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Garry Tan: "37K LOC per day across 5 projects" (twitter.com)
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we're in the age of idea-men and garry is their prophet.
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I was gonna say, we already dragged Garry for writing like this a couple weeks ago [0].. But this is a new incident of him measuring value by lines of code. Carry on. 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47418576
"CEO Said a Thing " Journalism (karlbode.com)
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I'm confident this phenomenon exists in other industries too. Is there a term that's equivalent to "reactionary" but applies to leftist/liberal ideals or is it fine for me to start referring to this kind of writing as "reactionary" save that I apply some sort of qualifier like "leftist" or "liberal" before or afterwards?
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im not sure what about this makes it left reactionary but I suppose left reactionary would be the term
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It is at least entertaining when certain CEOs speak off-the-cuff and reveal they have no clue what they are talking about. Jensen thinks DLSS 5 works at "the geometry level", for instance. Oh and he pays engineers $500,000 to spend $250,000 on Claude tokens.
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It doesn't reveal that they have no clue of what they're talking about. They know that a good number of idiot CEOs will hear this and dictate their engineers spend more claude/codex money, which benefits them. Jensen isn't an idiot, he's capitalizing on the market.
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[delayed]
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Also "some minority group is concerned about something" journalism.
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"[Thing] happened and [group] are furious!" journalism
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That's still more interesting than what some sociopath rich person without a real clue says.
A Peer-Vetted AI Stack for Builders (medium.com)
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More of a meta question, but how are people staying on top of the firehose of new AI tools coming out left and right? Personally I'd love a curated list of a handful of tools each week with more concrete examples/deep dives (e.g. autoresearch being a recent one)
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Explore the Tools/Resources added so far directly here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12r03Uscybrj2PTc-H7bq7k3fD7GOcCmFVhsFbK5rwHA/edit?usp=sharing and you can add new ones for us to introduce with your perspective: https://forms.gle/rgtsm9RfkX8rz8877 Idea is to collect tools that people have been testing and finding really valuable in whatever work they do
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This is a very good resource. Thanks for sharing..
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If you have some tools to recommend, please do add them: https://forms.gle/rgtsm9RfkX8rz8877
This is a great place for people to have connect the 'dots' between various zones of an AI system. Right now on a weekly basis, we have a new solution for each of the body parts, delivering specialized to general solutions, serving different use cases. What would be fun project out of this is to create a use-case based AI stack provider, which can account for peer acceptance to give you the best stack from thousands of possible combinations.
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That's an interesting angle. We haven't yet included a column to indicate anything for vertical specialization on the tools but that could be an indication especially if some frameworks are customized for a particular vertical or known to work better. If you have some tools to recommend, please do add them: https://forms.gle/rgtsm9RfkX8rz8877 If you already know vertical specific behavior, you can put that in comment and we can introduce something to capture that soon.
Spain shuts airspace for US planes involved in Iran war (english.aawsat.com)
Is it ok now to call the US electorate suckers? "US Republicans consider health care cuts to fund Iran war" - https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-republicans-consider-health-care-cuts-to-fund-iran-war-axios-reports/3885415 A reminder Israel has both universal healthcare and tuition free university...and voted yesterday to give $255 million to ultra-Orthodox programs and institutions, including yeshivas...that actually refuse to engage in military conscription... https://www.timesofisrael.com/opposition-mks-voted-to-allocate-nis-800-million-for-haredi-schools-how-did-it-happen/
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> Israel has both universal healthcare and tuition free university This is both wrong and off topic. Israel health care is funded by a 5% additional income tax tier. non working people pay a significant fixed annual fee. University is not free. $5K for the public institutions - which have limited admissions. $10K for many of the spill over private institutions. Now - about those space lasers ....
> Israel has had public education and public healthcare forever… This also applies to US aid.
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Nope, Israel had it much earlier.
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Israel, the nation state, came into being in 1948, with the explicit financial and military aid of the United States to do so. It has had American support since within hours of its founding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Israel#State_of_Israel "At the end of 1948, 53% of Israel's Jewish population was insured, about 80% of them by Clalit, with a few small health funds insuring the remainder. In the following years, Israel's healthcare system was expanded, and within a decade, about 90% were insured." Universal healthcare became a thing in 1995, it seems.
DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding (datacenterdynamics.com)
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One thing that's not super obvious, but is happening - 'AI' is increasing demand for 'normal' (e.g cpu) compute. People are building more apps because the cost of software has reduced, these need deploying somewhere. More commits == more CI runs, then there's then the 'agent' usage, things like openclaw instances etc. Just because they are expanding, it might not mean they're betting the house on more GPUs (though likely a part of it)
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I hope they don't be too much on AI, but I do think they deserve to grow more as a cloud provider, they need to focus strongly on following up on people's complaints about their existing services. I have seen many threads of people with complaints about their S3 compatible storage being very limited in its design, and potentially wildly insecure. If they are serous enough to be asking for roughly a billion dollars, they should really consider fixing up their current offering either first or at the same time. It's only a matter of time before some giant scandal has customers running away. I say this having used DO since... 2012?
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A little late to get in on the "AI"-based hype train in order to raise money, if you ask me. I guess they've fallen victim to the investors saying "What's your AI strategy?"
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Just to share something positive, I've had a ttrss instance running forever on digitalocean in NY. I like them for side projects too. $ uptime 16:06:14 up 2802 days, 15:03, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05 $ uname -a Linux myinstance 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.65-1+deb7u1 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Don't risk or trust DigitalOcean with production grade stuff, it disappears and doesn't get fixed and the support stops responding or escalating when their own information clearly outlines the gaps that have occurred in their systems.
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Off late my experience has been that they are pushing more around UX and support but I am recent user.
I love DigitalOcean to the point where I actually applied for a job there[0]. The UI is leagues better than AWS and there are really useful API endpoints to control common things. I've been a paying customer for something like 12 years and I've never had an issue. [0] They never got back to me, sadly.
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Their interview process sucks. They expect PhD-level experience for basic cloud operations. And since they started outsourcing to Hyderabad, they’ve gotten even worse.
I had a job interview with one of the founders. The whole process was, by far, the worst experience I ever had in my life, and a complete waste of my time. (I interviewed for maybe 25-30 jobs in my life overall).
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Worst job interview or worst experience overall ?
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same
You are falling behind because you haven't fed the insincerity machine (christianheilmann.com)
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The title is completely opposite to the content of the article. Who's falling behind? What does falling behind even mean if the OP doesn't care about numbers and really doesn't want to play the social media game? Social media as it existed is gone, because people got tired of it, just as they got tired of geocities and myspace before that. The new iteration is really bad, and there's a good chance people will get tired of it just as quickly as they got over the older ones. Meanwhile, let's try to ignore stupid people doing stupid things with AI as much as we can.
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I amsure it was Jaron Lanier, in his book Who Owns The Future, who predicted the inevitable outcome of bots talking to bots on social media. He said that in 2013, and now we're in 2026, not only is it possible, but it's very likely. I am glad about it. I think social media, in its current ad-infested, addiction-fueled data-harvesting form, is pure poison.
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I really strongly recommend his book You Are Not A Gadget. He wrote it like fifteen years ago and it feels like he is describing last year. Like he's telling you about a lot of the problems of social media today, writing before Facebook had ads. Why it is worth reading is his thinking about the causes and outcomes is so clear. Its still useful today.
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The advice here is good, and I'm a big believer that the cream (e.g., sincerity and real opinions) rises to the top for writing. That said, think folks dunk on these types of writing automation tools too much when, for many, they can be a gateway drug to consistent posting and finding your online voice. That is to say, the whole post is a bit of an internet old-head complaint. Reminds me of baby boomers complaining about a "decline" in work ethic and having children without acknowledging the massive shifts in the economic accessibility that support these life milestones. It's easy to write a post like this when you've already built a following because you started when social media was a greenfield experience. It's much harder when you have to compete for signal while being pressured to build a brand and perform at your day job.
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Who are these influencers that are getting ahead by dolling out AI slop in their likeness?
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It's got to be said that rewarding people who make content on a regular, frequent schedule seems to A: be a way of coercing a fairly high minimum level of labour out of platformed accounts and B: a good way of flooding feeds with content which is largely devoid of novelty as a handful of prolific accounts dominate what people end up seeing.
