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Enrich sign-ups for your SaaS for FREE (trialhook.com)
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What a great tool! Now that Clearbit Slack connector is dead, this is the best alternative!
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Please don't use a second account like this to create a pretend conversation. I hope this account isn't also responsible for the upvote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354226
Keep your Meyers-Briggs to yourself and your friends (loxation.com)
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Online personality tests are not Meyers-Briggs. The real ones are several hundred questions, some of which repeat themselves in different wording and costs money so using their name is probably not a great idea. Here [1] is the real site for Meyers-Briggs. [1] - https://www.themyersbriggs.com/en-US/Support/FAQs
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You're rather overdoing the self-promotion. Share something with us you're curious about (that doesn't benefit you) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Bubble Sorted Amen Break (parametricavocado.itch.io)
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I need WebGL to play audio on HTML pages now?
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This is bonkers and I love it.
My personal prize for the most chopped amen goes to Breakage’s Final mix of Equinox’s Acid Rain VIP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoKlz6_I4vY
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Wow I've heard pieces of this but never the full thing, incredible
Why wouldn't it work that way? Whether it's a hardware toggle like on iPhone or a software one like in Android, I want silent to mean silent . Not "silent but if a web page decides to play sound it can".
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The phone will still make sound if I launch a music app, why is a web page different? And I hate web pages making sound! But the UX is confusing, and it’s changed over the years, seemingly without reason. Iphones now have a software toggle as well, which may have coincided with the shift from “mute ringer” to “mute (almost) everything” that came with the multifunction button.
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There is some amount of the "Focus follows brain" problem here. What we want is for things to do what we meant, all the time, and in this case it's very possible that the visitor wanted to hear the music. It is not practical (without yet to invented technology) for that to work so we have a substitute - there's a switch and you should remember to press it. "Focus follows brain" is how everybody wants windowed UIs to work. When I type on the keyboard the letters go where my brain thought they should go - duh, but of course that's unimplementable, so the Windows UI provides "Click to focus" - if I click on a Window the typing goes there until I click another window, meanwhile some Unix systems do "Focus follows Mouse" - if I move the mouse over a Window then my typing goes there even without clicking. Neither is what we actually wanted, both are trying to approximate.
Cool, but I don't see how it's sorting anything. It just seems to play a randomized arrangement of the slices. You can re-randomize as much as you like but there's no sort option as far as I can see.
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The idea is that it slices the Amen Break into however many slices you specify, and the list being sorted is the indices for those slices. At each step, it plays the slice the pivot is being compared to. Because it only plays the samples being compared, it never plays the sorted chunks, so it's missing a "punchline" of sorts.
It randomizes slices of the sample and begins to play the slices in the random order. Meanwhile it begins the bubble sort algorithm at a pace that matches the tempo, sorting the slices into their chronological order. Throughout, it only plays the unsorted slices. (I was kinda hoping it would play the sorted sample at the end.)
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I actually wanted it to play them as it went, so that it would be <unsorted><sorted> each time through, with the former shrinking and the latter growing.
Did you play it to the end? It's absolutely sorting from smallest to largest. Unless you have a confused understanding of a bubble sort, it's doing a bubble sort
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So it's sorting from earliest to latest, really?
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The value that is being sorted isn't obvious to me. It's obvious that it is sorting it. I'm guessing maybe some dB level of each of the hits/notes. If that was the case, I'd expect the initial unsorted view to line up with the pattern of the waveforms which is not the case. Maybe it's just an unsorted list of values sorted in sync to the rhythm. It's weird though that the segment corresponds to a segment of the audio. I just don't see how they are linked.
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It's sorting by index of the slice. Pressing "shuffle" jumbles the slices up. So it puts the slices of the break back in the correct order. You never hear the result. Set it to 8 slices and it becomes easy to see what it's doing: look at the waveform and the now-playing highlight jumping around.
Apple's MacBook Neo makes repairs easier and cheaper than other MacBooks (arstechnica.com)
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Apple's marketing team is on fire with this one. How could you miss the Neo news? You can do computing! You can even charge it! This article is so obviously bought and paid for by Apple, maybe through reputation management companies or whatever. Has anyone actually needed to repair their 1 day old computer? You can change the battery 'relatively easily after you get some shielding and flex cables out of the way.' Gosh I wish I knew how to get Apple to do marketing for my company. If anyone knows what 3rd parties they use for plausible deniability for astroturfing and upvoting, please let me know. No one beats them in the world.
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Wow. Beautiful engineering. Please, please Apple use this ethos for all future major laptop re-designs e.g. MBA & MBP.
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I'm not sure if it's possible, but an aftermarket battery with closer to the MB Airs KW/h specs would be a very interesting modification. The repairability seems to be interesting especially if it leads to framework style upgradability (logic boards, not the ports).
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Just 20 steps and 18 screws to replace a battery, easy!
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But no adhesive under the battery. That’s huge.
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Only if you are in Apple's Walled Prison. (Or I guess iOS dev)
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This is probably going to be my new laptop next year if it gets the A19 Pro with 12 GB of RAM.
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I'd bet these things are going to be on a two-year upgrade cycle, instead of yearly. Will be super happy to be proven wrong.
I just want to link this teardown; it is a suitable companion to this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k7Lv7f-5CQ On a rational level it isn't surprising that the "compute" part is so small, given its origins, but for some reason it still caught me by surprised seeing something barely larger than a Raspberry Pi. But, yeah, this thing is crazy modular. I particularly want to call out how trivial it is to replace the ports, given how common of a failure point they are. With the keyboard/monitor being more involved, but absolutely still approachable. I believe he finds just a single piece of light adhesive keeping a cable in place, everything else (inc. the battery) is screws only.
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It looks like it's still bigger than the logic board on the 12" MacBook from 2015.[1] I really wish Apple would resurrect that form factor, as every other MacBook since has seemed bulky in comparison. Thanks to OpenCore Legacy Patcher[2], I still haven't gotten a newer mac. With a modern M series chip, it wouldn't have such rough tradeoffs in battery life and performance. I'd definitely buy it. 1. See step 11 on https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2015+Teardown/39841#s89806 2. https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
They’ve gotten largely more repairable since then, including adhesives you can electrically debond.
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...electrically debond, are you serious? More details please, this sound very interesting.
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That's a relatively recent development. Repairability has been very poor for quite a while, but now they're finally starting to improve the situation somewhat.
Show HN: LogClaw – Open-source AI SRE that auto-creates tickets from logs (logclaw.ai)
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How effective are LLMs at triaging issues? Has anyone found success using them to find the root cause? I've only been able to triage effectively for toy examples.
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Wild Moose just made a blog post[0] about this. They found that putting things into foundation models wasn't cutting it, that you had to have small finely-tuned models along with deterministic processes to use AI for RCA. [0] https://www.wildmoose.ai/post/micro-agents-ai-powered-investigation-at-scale
I'm a little confused. An agent's value-add is to automate what a human actor (in this case, an SRE) does and thus reduces the time taken to recovery, etc. A human SRE never manually detects an error - we already have well-established anomaly detection implementations and wiring them to some ticket generation tool is also an established pattern. My confusion is, what value the "agent" is bringing here. Nothing wrong in competing with the Datadogs of the world.
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>A human SRE never manually detects an error - we already have well-established anomaly detection implementations and wiring them to some ticket generation tool is also an established pattern. I'm currently dealing with fallout at job because we were doing all this with humans with no alerts and we missed a couple major issues. This product could have prevented a lot of stress in my case, but it'd be a bit like a bandage on a missing limb.
Logs are pretty dry sometimes. INFO gives you a ton but it's low SNR. WARN/ERROR may tell you that something could happen or is happening, but it doesn't tell you the ramifications of that may be. It could be nothing! Now imagine you're getting hundreds, thousands, millions of messages like this an hour? How do you determine what's really important? For instance, if a kubernetes pod on a single node runs out of space, that could be a problem if your app is only running in that node. But what if your app is spread against 30x nodes? It's a triage system with context, at least it sounds like it. It's helping you classify based on actual current or potential problems with the app in the ways that a plain log message does not.
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Deciphering ramifications from a log message alone is a pretty unusual way to approach a problem. You still have your 1990s Nagios-style application monitoring, right? So when you wake up to a message that the web monitor says it's not possible to add items to the shopping basket right now, the database monitor signals an unusually long response time, the application metrics tells you number of buys is at a fraction of what is normal for this time of day, then that WARN log message from the application telling you about a foreign index constraint is violated is pretty informative!
Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once (github.com/understudy-ai)
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One more tool targeting OSX only. That platform is overserved with desktop agents already while others are underserved, especially Linux.
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That's mostly because Mac OS users make tools that solve their problems and Linux users go online to complain that no one has solved their problem but that if they did they'd want it to be free.
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Fair point that Linux is underserved. My own view is that the bigger long-term opportunity is actually Windows, simply because more desktop software and more professional workflows still live there. macOS-first here is mostly an implementation / iteration choice, not the thesis.
The demonstration-based approach is interesting for the handoff problem. The hardest part of agentic automation isnt the first run -- its making the agent robust to the cases the demonstrator never showed it. How do you handle edge cases or failures mid-task? Does it fall back to asking the user, or does it have some recovery heuristic? Asking because we found that the failure mode surface matters more than happy-path coverage when you actually deploy these in production.
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That’s exactly the hard part, and I agree it matters more than the happy path. A few concrete things we do today: 1. It’s fully agentic rather than a fixed replay script. The model is prompted to treat GUI as one route among several, to prefer simpler / more reliable routes when available, and to switch routes or replan after repeated failures instead of brute-forcing the same path. In practice, we’ve also seen cases where, after GUI interaction becomes unreliable, the agent pivots to macOS-native scripting / AppleScript-style operations. I wouldn’t overclaim that path though: it works much better on native macOS surfaces than on arbitrary third-party apps. 2. GUI grounding has an explicit validation-and-retry path. Each action is grounded from a fresh screenshot, not stored coordinates. In the higher-risk path, the runtime does prediction, optional refinement, a simulated action overlay, and then validation; if validation rejects the candidate, that rejection feeds the next retry round. And if the target still can’t be grounded confidently, the runtime returns a structured `not_found` rather than pretending success. 3. The taught artifact has some built-in generalization. What gets published is not a coordinate recording but a three-layer abstraction: intent-level procedure, route options, and GUI replay hints as a last resort. The execution policy is adaptive by default, so the demonstration is evidence for the task, not the only valid tool sequence. In practice, when things go wrong today, the system often gets much slower: it re-grounds, retries, and sometimes replans quite aggressively, and we definitely can’t guarantee that it will always recover to the correct end state. That’s also exactly the motivation for Layer 3 in the design: when the system does find a route / grounding pattern / recovery path that works, we want to remember that and reuse it later instead of rediscovering it from scratch every time.
