the way up to these clusters. Particularly mind blowing for me who has cable management issues with a ten port router. https://youtu.be/1la6fMl7xNA?si=eWTVHeGThNgFKMVG
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what's mind blowing about the video you shared was the amount of coper cable used. I thought with fiber we wouldn't need coper cables maybe just for electricity distribution but clearly I was wrong. thanks for sharing
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I always wondered why a bunch of different companies make identical graphics cards then complain that it's a horrible business and Nvidia is screwing them. I wondered even more strongly when I saw a dozen flavors of the NVL72 rack. If the rack is so complex and difficult to manufacture, why have N companies do redundant work?
Maybe in 2019, but I find it hard to believe nvidia looks at google’s TPU business model enviously these days.
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Are TPU’s a bad business model?
They're invested in nuclear power. Pairing datacenters with small modular reactors is at least on the minds of all the AI companies.
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One day they will build AI out of radioactive source material directly and skip the reactor. Maybe.
More vertical integration
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Like IBM?
In a sense, they already do, since they're heavily invested in CoreWeave. For those unfamiliar, CoreWeave was a crypto company that pivoted to building out data centers.
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GPU "neoclouds" are a different topic than whose logo is on the server.
Winamp for OS/X (github.com/mgreenwood1001)
Why does the title call it OS/X? It's macOS and it's described that way on the repo. Unfortunately his is just a recreation rather than an actual port, since the license for the source that was released prevents derivative works. Foobar2000 is the spiritual successor to Winamp and it runs on Windows and macOS as well as mobile.
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The "About" section on that page says "Winamp clone in swift for OS/X" but their description says "Winamp macOS [...] A native macOS application..." Not sure I understand what OS/X is--I thought it said OS/2 for a second.
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Oh, I originally missed it on the side I only looked in the README. I don't think it was ever called OS/X? It's been called OS X and Mac OS X but never OS/X.
Every single time something like this comes up I feel compelled to mention Audacious. See my previous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32779590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39965620 Like most days, I am using it right now on macOS.
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Supports old Winamp skins too, which is the whole point!
I started using https://github.com/kushalpandya/Petrichor a while ago. Though design is more akin to the default Apple Music app than WinAmp.
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I've wanted a music player like the early versions of iTunes for a while, and this looks like it might fit the bill. Those who've only known Music.app and later iTunes versions might be surprised to learn that there was a time when iTunes actually had a clean, intuitive UI: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/itunes-app
Entrepreneurs don't have a special gene for risk, they come from families with m (qz.com)
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things they didn't teach me at business school
I'm curious about this take and what you think of https://www.metroparent.com/parenting/tweens-teens/how-to-become-a-potted-plant-parent-for-your-teen/ While it may be true that entrepreneurship means being overly absent in your child's life I think MOST parents are TOO present in their child's life.
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What I meant was not so much a statement about a parent's influence on a child's entrepreneurial ambitions, but more so that the author's dismissal of a person's inherent qualities would seem laughable to someone that has experience interacting with young children. I have no way of knowing or proving what is or isn't "genetic". However, there are absolutely proto-entrepreneurial traits, a sort of hustler mentality that is blindingly obvious to see that some kids seem just "have it" and others don't. I would argue that this disposition is identifiable as early as two years old. Does that come from money? I would need much more evidence than the referenced study to believe that. I think my major gripe comes from the way the article attempts to base this conclusion on the NBER paper. The paper measures material outcomes and rightfully correlates them with the financial opportunities of the participants. This says nothing about the personality traits that make someone an entrepreneur.
> I wonder if the term "moneyed" means something different to you than the author. I think the author was using the term to mean people who have enough resources available to them (through family or other support networks) that they don't have to worry too much about survival and have relatively easy access to capital. I think that you and I define it similarly. But most entrepreneurs I've known over the decades have had neither of those advantages. Although, I'm thinking of "entrepreneur" in its basic sense, not in terms of just starting tech businesses, and not in terms of people starting business with the goal of becoming anything like unicorns. > My personal bias would lead me to believe that most people have less of a support system then the wonderful people on HN. I agree completely. The HN crowd is, generally speaking (there are exceptions), a fairly privileged bunch.
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I think you’re taking up semantics at a certain point. Entrepreneurs in our current environment has a much more narrow meaning than auto mechanic who takes over an existing business or starts his own shop after working at another for a decade and building up a client base.
Show HN: European Tech News in 6 Languages (europedigital.cloud)
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You can select by source and audience, but not by topic. I found that a bit strange, topic would be the first thing we filter by. Why don't you dress up the summarization prompt with a task to generate tags?
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Good point. You can currently search for topics (search bar), but I see what you mean, dedicated topic filters/tags would be even more intuitive than having to type. Interesting idea about using AI to auto-tag articles with topics. What specific topics would be most useful for you? (Thinking: AI/ML, Funding, Privacy/GDPR, Regulation, Open Source, etc.) Topic filtering could work well alongside the current audience/source filters. Will add this to the roadmap for sure, thnks! :)
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Really like this. Eager for the RSS to be launched so it can be in my daily news routine.
RSS feed is on the roadmap. Planning to implement: - Per-language RSS feeds (/en/news/feed.xml etc.) - Manually curated (articles are already human-selected from sources) Newsletter is an interesting idea too. Im thinking about a weekly curated roundup per segment. What would your preference be? Thank you for your feedback, well appreciated.
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I'd prefer one digest of essential highlights of the week across all segments. I like to be interested in "other segments". But if they are in a separate subscription/email - I will never prioritize to open it. Thank you!
Why does this have ads and tracking?
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Valid question. Let me clarify: NO ADS: Zero advertising. No ad network scripts. TRACKING: Only privacy-respecting essentials: . Sliplane (European hosting) server logs . No Google Analytics, no third-party trackers What made you think there's tracking? I want to fix any privacy concerns immediately. This is a European digital sovereignty project & privacy is the whole point. Can you share what triggered the concern? (Specific script/banner you saw?) Thanks for your help.
It's yet more LLM shovelware from yet another account with only self-promotion activity. Why wouldn't it?
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I understand the skepticism, but let me address this: "LLM shovelware": The articles are curated from around 30 European news sources (TechCrunch Europe, Sifted, The Verge, etc.). AI is only used for: 1. Translation (EN→NL/DE/FR/ES/IT) 2. Pattern-based image generation The curation, source selection, and quality filters are all manual. "Self-promotion": Fair point on the account activity. I created this account specifically to share this project with HN because the community values European tech sovereignty and privacy. Happy to answer specific questions about the implementation. The goal is NOT traffic farming, it's building a multilingual resource for European digital policy/startups. What would make this more valuable to you? :)
Things that I liked: * The article selection (which is probably the most important part) Things that I did not liked: * AI Images. While they are well made and not as cringe as others, I prefer to get stock images even if they are repeated. * Lack of RSS (or at least I couldn't find it). This is a deal breaker for me Nice busy!
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Thanks for the feedback. Really appreciate that the article selection resonates as that's the core value prop. RSS: You're the second to mention this already, makes it even more priority. AI Images: Noted. The pattern was to avoid generic stock "businessman shaking hands" photos, but clearly it's not working for everyone. Options i consider now are: 1. Hide images in RSS/reader mode 2. Stock images as fallback 3. User preference toggle Would a "reader mode" without images help?
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