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You can see this happen in real time if you closely follow some youtube channels. You take someone who is genuinely talented and has some interesting, novel insights. And, maybe a couple of their videos makes it big. And they rightly think they should keep making videos because they have other insights. And they're not wrong. But over time, something happens. No one has a novel, brilliant insight 1-2 times a week. So once they really turn in and decide to make a serious effort with their channel, the quality of their content suffers. Maybe it's not quite click-bait, but it's less genuine and more formulaic than their original work. A bit more sensational. Videos are reaching for reasons to exist, since the author needs to keep pumping them out. I wouldn't quite call it corruption, but it's a clear degradation. In principle it's not a novel problem, since people have been writing weekly editorials for a long time. But, there seems to be something about the Youtube format that makes it such that the big channels must always play the game and pump out sub-par content.
New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements (seattletimes.com)
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WA has bigger problems like crazy overspending at the state level and many cities, leading to a spiral of new taxes, even if they are unconstitutional. This won’t be enough to make the state more attractive to workers and businesses.
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This feels a tad heavy-handed and will make it tougher to sell a business without hard assets. It should just be banned for employees or require a payout of (previous salary) * (length of non-compete).
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Why wait until 2027, instead of making it effective immediately?
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A win for Adam Smith capitalism.
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Not sure if this is meant sarcastically or not, but it is - it helps reduce transaction costs of changing employers. Anyone who has ever signed a contract with wide non-competes knows that it is hard for an individual to negotiate against it on an individual basis, but they are rarely enforced in practice, which leaves open individuals to worries about "maybe I'm one of the unlucky few?" These clauses then primarily only increased transaction costs, so eliminating them aids free exchange.
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Not sarcastic. Anything that helps keep markets optimally competitive is good for capitalism.
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It’s not the noncompetes that’s the problem, it’s confidentiality agreements with extremely broad language. Learn about the legal principle of “inevitable disclosure”. It’s the idea you can’t work for a competitor because you can’t help yourself but violate an NDA
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Have fun trying that in CA.
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Inevitably, it's just the need for lawyers to intervene in "common sense" negotiations. It's never legal to do X, Y, Z, but if the business has all the lawyers and the employee has non, then it doesn't really matter whats legal; it's whose willing to exhaust the cash to fight the issue. Which of course, is why unions are what's needed to properly negotiate employee-employer relationships, the same way a strong government is needed to negotiate corporate-civil relationships. Americans, however, have decided that "individual freedom" is _soooooo_ valuable, that it only exists for people with enough cash to defend it.
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The only time I see non-competes as reasonable is when someone sells a business. It seems fair to put a territory restriction on a seller so the new owner doesn't have to immediately start competing against the person they bought out.
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Here in Sweden non-competes without a financial agreement is void. And those that offer some financial are probably OK, but haven't been tried extensively. The non-competes I've signed have offered 60% of my base pay for six months (the length of the non-compete) if I cannot find a job because of the contract if the company exercise it. They never have exercised it for me.
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That's how it works in California. I had a 3 year non-compete with VMware after we sold a business to them. It was restricted to the specific market and technology our business covered but didn't limit activities in other areas. It seemed completely fair to me. Besides, competing would have meant doing exactly the same thing over again. What's the fun in that?
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>Besides, competing would have meant doing exactly the same thing over again. What's the fun in that? All of the baggage and tech debt gone! THIS TIME WE'LL DO IT RIGHT
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Why? They started one successful business. It seems good for society if they go on to start another.
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That is not even remotely the point OP is arguing.
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Often an acquisition of a company is for the set of customers. If I sell my lawn care business and then turn around and email all my former clients offering them lawn care via my new company, I’ve just undercut what I just sold. Noncompete shouldn’t be so broad that I couldn’t move to another city and start a lawn care business there, but I shouldn’t be able to compete directly with the business I just sold using my insider information of that business.
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There's also a big difference between starting a competing business like your example, and being barred from say working on "cloud infrastructure" because your previous employer also worked on "cloud infrastructure". It can be blurry for executives, but in general noncompetes seem to be used to push pay down more than for any legitimate business purpose.
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Why would I buy a business if the person im buying it from is just going to create a new one to compete with me?