U.S. to suspend the Jones Act in a bid to curb oil prices (bloomberg.com)
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This is literally the meme of "worst guy you know made a great point" playing out in real time.
That's the goal. The Jones Act guarantees a lot of American jobs and those workers are expensive. This allows US port-to-port shipping at much lower prices. Good for the bottom line, bad for the worker.
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Jones act also guarantee lack of competition between shipyards. When companies MUST buy from you, there is no pressure to improve and you can set prices as you like. Now US shipbuilding has been shielded from competition for so long, that any kind of permanent repeal of Jones act will mean instant bankruptcy of US ship builders. Similar to what happened in Eastern Europe after 1989. That shock of not being shielded by iron curtain from competition has caused implosion of whole industries.
> Good for the bottom line, bad for the worker Bad for most workers. Good for a cabal. The Jones Act directly lead to the failure of American shipbuilding.
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Say what? Jones Act didn't kill American Shipbuilding, cost of American worker did. However, whole reason for Jones Act is attempt to protect the American Merchant Marine. If you can't move things via water in wartime, you don't have an empire.
Show HN: OneCLI – Vault for AI Agents in Rust (github.com/onecli)
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wuweiaxin's short-lived-tokens-per-task is the right model, but it hits a ceiling: AWS IAM makes it native; most SaaS APIs don't. GitHub hands you a bearer token, Stripe too, Notion too. The proxy fills that gap. You get per-request scope enforcement without depending on the upstream service supporting fine-grained auth. That's the actual answer to paxys's question -- it's not about preventing the agent from making the same calls, it's about enforcing which calls it's allowed to make when the credential issuer won't.
You don't want to give the agent a raw key, so you give it a dummy one which will automatically be converted into the real key in the proxy. So how does that help exactly? The agent can still do exactly what it could have done if it had the real key.
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For one thing, it cannot leak secrets between services.
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Is that really a problem? All the examples on the repo page themselves show LLMs running unintended operations and messing up your data. And that is very much still going to happen with this wrapper. If anything it is going to provide a false sense of security.
It seems that the architecture you describe still gives the key to the agent (who could email it to red team or perform nefarious actions with it). The advantage of OP's architecture is that the agent never sees the key and you could inspect the request before proxying it. Is that right or do I misunderstand something?
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Sort of. The point of Vault is you're supposed to actually use RBAC and least privilege and store NPE credentials that are properly scoped to the actions you're comfortable automating, which your NPE then gets a certificate to fetch on demand, rather than just giving it your own personal root credentials that can do anything. We're going to see this reinvented thousands of times in the next few months by people whose understanding of security is far poorer than HashiCorp's, via implementations that are nowhere near as well-tested, if tested at all.
This is the right approach. I built a similar system to https://github.com/airutorg/airut - couple of learnings to share: 1) Not all systems respect HTTP_PROXY. Node in particular is very uncooperative in this regard. 2) AWS access keys can’t be handled by simple credential swap; the requests need to be resigned with the real keys. Replicating the SigV4 and SigV4A exactly was bit of a pain. 3) To be secure, this system needs to run outside of the execution sandbox so that the agent can’t just read the keys from the proxy process. For Airut I settled on a transparent (mitm)proxy, running in a separate container, and injecting proxy cert to the cert store in the container where the agent runs. This solved 1 and 3.
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Node 24+ does respect HTTP_PROXY when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set.
Reversing memory loss via gut-brain communication (med.stanford.edu)
Everyone's "pooing" on the article because the title doesn't mention mice, but, FWIW, stories of gut biota affecting humans behavior have been documented for a while. Memory gain is noteworthy, which is their point, but everyone's just knee-jerk smirking so ... here's a few random articles to gross you out about the ... gross ... world of trading microbiota and, for better or worse, changing your personality.[1][2] [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-behavioral-microbiome/202404/hacking-an-individuals-personality-through-their-gut-contents [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-28/faecal-microbiota-transplant-credited-with-curing-bipolar/105541522
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This seems to be a recent anti-science meme to dismiss studies that use mouse models. I'm sure there is an interesting line of discussion about the strengths and limits of those models, but that's probably a complex, nuanced thread to pull, not something you blow off with a hand-waving internet comment.
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To some degree the other posts are just pointing out the misleading "assumed protagonist" of the title (which doesn't mention mice) but I was surprised to see that the majority of posts boiled down to "eek! mice!"
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I would recommend the site https://gutbrainaxistherapeutics.com for learning more about Microbiota Transplant Therapy (MTT) and its opportunities, especially for Autism and Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome.
Claude now creates interactive charts, diagrams and visualizations (claude.com)
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When I ask chatgpt to create a mermaid diagram for me it regularly will add new lines to certain labels that will break the parse. If you then feed the parse error back to it the second version is always correct And it seems to exactly know the problem. There are some other examples where it will almost always get it wrong the first time but right if nudged to correct itself. I wonder what the underlying cause is
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> I wonder what the underlying cause is It responds with the statistically most probable text based on its training data, which happens to be different with the errors vs without. I suspect high-fidelity diagramming requires a different attention architecture from the common ones used in sentence-optimized models.
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Today I asked Claude to create me a squidward looking out the window meme and it started generating HTML & CSS to draw squidward in a style best described as "4 year old preschooler". Not quite it yet.
I feel like this is a feature which improves the perceived confidence of the LLM but doesn't do much for correctness of other outputs, i.e. an exacerbation of the "confidently incorrect" criticism.
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It's a mismatch with our intuition about how much effort things take. If there's humans involved, "I took this data and made a really fancy interactive chart" means that you put a lot more work into it, and you can probably somewhat assume that this means some more effort was also put into the accuracy of the data. But with the LLM it's not really very much more work to get the fancy chart. So the thing that was a signifier of effort is now misleading us into trusting data that got no extra effort. (Humans have been exploiting this tendency to trust fancy graphics forever, of course.)
They also pay... insane salaries, like double industry average. That coupled with an IPO on the horizon means they probably have their pick of engineers.
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Their interviews are actually very much focused on how fast you can code something that works.
> If you signed up with your Apple on the iOS Claude app, to access your account on the computer, you have to open the passwords app and copy your random email address and paste it into the Claude website login. Isn't this basically Apple's fault? When you signed up, Apple provided a fake email address in leu of your real one. This is great for privacy but means the service has the wrong email. I'm sure they didn't want to provide an Apple sign in option at all, but it's required by App Store rules.
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Not really. It's the user's fault. Apple provides an option to hide your email, it's not required. It's an option that shows up when you're prompted to create an account.
The Met Releases High-Def 3D Scans of 140 Famous Art Objects (openculture.com)
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Here's a little script to download all the publicly available scans (135) as GLBs and stick the metadata in a JSON. The scans are all CC0 (public domain) https://github.com/InconsolableCellist/met_scans
The original article is https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2026/03/metropolitan-museum-of-art-3d-models-art-history/ Not sure why that is not linked, instead we have an AI generated SEO spam page.
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For what it's worth I thought the modal dialog on the original was worse than the pop-over ad on the copy.
> Open Access data and public domain images are available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use without permission or fee. > > To request images under copyright and other restrictions, … If these are available as public domain with unrestricted use without fee, what is the use case for requesting a version under copyright with restrictions?
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No idea. But I've integrated their API to a commercial project ( https://bookmarker.cc ) without any issues. Users are exploring The Met Collection and save images to their library directly in the app. > Through The Met Collection API, users can connect to a live feed of all Creative Commons Zero (CC0) data and 406,000 images from the The Met collection, all available for use without copyright or restriction. The Met Collection API is another foundational step in our Open Access program, helping make the Museum's collection one of the most accessible, discoverable, and useful on the internet. The Met Collection API is where all makers, creators, researchers, and dreamers can now connect to the most up-to-date data and images of artworks in The Met collection, representing five thousand years of human history. source: https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/met-collection-api-2
Lf-lean: The frontier of verified software engineering (theorem.dev)
Is this impressive? They just ported a bunch of theorems/proofs already written in Rocq into Lean. Also Logical Foundations is just a Rocq tutorial with the basics. An absolutely amazing tutorial and probably the best resource out there. But I'm not surprised AI can do that.
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I believe what they are bragging about is not the translated proofs, but the process of doing the translation. > produced by frontier AI with ~2 person-days of human effort versus an estimated ~2.75 person-years manually (a 350x speed-up). We achieve this through task-level specification generators...
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Impressive if for no other reason than there are various disparate formally verified projects (seL4, compcert, certikos) that could potentially be unified under a single proof system. Additionally it may be possible to quickly extend existing proofs (e.g. seL4's proofs) to other architectures.
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Not saying this is useless. But that article reads like they made some kind of breakthrough in automatic software verification. But is sounds like they rather ported a tutorial test suite from Go to Rust with AI and the tests are still passing.
AI should not replace people at Atlassian, says CEO (heise.de)
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What do people use Atlassian for these days? Back in the day we used Jira a lot. But we also had GitHub accounts. The integration of the two wasn't great so we switched to GitHub issues and kicked Jira to the curb. This saved money and also a lot of hassle in trying to keep the two in sync. I am wondering if many others went a similar route. We did use Confluence and I do miss it. I would love to find an opensource replacement for it that stores files in markdown format. Like Obsidian, but for teams.
steering wheel manufacturer lays off thousands in anticipation of self-driving cars
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In this case, it is a little more than anticipation. Software dev job losses have already happened and continue to happen.
I've become convinced that "investing in AI" is just the magic incantation CEOs are using to spin layoffs as a positive rather than a negative for the company's reputation among investors
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They shove off people forced on them so they could grow faster, but the problem is, they don't have the ideas....
Pretty sure by putting "me too" in quotes and not saying #MeToo, what they're talking about is really FOMO. The companies are performing layoffs because of the trend
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Oh, probably
Colon cancer now leading cause of cancer deaths under 50 in US (theguardian.com)
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Here take your pick: Antibiotics, Potassium bromate, aspartame, Red 40, rBGH/rBST, Chlorpyrifos, Atrazine and many more
There's a bazillion ways to discuss a topic that don't involve giving advice with unearned confidence. Even just saying "My experience is that doing X helped" instead of "You should do X" is a massive massive difference.
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One thing I've noticed is that Americans typically use the latter while conversing.
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That's fine. It's just unclear to me if the parent poster is being critical exclusively of people "irl" giving unsolicited advice or if they're speaking to the forum of users who come here explicitly to discuss topics like these. If it's the former, I'm ambivalent. I don't give advice as a general rule. If it's the latter, I find that totally silly.
Amazing how everybody in this thread has posted their pet theories as to cause: - insufficient fibre - too much high fructose corn syrup - too much milk - too much citric acid - toxins and parasites (gut cleanse!) - washing chicken in chlorine (voiced as hypothetical) - ultra-marathoners - maybe their supplements and too much carbs or dehydration? - too much processed junk - vitamin and mineral deficiencies - radiation - insufficient veggies
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Can we add microplastics to the list?
I can’t take hyperbolic appeals to the authority of chemical names = bad seriously. Let’s at least get specific and name a molecule with a known mechanism of action.
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I think the people that dismiss this concern are just as bad and unscientific. It's a pretty decent Bayesian prior to assume that regular exposure to synthetic organic compounds in quantities or concentrations that hominids didn't receive exposure to in our evolution are likely to be potentially problematic. This is especially true when they don't occur naturally in any organisms biochemical processes and yet are active enough to interact with many of these things. This is OBVIOUSLY true for things used as pesticides / herbicides. We have evolved a natural aversion to areas where all the plants and animals are dead and rotting. There are good reasons for this to be a really good heuristic. I'll go so far as to say that almost any pesticide or herbicide is likely to be bad for vertebrates and invertebrates alike. This is really likely the case for perservatives as well, for what should be obvious reasons. It's really not that crazy to assume they're probably not good as a default assumption. Go into a hardware store and almost every chemical, solvent, paint, etc. that you encounter is not good for you. Eat a salmon and enjoy billions of plastic particles. Open almost any prepackaged food and you'll be ingesting all manner of dyes, perservatives, anti-caking agents, etc. etc. etc. that simply weren't around in your food environment during our evolution. It's a surprisingly good baseline assumption that these things aren't likely to be good for you. If you think about the study design and epidemiologic studies, it should be clear that it's going to be very difficult to prove harm in a lot of cases for things that are only a little harmful, or only harmful in combination, or harmful only after 20 years have passed since exposure, etc. ...except that the science is VERY clear: something (or lots of things) associated with "processed food" is really bad for you.
Humans have relied on bread, pasta, rice, and tubers for most of their calories since time immemorial. Japanese people eat plenty of rice even today and they are very healthy. "Food pyramid dumb, eat meat" is a very reductive take.
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Folks had to do the harvest and milling work themselves until recently, it’s not the same. Nor are the quantities.
>I'm guessing the colon cancer thing is probably due to pollutants > You don't actually need fiber Hey, you know what fiber is good for? Speeding up gut motility! You know what a faster gut motility is good for! Getting toxins out of our body quicker!
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In that case, wouldn't you want to include things like sorbitol? I want to emphasize I'm not making any grand claims of advice. I'm more being skeptical of traditional advice as someone who had/has a colon issue and tried everything under the sun.
"Fiber from food" seems good enough. It's hard not to fibermax without incidentally improving your diet substantially. For example, beans are one of the best and easiest sources of it. Splitting hairs beyond that, like insoluble and soluble, is the kind of thing that just confuses and intimidates people about nutrition advice. It's a bridge you can cross once everyone is eating 50g+ of fiber per day, has chiseled physiques, and are looking to min/max.
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This is hubris. I actually think I got my first colon issue because I ate too many beans.
Should be a betting service for this kind of thing instead of sports betting. Maybe all the men betting sports might read and change their habits based on the betting outcomes (and improve their health). I would also bet top reason is fiber but it isn't the only reason - multiple factors at play.
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I think that's all very fair.
US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike (lloydslist.com)
Iran has two clear win conditions in this war: cause enough pain that the US withdraws (unlikely given the current admin), or wait until US midterms and hope the Dems secure a victory and use the war powers resolution to end the war. The more FUD they can generate around transport in the strait of Hermuz the better for them. Maybe they have this capability and maybe they don’t, but they are clearly able to hit these tankers with something. Ukraine has been using these drones so it’s entirely possible Iran has this tech too.
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This admin does TACO all the time. A likely scenario is Iran causes economic problems, Trump chickens out and withdraws while simultaneously declaring absolute victory. Any lingering problems he blames on Rubio and hegseth.
I think you're overestimating the complexity of small unmanned subs. Drug traffickers are building _manned_ subs now in South American jungles. You just need a body (plastic tube), batteries, motors, and a computer. Maybe with a "range extender" gas engine. Everything can be COTS, and Iran certainly can manufacture occasional custom components. After all, it can manufacture centrifuges for uranium enrichment.
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Maybe! Most of those unmanned narcosubs are cut-down speedboats hulls, to my knowledge. The truly watertight/submerged ones are few and far between; it's a lot of investment for marginal decrease in observability. My money is still on low-observable attack craft, or a high-low mix that deprioritizes submersibles. Iran has an impressive panopoly but also has casus belli to lie out their nose. If Iran does have fully submersable UUVs, I'd expect them to be saved for a direct confrontation with the US Navy, not tankers. I could definitely be wrong though, I don't have any insider info to work with here.
It doesn't. This is a power specifically granted to states. The Save America act is unconstitutional.
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More than half the SCOTUS is corrupt and bought off, and the Republican Party in congress is just rubber-stamping what Trump wants. I don't have a lot of faith in the word "unconstitutional" anymore.
What defense is there against something like this? AFAIK only a few US aircraft carriers are equipped with anti torpedo torpedoes, and one of those sitting in the straight would be pretty vulnerable. Of course that could be the entire idea.
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The calculation is that of course there are defences, but if you have a big stockpile of $20K drones, and your opponent has a limited number of $2mil drone interceptors, then you can keep throwing drones and keeping your opponent busy there, and you're coming out ahead even before one finally gets through. See: https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5grf22r
The Road Not Taken: A World Where IPv4 Evolved (owl.billpg.com)
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This sounds a lot like what we have in 6to4 (for 25+ years now), where nodes behind two ipv4 derived prefixes can automatically talk to each other p2p, and use a gateway to communicate with the rest of the v6 internet.
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> The Version field must remain 4. And at the same time the address format and IP header is extended, effectively still splitting one network into two (one of which is a superset of the others)? A fundamentally breaking change remains a breaking change, whether you have the guts to bump your version number or not.
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IPv6 is fine. The advice on ULAs is garbage. The purpose of a protocol is to provide utility, not proscription.
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> Who owns all these new addresses? You do. If you own an IPv4 address, you automatically own the entire 96‑bit subspace beneath it. Every IPv4 address becomes the root of a vast extended address tree. It has to work this way because any router that doesn’t understand IPv4x will still route purely on the old 32‑bit address. There’s no point assigning part of your subspace to someone else — their packets will still land on your router whether you like it or not. So the folks that just happen to get in early on the IPv4 address land rush (US, Western world) now also get to grab all this new address space? What about any new players? This particular aspect idea seems to reward incumbents. Unlike IPv6, where new players (and countries and continents) that weren't online early get a chance to get equal footing in the expanded address space.
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> In a nutshell, an IPv4x packet is a normal IPv4 packet, just with 128‑bit addresses. The first 32 bits of both the source and target address sit in their usual place in the header, while the extra 96 bits of each address (the “subspace”) are tucked into the first 24 bytes of the IPv4 body. A flag in the header marks the packet as IPv4x, so routers that understand the extension can read the full address, while routers that don’t simply ignore the extra data and forward it as usual. So you have to ship new code to every 'network element' to support IPv4x. Just like with IPv6. So you have to update DNS to create new resource record types ("A" is hard-coded to 32-bits) to support the new longer addresses, and have all user-land code start asking for, using, and understanding the new record replies. Just like with IPv6. (And the DNS idea won't work, as a lot of legacy code did not have room in data structures for multiple reply types: sure you'd get the "A" but unless you updated the code to get the "AX" address (for ipv4X addresses) you could never get to the longer with address… just like IPv6 needed code updates to recognize AAAA, otherwise you were A-only.) You need to update socket APIs to hold new data structures for longer addresses so your app can tell the kernel to send packets to the new addresses. Just like with IPv6. A single residential connection that gets a single IPv4 address also gets to use all the /96 'behind it' with this IPv4x? People complain about the "wastefulness" of /64s now, and this is even more so (to the tune of 32 bits). You'd probably be better served with pushing the new bits to the other end… like… * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses
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Yes, I was wondering if I was missing something reading the hypothetical: This is still splits the Internet into two incompatible (but often bridged etc.) subnetworks, one on the v4, one on the v4x side, right? It just so happens that, unlike for v6, v4 and v4x have some "implicit bridges" built-in (i.e. between everything in v4 and everything in v4x that happens to have the last 96 bits unset). Not sure if that actually makes anything better or just kicks the can down the road in an even more messy way.
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In my view, the problem largely comes from the way the Internet has grown. Many of these concepts developed together with the Internet, and IPv4 was the protocol that evolved with them. I see many ISPs deploying IPv6 but still following the same design principles they used for IPv4. In reality, IPv6 should be treated as a new protocol with different capabilities and assumptions. For example, dynamic IP addresses are common with IPv4, but with IPv6 every user should ideally receive a stable /64 prefix, with the ability to request additional prefixes through prefix delegation (PD) if needed. Another example is bring-your-own IP space. This is practically impossible for normal users with IPv4, but IPv6 makes it much more feasible. However, almost no ISPs offer this. It would be great if ISPs allowed technically inclined users to announce their own address space and move it with them when switching providers.
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Reminds me of https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html Which has been discussed previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=The+IPv6+mess
IPv4 was evolved, it is now a 48 bit address, signified by IP:PORT.
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You're thinking of TCP or UDP. IP does not have ports.
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There are many things wrong with this analogy, but the most important ones seem to be: - NAT gateways are inherently stateful (per connection) and IP networks are stateless (per host, disregarding routing information). So even if you only look at the individual connection level, disregarding the host/connection layering violation, the analogy breaks. - NAT gateways don't actually route/translate by (IP, port) as you imply, but rather by (source IP, source port, destination IP, destination port), as otherwise there simply would not be enough ports in many cases.