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Isn't that doable via stay on and holdback clauses?
The flip side should be considered as well. There should be some sort of protection for small startup companies. A big company should not be able to steal an innovative startup's technology by hiring away the employees that worked on the product. That used to happen a lot when Bill Gates was running Microsoft, for example. Patents provide some protection, but it is flawed because a big company can put you out of business if you get into a patent war. An employee should be able to leave at any time and work for a competitor, but maybe should not do identical work, otherwise startups will have a hard time protecting their IP.
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Small startups in California (where many, if not the majority, of tech startups are headquartered) do just fine without enforceable non-compete agreements. It's also already unlawful to steal another company's assets when you leave. Besides, companies should file provisional patent applications as soon as they invent valuable proprietary technology to prevent the sort of subject matter leakage you mention.
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No big company is going to bother poaching that way. They are either going to purchase the company outright or undercut them with their own competing product to kill it off through attrition. We're not in the 2010's anymore where people are banging at the door for singular SWE's.
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acquhire practicies show that yes - sometimes people really ARE the company. However, i think for the average C# developer, or Epson printer specialist or wordpress or Bosch controller analyst, these arent really true.
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Companies need to put more care into who they trust, and maybe incentivize skin in the game. If leaving for a competitor means you lose equity, agency, ownership, or some intangible, that can outweigh bigger paychecks. The market should be able to solve this problem without the government setting arbitrary rules, and people should be allowed to sign contracts that limit or restrict their freedom, so long as it involves informed consent from all parties. If Microsoft wants to hire an AI expert for a million dollars a year, and restrict him from competing for 2 years after leaving Microsoft so as to avoid losing market advantage, that seems like a reasonable thing for Microsoft to want. If all Apple has to do to get all the Copilot secrets is hire the chief copilot engineer for 1.5 million, seems like that creates a toxic dynamic and all but guarantees acquihires and a near immediate turnaround in a startup to corporate pipeline for raiding IP. Maybe we should be limiting businesses to doing business at a scale they can responsibly handle. If you can't get human customer service for your computer issues because Windows and Mac have scaled far beyond the number of users they could ever hope to handle, maybe that market needs regulation, and unless they scale customer service accordingly, they don't get to target a majority of the world's population as their customer base? That'd certainly create jobs and opportunities for Linux and induce a revolution in software markets, and it'd limit the incentives for MS and Apple and big tech to do shitty things to suppress the markets overall.
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The solution here in finance is garden leave, where people are contractually barred from competing with their former employer during a period for which they are compensated as if they were fully employed!
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This is not a mechanism to protect startups. This is a mechanism to protect the flow of ideas, whether the ideas are flowing from a big company to a startup or vice versa. Workers who find a big company bureaucratic should be able to launch a startup. Workers who find a small startup insufficiently resourceful should also join a big company to get resources.
It always baffles me how much resistance there is to banning noncompetes every time this is proposed, and how that resistance lives right alongside “we want to be the next Silicon Valley”, even though pretty much every analysis of “what’s Silicon Valley’s secret sauce” cites the unenforceability of noncompetes as one of the most important factors. But maybe the ship is turning very slowly.
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What's the actual steel man argument for why noncompetes are good? I've never really encountered one, just seen the corporate advocacy that they don't want to deal with high employee turnover. Best I can do: Non-competes are (possibly) unenforceable anyway, so signing one maybe acts as a value signal for the employee? "I'd have to violate my non-compete, so in order to do that and permanently burn the bridge with my current company, you need to pay me $X + $Y." Frankly I don't buy it, though, because it assumes too much about the rationality of all actors involved and the savviness of the employee during negotiations.
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> What's the actual steel man argument for why noncompetes are good? It makes it possible to confidently buy a business that's mostly or all goodwill. Otherwise the previous owner can simply poach all the clients. Also lots of jurisdictions allow non-competes as long as the employee is paid for the duration of the non-compete clause. Obvious win there. Non-competes on employees without compensation are obviously bad.
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I am glad most places are getting rid of non-competes. But here is the best argument I've heard for them: For many companies, a lot of their value is in their intellectual property. Non-competes exist not because the company will enforce it against employees (they might, but they usually don't), but more as a fig-leaf to potential investors down the line asking about the value of the intellectual property. The argument goes, if someone could easily leave the company with the knowledge earned and go to a competitor, then the investment wouldn't be as valuable.