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Routing of this additional /16 is more tricky and non-uniform though. NAT, hole-punching, all that.
what happens when a legacy host sends a 32 bit address to a 128 bit endpoint? it doesn't have enough information to forward it anywhere
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It can't even address a 128 bit endpoint, so nothing would happen.
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I think that's meant to be covered by the "IPv4x when we can. NAT when we must" part, in particular "ISPs used carrier‑grade NAT as a compatibility shim rather than a lifeline: if you needed to reach an IPv4‑only service, CGNAT stepped in while IPv4x traffic flowed natively and without ceremony." It seemed strange that the need for CGNAT wasn't mentioned until after the MIT story. The "Nothing broke" claim in that story seems unlikely; I was on a public IP at University at the end of the 90s and if I'd suddenly been put behind NAT, some things I did would have broken until the workarounds were worked out.
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> "ISPs used carrier‑grade NAT as a compatibility shim rather than a lifeline: if you needed to reach an IPv4‑only service, CGNAT stepped in while IPv4x traffic flowed natively and without ceremony." What's the difference between that and dual stack v4/v6, though? Other than not needing v6 address range assignments, of course.
Asia rolls out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis caused by Iran war (fortune.com)
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We consume 101 million barrels of oil per day. The amount of oil humans consume per day has doubled since 1980. Is this the way we finally wake up to the urgency of addressing the climate crisis caused by burning fossil fuels?
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Thank you Donald Trump for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels!
I've been working 4/10 schedule (4 days, but 10 hours/day, so I still work 40 hours). It's a HUGE perk, and is the biggest thing keeping me at my current job.
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Care to share how you snagged that?
I've long said that WFH is an easy win climate change solution that costs nothing, is well loved by everyone who participates (except management). Turns out in times like this, it's also an energy security measure.
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It's bad for the EcOnOmY, less wear and tear in cars, less jobs for mechanics, less gas consumed, less lunch bought in fast food chain, &c. The entire system is designed around making the numbers go up, not down
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I love WFH but how is it a win climate change solution for anyone outside of the USA? If my office building WFH, instead of heating a building we need to heat 500 people homes all day. And most of the people commute by public transport.
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How is their commute relevant? If they are WFH, theres less people needing to commute. Thats less fuel or more efficient fuel economy for public transport to use
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So 500 people leave for office and turn off the heating at their homes, even if there are other people (kids, elderly) or animals (cats, dogs, birds) living there?
I know it's a meme on HN to say everyone likes WFH, but I (and many but not ICs around me) thrive more in person. I am 100% more effective in person where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally. This can be recreated in a remote environment by having things like a team Discord that folks sit on, but it can feel forced at times (just like communiting to the office I suppose). My take might be heavily skewed though. I am in games and our environment is highly collaborative.
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I hate WFH, personally. My company is actually closing the office I work out of due to lack of use, so I'm in the opposite scenario of "forced-RTO", I'm moving to "forced-WFH." It's the right call objectively, the office is genuinely very empty, but I'm a bit annoyed about it. I'm actually going to be paying to rent a desk out of a coworking facility so I don't have to WFH. If this situation sucks, there's a real chance I'll be changing jobs later this year because of this.
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I pretty much dislike WFH and for many of the reasons you mention and more, so took local in-office job last year after being at home since COVID. I was excited to return to a more social environment until I found that "the office" itself was itself entirely problematic. Cheapass flatpack desks all rammed in together. No noise or sound proofing, giant sweatshop room. Sub-par monitors and equipment generally. Grumpy coworkers complaining constantly about the very conversations (both on-topic and off-topic/non-work) that I came in to have a chance to experience again. And half the staff was just WFH anyways, or remote, so the collaboration opportunities... diminished. I even saw this happening at Google before I left there, which had formerly been a ... luxury office. Packing people in like sardines, forcing people to "reserve" desks. Bad parking and/or transit situations. I get it when employers face financial or real estate crunches. But in the last 10-15 years (I've been working for 30) -- even pre-COVID -- I feel like some switch went off tech industry leadership brains that is just outright disrespectful. Paying high salaries to engineers and then providing them with uncomfortable accommodations. Makes little sense to me. I'm back to WFH and the isolation that comes with it. In part because the office environment was actually not what I was hoping for. Because the industry ruined it.
We've been slowly creeping back toward being fully RTO, and my mental health has been in what I can only describe as "steep decline". I don't know if I pin it all on RTO, but it sure isn't helping the situation. I love my job, but hate the in-office requirements - I'm a systems admin.
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Sorry to hear that. Being a sysadmin, I guess you're mainly interacting with systems rather than people and need to focus. They should exempt you from RTO except for the odd "all hands" meeting days. I'm a software engineer in a Product Engineering team and it's about 75% hands-on engineering, 25% Slack/Teams interaction and alignments between people. I find being in the office helps to make connections with other staff in other teams (eg. bumping into people while making coffee in staff kitchen etc). I think thats important from a career perspective.
In my experience, everybody cares about climate change. A lot of people just don't like the idea of caring about climate change. But ya, probably best to just call it "traffic" then, and they might be more receptive.
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Absolutely not. There are tens of millions of Americans who have jumped full speed onto the "It's not even happening" train, let alone the "It's actually a good thing because plants" or "It's not our fault" or "We can't fix it so we shouldn't try" or "It's too expensive to fix and I can't do long term math" trains. And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash. Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now , let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics. Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
"Leave the petro-billionaires alone!" Seems to be the driving force Imagine if the world had aggressively invested in renewables at any time in the past ten years!
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Cheap and efficient solar power didn't seem to require any actual breakthroughs or real investment. Maybe better power electronics for inverters and things? Batteries are a real issue but storage could have been totally ignored for a while. So, maybe when Carter put those (thermal) solar collectors on the White House we should have thrown a hundred billion dollars at solar panel work and had abundant solar power decades ago . But no, Carter was "weak" so we had to instead elect the guy who ignored AIDS because he hated gay people, pushed absurd drug policy, put us in bed with the middle east, and started the process of removing taxes from any rich person and racking up national debt for stupid reasons. Why was Carter "weak"? Well you see, Iran was a huge Bad Guy that we needed to stop! Oh.
Makes sense for short term damage control. However, I think in the medium and long term you end up having productivity hits from such measures. I know its unpopular to say, but when I have my 2 programmers in office, we get sooo much more done than at home. Someone gets stuck and we don't message/call, we just talk. Although, if you want to justify WFH, introverted-like people do not get the same level of benefit as extroverted-like people in this situation. The extroverted people will just start talking. The introverted people need to be asked.
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> if you want to justify WFH, introverted-like people do not get the same level of benefit as extroverted-like people in this situation I'm introverted and did just fine in an office, because the company culture was that coworkers all talked to each other about how they preferred to work (preferably no more often than once a quarter) and then respected that. When we moved to WFH during lockdown, that practice continued. I've also WFH at remote-first companies that did not practice, encourage, or enforce ICs communicating to find and document better ways to work together, and have not been served remotely as well by the result.
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Sounds like you don't have a lot of remote work experience. The majority of my career (years before the pandemic) has been remote work. I find in office work painfully slow. I pair program quite often remote, and when someone gets stuck we also "just talk". Honestly I prefer screen sharing to leaning over someone's shoulder (much easier to doing supporting work in parallel). I find it really depends on the type of org though. Large corporate places do tend to suffer from remote work because so much of the work is performative anyway. Remote small companies and startups the velocity is very high, but you do need more senior people capable of independent work. Especially when you factor in the easy of "after hours" work, the amount of emergency stuff I've shipped around midnight is incomparable to the 'in office' equivalent. Though I suspect the key word here is " my 2 programmers", I find managers don't feel like their doing work unless they're physically watching it get done. Not understanding how to run a remote team is not the same as remote teams not being effective in principle.
I entered the workforce during covid, underwent a return to office mandate only to get a new job that is fully WFH. I am easily twice as productive in my own hive than I am in the office. The office is full of distractions, noise, it is not as ergonomic as my setup at home and i get to waste 90min a day commuting. In some very specific instances i see value in going to the office, productivity during everyday work is not among them
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I know what you mean. I'm not sure why my office doesnt have distractions. We take breaks, but its not like when I was at a fortune 20 company where I'd spend an hour drinking coffee and catching up with people in other departments. If I had to guess, we are such a small office that its obvious if someone is distracted and I can nudge them back to work. Saying all of this outloud, you are making me realize I have the office style of a panopticon. At least my workers seem to genuinely like working.
I'm not sure that counting "How it's going?" as a productivity stat is the win you think it is.
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When they say 'stuck...' and we fix a problem, I'd count that as a win.
But it gets solved when we are in-person. We could develop new technology, research culture solutions... or... meet in-person.
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> develop new technology, research culture solutions. The technology and culture solutions have existed and been evolving for 20 years. It really sounds like your experience with remote work is not representative.
you can just send "hey you got 5 mins"? you have to do that in person. you do that on chat. nothing different. this is a made up reason. I do this all day, everyday
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I'm the manager. They do not send that message. They either are trying and never giving up, or... doing dishes. I check in, and it ends up being story time about non-issues. In person, its a 'hows it going?' and they say either 'good, still working' or 'stuck...'. I would love if WFH was as effective. I could reduce my labor costs and probably have happier workers.
I've lived in over a dozen states and I've never heard either called anything other than EYE-(ran/raq) in conversation. The extremely, I mean extremely rare occasion when someone pronounces it differently on TV, it's almost like they get side-eyed by other people as trying to "talk fancy".
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Well anecdotally, I've lived in four states in the last 20 years. In those where the state-level government was largely Democratic, the pronunciation was typically correct/respectful. In the one where it was not, the pronunciation was usually wrong. There has also been an inverse correlation between mostly-Democratic political leadership, and the rate of active or former military employment. This might be more indicative. And of course, a positive correlation with education levels. So the answer is in there somewhere, I suspect. National TV "news" programming might have a style guide which dictates speaking in real american. No matter how well-educated the hosts might be.
The thing I feel like is really important to remember whenever thinking about the world and demographics is that most people are Asian. As in more people live in Asia then outside of it. Conversely when a headline or something mentions Asia, it is rare they actually mean the majority of the continent or people living there.
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Not to mention that people tend to lump Oceania into it too.
Globally, everyone does this. When someone outside of America thinks of American food, do you think they will think of Cajun gumbo, TexMex, Clam Chowder, or something you'd find on the menu at McDonalds?
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I thought that McDonald's was considered Scottish cuisine?
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>When someone outside of America thinks of American food, do you think they will think of Cajun gumbo, TexMex, Clam Chowder, or something you'd find on the menu at McDonalds? Statistically this random non-american is some sort of Asian. Therefore the answer is finger lickin good.
I don't know about that. Japanese food and Thai food have very little in common besides rice. Possibly there is some overlap in curry but not much.
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Sure. And most people I knew are able to differentiate between "sushi" and "Thai curry".
> Makes no sense, same with "I'm in a mood for asian food" Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian food / cuisine even thought different is more probably closer to each other same like e.g. Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine.
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Asian countries developed with more overlap in basic ingredients, cooking techniques, and historical influence networks than Europe did. Historically there were 3 influence zones in Asia. There is a lot of pickling, fermenting, salting, drying. In Asia of these techniques were more or less unified. Fish sauces from different countries are Pepsi vs Coca-Cola level of difference. > Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine. I'd say Polish has a lot of similarities with Asian cuisine. Sure, both have stews and sausages, but flavor profiles are very different: acidic vs sour. I won't be able to tell difference between gyoza & wonton if they shaped the same, but surely I can tell difference between ravioli & uszka. Uszka is IMO closer to any dumpling from Asia than to anything European.
It's similar to how people say "Europe does this or that". Basically the part of their thoughts dedicated to that part of the world is so small that all they can afford is a tiny box, and everything has to go in there, reality be damned.
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Europe at the very least has one parliament that sometimes passes laws that apply to almost the whole continent
It is quite unclear how big China's population really is; see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFbMWq-xvXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymmaYswXm78
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Youtube videos are always a poor quality source - the UN doesn’t accept China’s numbers exactly but they believe the total number is broadly correct due to cross referenced data, and expert independent demographers largely agree. The figure of 1.4 billion is likely within the ballpark and the idea that this is off by hundreds of millions is considered a fairly fringe theory, almost a conspiracy theory.
> eg. I've had my parents say the "taste" of food is worse on electric instead of gas stovetops If you are using the cooking technique of "bhunai" [1], which is quite common in South Asian cooking, there is a large difference in food quality you can make with an electric and with a gas stove. Gas stoves are able to provide higher heat at consistent levels, and you can tilt the pot to concentrate heat in one corner to intensify the cooking. So I don't disagree with your parents. [1] bhunai is when you cook meat with spices at very high heat while rapidly stirring it. I think the willingness to burn the spices during this process is what sets this apart from similar techniques in other cuisines, but I am no expert.
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My mom doesn't cook bhunai - she's pushed for a low oil household since I was a kid and is extremely health conscious verging on "crunchy". I've also done bhunai with electric stovetops and ceramic cookware like Dutch ovens and green pans and gotten close enough to an authentic taste - the marginal differences that exist are due to differences in ingredients in the US (eg. lower milkfat percentages, onions instead of shallots, different cultivars of vegetables, etc) and some inexperience of non-Westerners with Western cookware. It's a very solvable problem. For example, the Indian restaurants my parents like and feel taste "authentic" use electric stovetops as well in the back, but discriminate on ingredients and masalas.
ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did (davidoks.blog)
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Fun story. There are still bank tellers in the Falkland Islands because there is no e-banking. Transfers are literally made by filling in a piece of paper and taking it to the bank.
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Not sure it’s great to start this with jd Vance…
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Two anecdotes I'll share: First: Most people believe it was Netflix that killed Blockbuster, but that's not strictly correct. It was the combination of Netflix and Redbox that really sealed the deal for Blockbuster (and video rental generally). It normally takes not one, but at least two things to really fill the full functionality of a old paradigm. Also it's human nature to focus heavily on one thing (Blockbuster was aware of Netflix) but lose sight of getting flanked by something else. Second: Not listed here is how banks themselves have changed to be almost entirely online, which in many cases is more of a outsourcing play than a labor destruction play. My favorite example of this is Capital One, where the vast majority of their credit card operations literally cannot be solved in a branch. You must call them to say, resolve a fraud dispute. Note that this still requires staffing and is (not yet) fully automated, just not branch staffing. It doesn't make sense to staff branches to do that.
> But will it? My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. For example, ATMs being automated did cause a negative drop in teller jobs, but fast money any time does increase the velocity of money in the economy. It decreases savings rate and encourages spending among the class of people whose money imparts the highest multiplier. AI does not. All the spending on AI goes to a very small minority, who have a high savings rate. Junior employees that would have productively joined the labor force at good wages, must now compete to join the labor force at lower wages, depressing their purchasing power and reducing the flow of money. Look at all the most used things for AI: cutting out menial decisions such as customer service. There are no "productivity" gains for the economy here. Each person in the US hired to do that job would spend their entire paycheck. Now instead, that money goes to a mega-corp and the savings is passed on to execs. The price of the service provided is not dropping (yet). Thus, no technology savings is occurring, either. In my mind, the outcomes are: * Lower quality services * Higher savings rate * K-shaped economy catering to the high earners * Sticky prices * Concentration of compute in AI companies * Increased price of compute prevents new entrants from utilizing AI without paying rent-seekers, the AI companies * Cycle continues all previous steps We may reach a point where the only ones able to afford compute are AI companies and those that can pay AI companies. Where is the innovation then? It is a unique failure outcome I have yet to see anyone talk about, even though the supply and demand issues are present right now.
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> My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable. The problem with services is that they're typically resistant to productivity growth, and that's finally changing. If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam.
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"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable." You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative. "If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam." It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?
I go back and forth on this. I relate it to software. I don't think AI can meaningfully write software autonomously. There are people who oversee it and prompt it and even then it might write things badly. So there needs to be a person in the loop. But that person should probably have very deep knowledge of the software especially for say low level coding. But then that person probably developed the knowledge by coding things by hand for a long time. Coding things by hand is part of getting the knowledge. But people especially students rely heavily on AI to write code so I assume their knowledge growth is stunted. I don't know mathematical proofs will help here. The specs have to come from somewhere. I can see AI making things more productive but it requires humans to be very expert and do more work. That might mean fewer developers but they are all more skilled. It will take a while for people to level up so to speak. It's hard to predict but I think there could be a rough transition period because people haven't caught on that they can't rely on AI so either they will have to get a new career or ironically study harder.
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An AI’s ability to meaningfully write software autonomously has changed hugely even in the last 6 months. They might still require a human in the loop, but for how long?
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Quantitative measures of this are very poor, and even those are mixed. My subjective assessment is that agents like Copilot got better because of better harnesses and fine tuning of models to use those harnesses. But they are not improving in the direction of labor substitution, but rather in the direction of significant, but not earth-shaking, complementarity. That complementarity is stronger for more experienced developers.
We have to grow out of those kind of dreams. That's like a kid dreaming that when he grows up he'll eat ice cream for dinner every day. People when they mature have an innate desire to work. It is good for body and mind. If you're curious about the world, you'll have to do some work one way or another to achieve your goals and satisfy your curiosity. If "society" is just a function of basic needs, then there's plenty of places in the world to visit where people live like that and use any excess energy in endless fighting against each other instead of work.
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I would say endless fighting against each other is a much more innate desire than work. I know I don't have one.
> Someone still needs to review and test the code, and if the code is for embedded systems I find it unlikely. I feel like you didn't understand my comment. I am predicting that there is no code to review. You simply ask the AI to do stuff and it does it. Today, for example, you can ask ChatGPT to play chess with you, and it will. You don't need a "chess program," all the rules are built in to the LLM. Same goes for SaaS. You don't need HR software; you just need an LLM that remembers who is working for the company. Like what a "secretary" used to be.
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Because AI agents are tool users. Why does AI need to research 2026 tax code changes and then try to one-shot your taxes when it can just use Turbotax to do it for you? Turbotax has the latest 2026 tax changes coded into the app. I'd feel much more confident if AI uses Turbotax to do my taxes than to try to one-shot it.
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> I feel like you didn't understand my comment. I am predicting that there is no code to review. You simply ask the AI to do stuff and it does it. I didn’t, and thanks for clarifying for me. This doesn’t pass the sniff test for me though - someone needs to train the models, which requires code. If AI can do everything for you, then what’s the differentiator as a business? Everything can be in chatGPT but that’s not the only business in existence. If something goes wrong, who is gonna debug it? Instead of API requests you would debug prompt requests maybe. We already hate talking to a robot for waiting on calls, automated support agents, etc. I don’t think a paying customer would accept that - they want a direct line to a person. I can buy the argument that the backend will be entirely AI and you won’t need to be managing instances of servers and databases but the front end will absolutely need to be coded. That will need some software engineering - we might get a role that is a weird blend of product + design + coding but that transformation is already happening. Honestly the biggest change I see is that the chat interface will be on equal footing with the browser. You might have some app that can connect to a bunch of chat interfaces that is good at something, and specializations are going to matter even more. It was a bit of a word vomit so thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
I do not get what's special about banking apps as opposed to online banking. I've been doing online banking in the browser on a PC since before apps and I'm still doing it because dealing with data on a phone is painful compared to a PC. Is an app really that much easier to use?
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Yeah, I have been doing online banking since around 1998. I have refused to install the bank app on my phone because I see no point in it and just downsides in case I get mugged (bad experience in my teenage years) The 1 check I get a year takes about a minute to deposit at the ATM on my way to work.
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Yes? Why would I go over to my computer and boot it up and sit down and type in a website when I could just pull my phone out tap tap done?
I guess there's also a difference between "can use checks" vs "have to use checks" because, aside from rent, I can't recall having to write checks. Everything else allowed either credit card or direct debit on top of allowing checks.
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Both my housekeeper and contractor use checks and, while I could get the bank to "write" them checks, it's easier to just hand them a piece of paper. I've also needed to pay my neighbor something from time to time and it's easier to just write a check. I do also periodically receive checks from various institutions.
I know this is true, but for serious tasks, I need the screen real estate. I'm amazed at what some people can do from a phone, but also wonder if they're missing things, of if it's actually inefficient.
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Do you need it, or do you just feel more comfortable with it?
Your grandma doesn't give you a $10 check for your birthday in Europe? What about manufacturer rebates?
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The last few manufacturer rebates I have gotten come in the form of a pre loaded Visa card
In which way is the cashless society due to smartphones? Cards did that already before Apple/GooglePay were a thing.
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P2P apps (Cash App, Venmo, etc) that have filled the gaps for transactions that were typically tricky to use cards for.