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There's a lot of opposition to pretty much any nigh objectively good thing for the people. Just follow the money. It usually comes down to 1. lobbyists vying for a company who wants to keep power 2. the legislature having its own vested interest from relationship/deal/lobbying 3. the minority of constituents are the ones who constantly call in and go to townhalls, because they have the time, money, or energy to do so compared to someone who's at work during a townhall.
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Is there actually substantial resistance to this? Or just a few manufactured counter-arguments from news outlets trying to do a both-sides take on this? Non-competes have been heavily limited or outright voided in California. That's an easy and obvious rebuttal to the Silicon Valley argument.
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Haven't followed this one, but ~a decade ago, Lobbies representing Microsoft, Amazon, and hospital industry had substantial resistance and came for in-person public hearing to oppose it. It did resulted in water down the prior attempt at banning non compete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19954458 Originally it should have been a total non compete ban, but got nerfed to only apply to anyone making more than 100k/year
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Yes. The US Chamber of Commerce is particularly noteworthy in their attempts to slow the deployment of this policy at scale. They of course act on behalf of their members as a reputational laundering operation, so their members do not have to engage in this lobbying directly (potentially exposing them to reputational risk). U.S. Chamber of Commerce and business groups file lawsuit challenging FTC noncompete ban - https://www.fmglaw.com/employment-law-blog-us/u-s-chamber-of-commerce-and-business-groups-file-lawsuit-challenging-ftc-noncompete-ban/ - April 26th, 2024 > Less than 24 hours later, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, the Texas Association of Business, and the Longview Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit against the FTC in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas alleging that the consumer protection agency lacks the authority to issue rules that define unfair methods of competition, and instead, the FTC Act only allows it to bring cases challenging particular practices. The Chamber’s Complaint also contends that even if the FTC possessed such authority, the “noncompete rule would still be unlawful because noncompete agreements are not categorically unlawful under Section 5.” The lawsuit further argues that the rule is “impermissibly retroactive” and reflects an “arbitrary and capricious exercise” of the FTC’s power. > The Chamber of Commerce is seeking an order “vacating and setting aside the noncompete rule in its entirety” and an order permanently enjoining the FTC from enforcing the rule. The plaintiffs are also seeking an order to delay the effective date and implementation of the noncompete ban until the conclusion of the case. (and so, state by state enactment is the path forward until regime change can potentially speed federal enactment and enforcement of this policy)
Non-competes are almost always unenforceable. Never take money (although even then, they're still mostly useless), and just ignore them and no one is going to do anything. That was what my business law professor taught us. No court is going to enforce a non-compete if it means the person who cannot compete is going to be unable to support themselves. The only time it'll be enforced is if you're already independently wealthy. In other words, a completely useless scare tactic.
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> No court is going to enforce a non-compete if it means the person who cannot compete is going to be unable to support themselves. The only time it'll be enforced is if you're already independently wealthy. The first part is probably usually true, because places where non-competes are enforceable generally will not enforce them if they are overly broad. But for tech workers there are almost always other jobs that the worker can qualify for and pay similarly to their old job but are not covered by the non-compete and then then non-competes do get enforced even though the worker is not independently wealthy. A fairly recent example [1]. [1] https://callaborlaw.com/blog/former-draftkings-employee-loses-bet-on-californias-no-non-compete-law
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I don't think this is quite true. in my industry & city, noncompetes are very common and commonly enforced.
I lost a job because of one. In nyc. Company made some threats and the offer was pulled.
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You can sue the old company for that. You had a job that they are not allowing you to do. Courts don't like it when someone isn't allowed to support themselves, and so generally place narrow limits on what a non-compete tan cover. You should sue for the sake of the rest of us who might be next when this tactic is found to work.
I know at least one person who joined a Michigan startup, moved over, got sued by non compete, and the new employer just didnt want any hassle and laid them off. This person had to leave country then. The take home is dont take tech jobs in states where non-compete clauses are still legal.