As far as I can tell, it's entirely that. The things the author cites as how mobile banking supplanted going to the bank (paying for things with debit cards, getting your paycheck direct deposited, etc) have nothing to do with mobile banking. They are all just as you said: we live in an increasingly cashless society, the only reason to go to the branch is to deposit or withdraw money, so the need for tellers has gone off a cliff.
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Yes, exactly my reaction. Other than maybe to open an account in the first place, the only reason I ever went into to a bank even in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era was to deal with cash. Checks could be deposited in the deposit drop, or later at an ATM. My payroll went to direct deposit as soon as that was possible. But to get cash, before ATMs, you went into the bank, unless you had check-cashing privilges somewhere else (supermarkets used to offer this). To deposit cash, you went into the bank so the teller could count it in front of you and agree on the amount. It was risker to deposit cash in a deposit drop or ATM. The move to cashless transactions for almost everything, and the resultant rare need to carry cash, is IMO the main reason why we don't need very many bank tellers anymore.
Suburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency (nbcchicago.com)
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Among the many takeaways from this case is that if you don't own a car at all, you will likely be summarily denied, therefore you "must" own a car.
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> The plate reader company touts “Accurate residency verification does more than protect the financial health of public schools—it safeguards the trust and equity at the heart of public education.” There is so much wrong with that sentence it boggles the imagination.
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Also complete with the "it's not just X—it's Y" sentence pattern.
The scariest part of this story isn’t that they’re doing LPR at drop-off, it’s that they’re claiming to have knowledge of where the car is parked overnight. > her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.” The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?
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The craziest part of this is that a school district thinks that the overnight location of the vehicle used to transport a student has anything to do with the location of the residence. Especially when that data is from a time period when the school isn't in session. I can think of a half dozen valid scenarios why the vehicle used for school drop off is parked away from the student's residence at night. e.g. Vehicle belongs to a non-custodial parent from out of district who handles drop off. Vehicle is used by a household member to do overnight shift work. Family just moved, of course their vehicle wasn't being parked in the district in July. ALPR character recognition error. Parent and student live elsewhere in the summer, and still qualify as residents within the district. It sometimes boggles the mind the amount of inflexibility that people doing these jobs have/are willing to use, especially in something so consequential.
$10?? I thought it was a major crime to drive without a license plate.
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Welcome to Tennessee (it shouldn't matter, but it does: clean-cut taxpaying middle-aged white guy, with former background in govt data centers [1] ). If I had any detectible minority status, I would display a plate properly. More onlookers (from behind) snap photos of this taglessness than any other politics/offensive bumper sticker I've had [2] — my only thought is that my vehicle misleads them to think that perhaps I'm undercover I.C.E. (purposefully obscurring)..? [1] I've woken up blackout in a comped hotel when friends in identical situation got arrested/PI; I still carry a long-expired govt work badge in my moneyclip [2] 2nd-most popular, all-time, was "Patron Saint of Denials Luigi Mangione" image
It's not about hiding — it's about sending a message. IIRC, Steve Jobs was known to do this in his black plateless Mercedes (decades ago).
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Wired even wrote this up (2010). Getting a new lease every 6 months, which apparently legally let him go plateless somehow. https://www.wired.com/2010/08/the-mystery-of-steve-jobs-plateless-benz/ I found it pretty grossly offensive a practice.
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I lived nearish to him during this era, and after this article was published, it seemed like every black Mercedes in town started going tagless .
Returning a vehicle to a bank that someone has stopped paying for isn't exactly harm. If banks were unable to get vehicles back, people with bad credit would have a much harder time getting a vehicle in the first place.
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>much harder time getting a vehicle in the first place. This is a good thing ; add "houses" to the list, too. Credit is too freely issued — we live on debt (as a society/world). I've seen people throw their $20k in negative equity into a new purchase/lease — and just been baffled . --but I agree: lenders oughta'be able to retrieve their lien'ed properties.
Catching the pedophiles. Think of the children.
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More like catching the children. Think of the pedophiles.
People not returning vehicles to the banks, or commiting fraud by taking up resources in districts they don't live in are technically criminals.
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There are, in fact, many crimes
Big flag error I can see right away is joint custody where a parent lives out of the zone. Every time the parent who doesn't live in the exact neighborhood drops the child off the car is flagged. Then what happens when they look into this? Does the child automatically go to the school zoned for the parent with a "better" school or a "cheaper" school? Who makes the decision? What about paid caregivers or family members? This is a huge waste of time/money for everyone except for the company who sold the school on the "need" for it. There are way better ways of combating fraud which don't introduce mass surveillance.
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> This is a huge waste of time/money Right. And when you see someone so dedicated do it there is almost certainly a hidden variable which causes this to occur. I imagine the nature of funding of these schools and the distribution of public monies has a lot to do with it. > ways of combating fraud Imagine being the richest country in the world and _caring_, honestly, about school location "fraud."
> Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid license plate tracking? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold? No, I'm talking about changing how schools are funded by making funds more evenly distributed across districts. Giving the kids in the "bad" areas the same opportunities as those in the "good" areas. Right now, if you can't afford that four-five-six-seven-hundred thousand dollar home, you aren't afforded the same level of public education as someone else who can. And doing so democratically, which is why I mentioned it'll never happen because no politician would be able to run on that. Their opponents would be outfunded by the top 10% to keep the status quo. And this is coming from someone who own's a home in a "good" district. Where we got a total rebuilt elementary school 4 years ago, a new middle school actively being build, and a new high school that opened 3 years ago. Why should my kids have access to everything newer and better just because we can afford to live out in the suburbs, than someone else who isn't working in the cushy tech industry and instead is busting their ass only to live in poverty?
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Newer does not mean better, or even imply it. Money spent on facilities has almost no correlation to educational outcomes. What matters are the peers you go to school with, supported by decent curriculum and moderately competent teachers. None of which is expensive. Oh, and administrators who actually care about teaching being done vs. being terrified of the lawsuit fairy. It’s the peers that matter by far the most - and that means parents. Parents that are self-selecting into good districts tend to skew heavily towards “involved” and some definition of functional. This can mean being able to and buying a home or rent an apartment in a good district, or finding some clever and/or creative workaround to get the same outcome. The latter is even better in most cases since those families are motivated at an even higher level to make sure it’s a success. The best school I went to as a kid was a private highly selective school in “the ghetto” where my dad lived growing up. Nearly every kid there was on some form of subsidized or full ride tuition, with very “working class” parents. The facilities were barebones at best. The vast majority of kids had parents who held them to extreme expectations even if they didn’t have financial means or even time to be highly involved day to day. The uber rich brand new high school I went to the next year in the suburbs wasn’t even close. The difference was in the kids who attended the school and the expectations put on them for both classroom behavior, engagement, and work ethic. Shitty disruptive kids were kicked out within a matter of days so as to let kids who wanted to be there actually learn. Anything beyond that is close to a rounding error for outcomes. The inner city school district I pay taxes into spends more per student than many of the suburbs. You could triple it again and get zero change in outcomes - in fact so far since living here school budgets are inversely correlated with outcome, although I don’t see a causation there in either direction. Schools that are allowed to be ran like schools and hold students to high expectations and standards do well. Schools that are ran like social programs trying to correct for all of societies ills do not. It’s pretty simple in the end.
Then the government should advertise an explicit minimum amount of tax paid annually in order to register for the school, or switch property tax to land value tax only.
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The residency requirement is that minimum. It's not a minimum in monetary limits. It's a minimum that you have to actually live there. The fact you are living there means you are paying a higher tax amount than for an undeveloped lot. There's a difference on having a house on a lot vs just some field. You have some skin in the game as they say compared to just owning land while living somewhere else completely.
Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English (codespeak.dev)
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A formal way for a senior to tell AI (clueless junior) to do a senior's job? Once again, who checks and fixes the output code? Of course an expert would throw it out and design/write it properly so they know it works.
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When we understand that AI allows the spec to be in English (or any natural language), we might stop attempting to build "structured english" for spec.
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Literally the first example on the main page declared as code.py would result in an indentation error :)
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This seems like a step backwards. Programming Languages for LLMs need a lot of built in guarantees and restrictions. Code should be dense. I don't really know what to make of this project. This looks like it would make everything way worse. I've had good success getting LLMs to write complicated stuff in haskell, because at the end of the day I am less worried about a few errant LLM lines of code passing both the type checking and the test suite and causing damage. It is both amazing and I guess also not surprising that most vibe coding is focused on python and javascript, where my experience has been that the models need so much oversight and handholding that it makes them a simple liability. The ideal programming language is one where a program is nothing but a set of concise, extremely precise, yet composable specifications that the _compiler_ turns into efficient machine code. I don't think English is that programming language.
Interesting project, but I think it's solving the wrong bottleneck. The gap between what I want and what the model produces isn't primarily a language problem — it's a knowledge problem. You can write the most precise spec imaginable, but if the model doesn't have domain-specific knowledge about your product's edge cases, undocumented behaviors, or the tribal knowledge your team has accumulated, the output will be confidently wrong regardless of how formally you specified it. I've been working on this from the other direction — instead of formalizing how you talk to the model, structure the knowledge the model has access to. When you actually measure what proportion of your domain knowledge frontier models can produce on their own (we call this the "esoteric knowledge ratio"), it's often only 40-55% for well-documented open source projects. For proprietary products it's even lower. No amount of spec formalism fixes that gap — you need to get the missing knowledge into context.
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Isn't that the point though? In the development loop, you'd diagnose why it's not building what you expect, so you flush out those previous implicit or even subconscious edge cases, undocumented behaviors, and tribal knowledge and codify them into the spec. It would actually end up being a lot easier to maintain than a bunch of undocumented spaghetti.
I am trying a similar spec driven development idea in a project I am working on. One big difference is that my specifications are not formalized that much. Tney are in plain language and are read directly by the LLM to convert to code. That seems like the kind of thing the LLM is good at. One other feature of this is that it allows me to nudge the implmentation a little with text in the spec outside of the formal requirements. I view it two ways, as spec-to-code but also as a saved prompt. I haven't spent enough time with it to say how successfuly it is, yet.
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Do you save these "prompts" so you can improve, and in turn improve the code. to me Spec Driven Development is more than a spec to generate code, structured or not.
Compiler is not 100% deterministic. Its output can change when you upgrade its version, its output can change when you change optimization options. Using profile-guided optimization can also change between runs.
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If you change inputs then obviously you will get a different output. Crucially using the same inputs, however, produces the same output. So compilers are actually deterministic.
This doesn't make too much sense to me. * This isn't a language, it's some tooling to map specs to code and re-generate * Models aren't deterministic - every time you would try to re-apply you'd likely get different output (without feeding the current code into the re-apply and let it just recommend changes) * Models are evolving rapidly, this months flavour of Codex/Sonnet/etc would very likely generate different code from last months * Text specifications are always under-specified, lossy and tend to gloss over a huge amount of details that the code has to make concrete - this is fine in a small example, but in a larger code base? * Every non-trivial codebase would be made up of of hundreds of specs that interact and influence each other - very hard (and context - heavy) to read all specs that impact functionality and keep it coherent I do think there are opportunities in this space, but what I'd like to see is: * write text specifications * model transforms text into a *formal* specification * then the formal spec is translated into code which can be verified against the spec 2 and three could be merged into one if there were practical/popular languages that also support verification, in the vain of ADA/Spark. But you can also get there by generating tests from the formal specification that validate the implementation.
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Maybe we're entering the non-deterministic applications too. No more mechanical predictable thing.. more like 90% regular and then weird. Slightly sarcastic but not sure this couldn't become a thing.
The end is whether the code meets the functional and non functional requirements. And guess how much shoe companies make who manufacture shoes in sweatshop conditions versus the ones who make artisanal handcrafted shoes?
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Functional requirements are known knowns. Out of bounds behavior is sometimes a known unknown, but in the era of generated code is exclusively unknown unknowns. Good luck speccing out all the unanticipated side effects and undefined behaviors. Perhaps you can prompt the agent in a loop a bnumber of times but it's hard to believe that the brute-force throw-more-tokens-at-it approach has the same level of return as a more attentive audit by human eyeballs.
This doesn't seem particularly formal. I still remain unconvinced reducing is really going to be valuable. Code obviously is as formal as it gets but as you trend away from that you quickly introduce problems that arise from lack of formality. I could see a world in which we're all just writing tests in the form of something like Gherkin though.
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> I could see a world in which we're all just writing tests in the form of something like Gherkin though. That works great in practice, Gherkin even has a markdown dialect [1]. If you combine it with a tool like aico [2] you can have a really effective development workflow. [1] https://github.com/cucumber/gherkin/blob/main/MARKDOWN_WITH_GHERKIN.md [2] https://github.com/jurriaan/aico
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People seem weirdly eager to talk to LLMs in proto-code instead of fixing the base problem that LLMs are just unreliable interpreters. If your tool needs a new human-friendly DSL to avoid the ambiguity of plain English, maybe what you really want is to be writing actual code or specs with a type system and feedback loop. Any halfway formalism gives a false sense of precision, and you still get blindsided by the same model quirks, just dressed up differently.
Malus – Clean Room as a Service (malus.sh)
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I know this is satire, but I worry that it's giving some scumbags out there ideas.
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From their front page: >*Full legal indemnification: *Through our offshore subsidiary in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize software copyright* Heh, ok. So, the thinking is: 1. You contract them. 2. The actual Copyright infringement is done by an __offshore__ company. 3. If you get sued by the original software devs, you seek indemnification from the offshore subsidiary. 4. That offshore subsidiary is in a country without copyright laws or with weak laws so "you're good!" ... 5. Profit. This is a ridiculous legal defense since this "one-way-street" legal process will almost certainly result in you being sued first... the company actually using the infringing code. The indemnification is likely worthless since the offshore company won't have any assets anyway and will dissolve once there's a lawsuit and legal process is established. The "guarantee" is absurd: Their "MalusCorp Guarantee" promises a refund and moving headquarters to international waters if infringement is found. This is not a real legal remedy and is written to sound like a joke, which is telling about their seriousness... This whole "clean room as a service" concept is a legal gray area at best. In practice, it's extremely difficult to prove tha ta "clean room" process was truly clean, especially with AI models that have been trained on vast amounts of existing code (including the very projects they are "recreating"). The indemnification is a marketing gimmick to make a legally dangerous service seem safe. It creates a facade of protection while ensuring that any financial liability stays with you, the customer who wants to avoid infringement .
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whoosh
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Couldn't this be done on proprietary software as well? Have an agent fuzz an interface (any type) for every bit of functionality and document it. Then have it build based on the document?
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I have a feeling this will lead to huge interoperability and ecosystem fragmentation issues. Well, there is one way... You can have a government steal all open source code and force its citizens to only use proprietary hardware and proprietary code, all government sanctioned btw. I wonder if we're headed this way.
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> Our proprietary AI systems have never seen the original source code. For this to be plausible satire, they need to show how they've trained their models to code, without mit, apache, bsd or GPL/agpl code being in the training set...
That's worth its own submission and discussion.
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It has been submitted last week, happy reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
Because that's impossible. Any "robot" that can generate code must be trained on massive amounts of code, most of which is open source.
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And how are you supposed to guarantee equivalent functionality by analyzing "README files, API docs, and type definitions"?
An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and occasionally enforcing it with expensive humans when they get around to it", and "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and rigidly enforcing it to the exact mph through a robot". Nominally, the law is "don't go faster than 55 mph". Realistically, those are three completely different policies in every way that matters. We are all making a continual and ongoing grave error thinking that taking what were previously de jure policies that were de facto quite different in the real world, and thoughtlessly "upgrading" the de jure policies directly into de facto policies without realizing that that is in fact a huge change in policy. One that nobody voted for, one that no regulator even really thought about, one that we are just thoughtlessly putting into place because "well, the law is, 55 mph" without realizing that, no, in fact that never was the law before. That's what the law said , not what it was . In the past those could never really be the same thing. Now, more and more, they can. This is a big change! Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce. And without very many people consciously realizing it, we have centuries of laws that were written with the subconscious realization that enforcement is difficult and expensive, and that the discretion of that enforcement is part of the power of the government. Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone . Yet we still have almost no recognition that that is an issue. This could, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the first places we directly grapple with this in a legal case someday soon, that the legality of something may be at least partially influenced by the expense of the operation.
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There was this scholarly article from Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic. I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.
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> Cost of enforcement matters. The exact same nominal law that is very costly to enforce has completely different costs and benefits then that same law becoming all but free to rigidly enforce. Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective. We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect. But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever. Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost. (A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).
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I think the fundamental issue is that a form of equality where everyone gets what was previously the worst outcome is... probably worse.
We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad. The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...
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The problem with precise law enforcement is that the legal system is incredibly complex. There's a tagline that ‘everybody's a criminal’; I don't know if that's necessarily true but I do definitely believe that a large number of ‘innocent’ people are criminals (by the letter of the law) without their knowledge. Because we usually only bother to prosecute crimes if some obvious harm has been done this doesn't cause a lot of damage in practice (though it can be abused), but if you start enforcing the letter of every law precisely it suddenly becomes the obligation of every citizen to know every law — in a de facto way, rather than just the de jure way we currently have as a consequence of ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’. So an increase of precision in law enforcement must be preceded by a drastic simplification of the law itself — not a bad thing by any means, but also not an easy (or, perhaps, possible) task.
You raise an interesting point: One question that I think about developing countries: Most of them have higher perception of corruption compared to highly developed (OECD) nations. How do countries realistically reduce corruption? Korea went from an incredibly poor country in 1960 to a wealthy country in 2010. I am sure they dramatically reduced corruption over this time period... but how? Another example, in the 1960s/1970s, Hongkong dramatically increased the pay for civil servants (including police officers) to reduce corruption. (It worked, mostly.)
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I live in a developing country. What I find is that the corruption is generally easier to navigate here that it was in the USA. The corruption in the USA is much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture. At the local level this can look like a local ordinance where “only a contractor with xy and z (only one of which is needed for the job) can bid, favoring a specific contractor. Here you just figure out compliance with the person in charge.
Note for people who just briefly skimmed the site: This is satire.
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I know this is satire, but I would wish to see something like this for liberating proprietary & closed-source hardware drivers.
First 6 days of Iran war cost $11.3B (nbcnews.com)
Never enough money for healthcare , childcare or school lunches, but always plenty of money for foreign wars. Why Americans are not rioting in the streets is beyond me.
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75% of them are overweight or obese, 30% functionally illiterate. They have neither the physical, cognitive or cultural capabilities to do what's needed
Is US Congress actually doing anything or do they just stand by and let Trump do whatever he likes? My own country's parliament is having more debates about the Iranian war and we're just sending one warship to Cyprus!
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Trump has mastered the bully pulpit and his steadfast popularity with his base to threaten any Republican who gets out of line by endorsing a primary challenger. This has been effective in replacing anyone who challenges him, and scaring the rest into line.
the bombing of the girls school should never have happened and is inexcusable, but otherwise increasing the future safety by annihilating the military structure of an aspiring nuclear power for say $50B / 250M inhabitants = $200 per person, sounds like a steal if only this would have been done before and thus instead of a genocide in Gaza!
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Should America do this to every aspiring nuclear nation? All the time?
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The US had a joint nuclear program with Iran for decades... After the revolution they didn't even pursue nuclear weapons until they understood it was the only thing you can get to protect yourself from Israel and American bullying. > before and thus instead of a genocide in Gaza! Lmao yeah OK buddy, your dollars are financing both, and many more, atrocities
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Attacking Iran has made the entire region less safe and so far there is no evidence Iran has been deterred. They continue to successfully hit targets with missiles and drones, and they have expanded operations to successfully close the Strait of Hormuz. Seems like it would have been a lot cheaper to not attack Iran and instead to rein in Israel, an existing nuclear power that is the primary destabilizing force in the Middle East.
Iran is real threat to oil circulation in that region, they applied this tactics many times before. Now imagine if we come to current situation 5 years later when Iran has missiles with nuclear warheads?
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> they applied this tactics many times before Feel free to list the details about when, how and why it happened before ;) interestingly none of these scenario would even have happened if they had nukes to begin with, how weird
US banks' exposure to private credit hits $300B (2025) (alternativecreditinvestor.com)
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Meanwhile: https://www.marketscreener.com/news/us-private-credit-defaults-hit-record-9-2-in-2025-fitch-says-ce7e5fd8df8fff2d
So, if I’m following: Banks are lending to private equity firms to fund purchases of businesses. Many of these businesses are SaaS which means their valuations are tumbling. It seems possible that valuations tumble so much that the private equity owner no longer has any incentive to operate the business, bc all future cash flows will belong to the bank. What happens in practice then? Will banks actually step in and take operational control? Will the banks renegotiate terms such that the private equity owners are incentivized to continue as stewards? Or, will they prefer to force a business sale immediately?