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Sue them back. Represent yourself. Get compensatory damages. They will lose unless you can support yourself. Do you think any state is going to let someone go on unemployment and withdraw from the public dole just because some private company wants to gain some competitive advantage. Lol But I do agree in general, never take compensation upon leaving a company, for whatever reason. Then everything is certainly unenforceable. As for leaving the country... even if a non-compete is found to be enforceable (due to you being self-sufficient, or sufficently compensated), then the scope cannot be country wide. It has to be limited to a particular reasonable geography and a particular reasonable field.
Take better notes, by hand (brianschrader.com)
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I haven't used pen and paper for note taking for years and years now. I used to keep a lot of notes in markdown organized into folders (used obsidian for a bit but was just easier to do in Vim). These days I don't take that many notes, usually only to capture key points/decisions in discussions but usually are pretty short lived. I find things get captured in other forms such that notes aren't really needed that much anymore.
anyone try e-ink style tablets (like remarkable?) the form factor/ability to backup is attractive to me but the price tag is a bit nuts...
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I am currently typing from a Daylight Computer that I've been using as my primary mobile device (over a laptop or smartphone) for a bit over a year now. I've used it so much the edges have started to peel off a bit where I hold it. Easily worth the money for me. Days of battery life, buttery smooth animations, reflective e-paper display, full android with an unlockable bootloader, it's great.
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I have a Supernote which I like primarily because it's repairable and the developers are very responsive. It's the A5 version. It's very nice to write on and if you haven't tried eink in a while, it's pretty impressive. The soft surface is also a replaceable film. It has a Lamy colab pen which is very nice. Downside is no backlight which many users tout as an improvement, or praise it as a minimalist perk. I don't really agree, but it does mean that the ink surface is closer to the pen so there's less parallax error. It makes it less usable as an ebook reader though, for example on a flight you'd have to use the blinding overhead lights. Sure the price is comparable to 20+ notebooks. I think if you actually use notebooks, they're good. If you don't, it's questionable whether it'll change your habit. It also doesn't replace the satisfaction of a nice ink pen on nice paper. I have a collection of fountain pen ink that I've used since university (for years of daily lecture notes which is more writing than I'm ever likely to do again - we're talking up to 20 A4 sides a day) and the bottles are still practically full. So good writing equipment can be very economical. There are other issues like no colour (on mine) and PDF support is still ropey.
There are ways to write that are faster and more legible. I recommend looking into the Getty-Dubay style.
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Thanks, though I think part of longhard feeling labourious these days is RSI sadly. I did try to correct my scrawl for effort and legibility a while ago, but it just wouldn't stick!
Bitwarden integrates with OneCLI agent vault (onecli.sh)
integration is a two-way street. it doesn't matter which is stated first
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I added "login with google" to my website. Should I go to the news media to brag about how google is launching an integration with me?
Who cares? Did you get the point of the message or not? People trying to detect AI and seeing red the moment their AI-sniff test fails are killing discourse.
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The authors want me to trust them to handle all my passwords. I'm not going to do that if they don't respect me enough to tell me I'm reading AI-generated content.
OneCLI assumes that the proxy is fully trusted by the agent and it still has authorized access to your accounts. What happens when the agent environment is breached? All you need is the the fake key + URL of the proxy and that maps to your real keys and you can make authorized requests outside of the agent. The real keys don't have to be leaked, just the fake ones have to map to the real one; so unless they are rotated, then this is a problem.
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Exactly. I appreciate the considerations they have already taken, this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed as agentic AI continues its warpath. However, this feels to me like widening the attack surface rather than tightening security. I'm going to dig in to this over the next few weeks. Hopefully I prove myself wrong
FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data (ftc.gov)
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I’m almost certain these dating apps, including Hinge and Bumble are creating loads of good-looking fake women profiles to attract male users and keep their platforms “sticky”. There are suspicious telltale signs like location downtown when nobody says they live downtown in my area. The same responses and prompts across multiple profiles. It’s paramount to them cooking their books, but with vanity metrics.
All of these sites do shady shit. I'm so glad I'm no longer single. I signed up for eHarmony with a unique email address dedicated to that site. After wasting 6 months, I chose to delete my account. Lo and behold, soon spam started to show up on this account, as if the floodgates had been opened. It was a unique account that I had not used anywhere else just for this specific reason, and my hunch was justified.