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Private equity is huge inflation driver. I'm thrifty, and for years I enjoyed a $10/mo phone provider, ~$12.39 with taxes. I even evangelized this carrier with some young parents who were struggling to get financial traction while paying off student loans. Our affordable plan came to an end when the rates tripled! Turns out a private equity firm bought the company, jacked the rates on every customer, and sold it off again. This was not a fundamental cost being passed on in slightly increased fees -- it was private equity extracting millions from the people who can afford it the least. Across my financially optimized life, I see this happening repeatedly. Personally, I can afford a more expensive cell phone bill. But I would imagine that many who have a $10/mo plan do not have many other options. I would like to punish the banks who are funding attacks on consumers. If by no other means, than letting them fail.
> Banks are lending to private equity firms to fund purchases of businesses. Yes some businesses are SaaS but here's the real problem: Many businesses' sole purpose is _leveraged buy-outs_ which really is the devil in disguise. It goes like this: A VC specialising in veterinary clinics finds a nice, privately owned town clinic with regular customers and "fair" prices, approach the owners saying "we love the clinic you've built! We'll buy your clinic for $2,500,000! You've really earned your exit!". So now the VC lends the money from the bank, buys the clinic, and here's the important part: _they push the debt onto the clinic's books_. So all of a sudden the nice town clinic has $2,500,000 in debt, raise prices accordingly, ~~burn out personnel~~ slim operations accordingly, and any surplus that doesn't go to interest and amortization goes straight to the VC. Debt and collateral on the veterinary clinics. Risk free revenue to the VC.
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The Mars family is doing that with the vets.
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So yes, PE funds are probably overvalued right now and there's a lot of PE funds getting rich off management fees while not providing promised returns...but this comment is so braindead I don't know where to begin. First, VC stands for venture capital, which is a subset of private equity that does zero LBOs and doesn't even acquire any businesses. VC funds buy equity in startups, and take on zero debt to do so. You have your boogiemen totally confused. Second, the entire point of a PE fund that uses a leveraged buyout strategy is that they need to sell the acquired firm at a profit to make any returns to the fund. PE funds don't 'cashflow' businesses, and saddling a business with a bunch of debt is antithetical to that purpose anyways. Third, this is not "risk free revenue." It's a high risk strategy to use the debt to increase the value of the business by improving operations enough that you can sell it for a profit to the fund. If you saddle a company with debt and DON'T increase the value of the business beyond the debt you took on, the PE fund will not be in business for fund 2. The risk-free revenue while the fund is alive comes from the management fees that investors in the fund pay (usually 2%, which is way too high IMO, but has nothing to do with the debt or the acquired businesses). Please do not write confident sounding comments about things you don't understand, it spread misinformation and makes the internet a worse place.
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As someone who's life is currently being affected directly by PE middle-manning something I spend a LOT of time on, I am sensitive to this issue. IF you have problems with the vocab and terms, fine. But I have seen personally this issue in my life, that is affecting my bank account. And we have seen example after example of these LBO's ruining otherwise functioning businesses. It's happening. All over the place.
The business owes the money or the fund. In any case the individuals do not unless they backed it with personal collateral.
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hmm, yeah ok so the collateral is the business they are buying, I forgot that one.
So, if I hold a bunch of Private Equity, and my holdings need a continuity of business loan, would I: (a) have the holding take out the debt, exposing 100% of my stake or, (b) have the holding divest a piece of itself, giving me control of the existing and new entities, then have that piece take out the debt, exposing 0% of my stake? I imagine any PE firm worth its salt would go with option (b). Presumably regulators would sometimes try to block such deals, but I cannot imagine that happening during the current administration. (Do the regulators even still work for the US government? I thought they were mostly fired.) Similarly, I can imagine the banks refusing to lend in scenario (b), but I cannot imagine bank leadership being allowed to make such a decision if the PE firm is politically connected to the current administration.
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It sounds like you're effectively describing some fraud scheme. A smart lender will not issue loans without real collateral. If you create a subsidiary, that subsidiary has to have sufficient collateral and cashflow to secure a loan.
I've been told by the head of compliance of the largest European banking group that 2.5% is exactly the threshold at which they begin to be very worried/ at systemic risk Apparently they operate on very low level of tolerable risk (way lower than I thought)
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>2.5% is likely still survivable, but i think risk departments + regulators are all a lot less risk tolerant after seeing how quickly things went south in 2008 and worries about an out of control spiral
My understanding is that many private credit funds have been very lax about conducting basic due diligence on the creditworthiness of borrowers. For example, take First Brands, a multi-billion-dollar company which filed for bankruptcy last year. First Brands had pledged the same assets as collateral for loans from multiple private-credit funds. Those loans were being carried at a fantasy NAV of 100 cents per dollar, until suddenly they were not. Did none of these lenders submit UCC filings so other lenders could check which assets had already been pledged as collateral? Did none of these lenders ever check to see which assets had already been pledged? Did all these lenders make loans based on blind trust? Failing to check and verify that assets have not been pledged as collateral to other lenders is an amateur mistake . It's reckless, really. The equivalent in home-mortgage lending would for a mortgage lender never even bothering to check that a homeowner isn't getting multiple first-lien mortgages simultaneously on the same home, then forgetting to put the first lien on the property title. My take is that for many private credit funds, NAVs are basically fantasy.
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Do you know if First Brand's actions are considered fraud? Or was this entirely on the lenders to make sure they were in the clear regarding the collateral? Doesn't excuse the lack of diligence, but curious if there was some assumption of good faith that may have played a role in what diligence was or was not done.
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Only a court can decide if the actions are fraud, but they sure look like it to me. Fraud doesn't excuse the lack of due diligence.
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If lenders are in fact not performing due diligence and passing off good credit as bad...sounds suspiciously like a 2008-like era where noone cared about the credit worthiness but just wanted to generate lines of credit. Oh boy, if this is the case, oh boy. Lessons not learned indeed.
I'm re-running some of the Fed's stress tests and, somehow, still find myself flabbergasted that DB is at the top of my risk list. Despite only having $12bn of exposure, if they see a 60% loss on that risk alone (assuming 60% recovery and 1.5x leverage), they breach their 4.5% capital requirement. That's the lowest threshold I'm finding across all of the banks the Fed stress tests. Now 50% loss means wipe out. But given the size of the portfolio, there is also the concentration risk. A single private-credit firm going bust shouldn't take out a bank. But that seems–seems!–to be what I'm seeing.
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Time to short them?
Emacs internals: Tagged pointers vs. C++ std:variant and LLVM (Part 3) (thecloudlet.github.io)
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Happy to see discussion of LLVM's interesting implementation of Static Polymorphism using CRTP. Some recommended reads: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiously_recurring_template_pattern 2. https://david.alvarezrosa.com/posts/devirtualization-and-static-polymorphism/ 3. https://llvm.org/docs/ProgrammersManual.html#the-isa-cast-and-dyn-cast-templates
Do (u)intptr_t preserve provenance? Or does this count as exposed provenance when you convert back and forth? Maybe that is not the correct C++ terminology, I'm more familiar with how provenance works in Rust, where large parts of it got stabilised a little over a year ago. (What was stabilised was "strict provenance", which is a set of rules that if you abide them will definitely be correct, but it is possible the rules might be loosened in the future to be more lenient.) https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ptr/index.html#provenance
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Well, C++ does not have any promises about how Pointer Provenance works, so AFAIK the answer is "mu" meaning that's a bad question, don't ask that. But the likely destiny of C++ is to inherit the provenance rules that are an adjunct to C23, PNVI-ae-udi, Provenance Not Via Integers, Addresses Exposed, User Disambiguates As that name suggests, in this model provenance is not transmitted via integers. Every 123456 is always just the integer 123456 and there aren't magic 123456 values which are different and transmit some form of provenance from a pointer to some value which happened perhaps to be stored at address 123456 in memory. However, PNVI-ae-udi has Exposure, which means if we exposed the pointer in an approved way then the associated provenance is somehow magically "out there" in the ether, as a result if we have exposed this pointer then just having that integer 123456 works fine because we combined that integer 123456 with that provenance from the ether and make a working pointer. User disambiguation means that the compiler has to give you "benefit of the doubt" e.g. if you could mean to make a pointer to that Doodad which no longer exists as of a minute ago or to this other Doodad which does exist, well, benefit of the doubt means it was the latter and so your pointer is valid even though the addresses of both Doodads were the same.
Everything else in the siblings is true, but remember that the language and std types in rust all do this already. Most of the time it’s better to use a native enum or optional/result because they do this in the compiler/lib. It’s only really worth it if you need more than a few types or need precise control of the representation for C interop or something.
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To expand on the sibling answer: sort of! Rust will do niche optimisation, but for references and NonNull pointers this is limited to "the value 0 is invalid and can thus be used as a niche". But Rust does not (currently) take advantage of alignment niches in pointers. Nor does it use high bit on architectures where you know your whole theoretical address space isn't actually in use. Is doing that manually worth it? Usually not, but for some core types (classical example is strings) or in language runtimes it can be. Would it be awesome if this could be done automatically? Absolutely, but I understand it is a large change, and the plan is to later build upon the pattern types that are currently work in progress (and would allow you to specify custom ranged integer typed).
Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook (duckdb.org)
I know it's not really related, but how did you manage to build two startups worth getting acquired in such a short period of time?
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Oh that made it seem like I was the driving factor. Maybe for the first one (Percy.io) I can claim a large part of that success (owning the SDKs and support end to end). The other I just owned the front end infra and was on the growth team. The rest of the folks were the stars on that one.
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Doubt this is getting answered :)
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Just did :p
I’m sick to death of this. It’s so devoid from reality in 2026 that I see it as a lowest common denominator populist political catchphrase more than any legitimate contributor to any conversation. My min spec MacBook Pro from 6 years ago doesn’t flinch at this, and it barely flinches at a whole lot more. Can we please just move on? Maybe get your hardware checked if you’re legitimately still having these issues.
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Trust me, so am I. And I am dead serious.
Oh my. All I have to say is cherish the first week of your M* experience. :D When I got rid of my intel MBP (it was an i7) for my MBA it was astonishing how fast and smooth it was. So, the m5 with 48gb of ram will be amazing.
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Hah. yeah. I went from a 64GB i9 to a 32GB M2, and it was night and fucking day
Ah sorry minutes, they bill the most for macOS probably because of what a pain it is to scale it with apples EULA (I'm guessing) https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-pricing
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ah ok, minutes makes more sense. thanks.
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