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They were good 15 years ago. As with all things, it went to shit when Match.com started consolidating everything and the bean counters realized that a quality product was not as profitable. Surprised it took this long to get litigation. So many people complaining about how crap dating sites are, but no one thought to realize the site itself was the problem and fell into the whole "looksmaxxing" grift. Some people really will do anything except admit that rich people are corrupt.
I met my current wife on OKC in 2010, before online dating became an utter cesspool. I've been out of the dating scene for 16 years now, but based on what I see on social media, I think online dating sucks today for three reasons. 1. Many men (Not all, but many) are there simply because they want to get laid. They're not looking for a relationship, they're looking for a hook-up, and they're not honest about their intentions. It doesn't help that people argue over whether Tinder is a dating app or a hook-up app. 2. I'm not sure how to put this without seeming misogynistic, but some women greatly over-value themselves. Or at the very least, they have out-dated ideas of courtship. Some of them expect to be taken out to $50+/plate restaurants on a first date, while many men think women are just trying to score free meals. It's hard to make relationships kick off when they begin so adversarial. 3. Dating sites/apps have a financial incentive for your relationship to fail. They can give you matches they know are bad since it keeps you as a serial dater and on their app. They're in a sticky spot where their most successful customer is one that they will never see another dime from, and there's not really a way around it.
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> Many men (Not all, but many) are there simply because they want to get laid. Honestly, that's fine. The issue was when the "get laid" app suddenly decided to be the "find serious relationship" app. Makes about as much sense as Roblox thinking about a dating app, but I guess the MBA's told them it brings more monies. > but some women greatly over-value themselves. It's overblown, but the high level concept of "women are picky" the inevitable course of nearly all dating aspects. Evolutionary wise, women need to be picky due to their long gestation period, and men aren't as picky because they can copulate with dozens of women over the course of days. Add in a caste system and the pareto principle, and even scenes from millenia ago aren't as different from 2026 Tinder as you'd think. But of course your last point only polarizes this existing natural phenomenon. >Dating sites/apps have a financial incentive for your relationship to fail. This is why we needed to litigate these sites yesterday. But we were too busy fighting amongst ourselves, like serfs warring in the streets while the kings sit in an ivory tower. This is an issue only regulation can fix. The human element shouln't be sold off to capitalism, especially in this time where people are supposedly concerned about falling birth rates.
> They're in a sticky spot where their most successful customer is one that they will never see another dime from, and there's not really a way around it. naive question: why has no one made an app with the reverse incentive structure? i understand that the current business model is much more lucrative...but i feel like with how fed up people are with the inability of modern online dating to provide quality, long-lasting relationships a new platform that optimizes for match quality and longevity would eat all of Match Groups offerings lunches. i guess there just isn't enough money to be made so it's not even worth it?
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What insentives can an app maker provde to turn the structure around?
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The reverse incentive is used by match makers. It works well for people seeking marriage since there is a legal endpoint to be reached that can’t be faked and is meant to be permanent.
> Many men (Not all, but many) are there simply because they want to get laid. They're not looking for a relationship, they're looking for a hook-up, and they're not honest about their intentions. In fairness, this is not at all exclusive to online dating.
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Or starting a job; wanting to advance in the office; become an entrepreneur; wanting to go into politics; wanting to go into the clergy; wanting to become president; wanting to visit islands; wanting run casinos; wanting to run beuaty pagents... Hrm...
CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font (codingfont.com)
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Roboto Mono for the win.
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It works -- by the end I was facing off against my two favorites. ;) I CAN'T CHOOSE.
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Berkeley Mono, Iosevka, and Cascadia Code are missing which are my favorite fonts. The game handed me Roboto Mono instead. What I noticed while playing was that when fonts are similar, I really pay attention to the rendering of "m" and "r". When they look off, the whole font looks off to me.
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I was pleased to find that I chose the font I actually use.
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Hilariously, I had the exact opposite. I use Fira Code, which I eliminated in the first round.
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Courier Prime won for me, I've always been a courier fan I guess because I wrote all my books in the 90s with it..
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I got Anonymous Pro
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I wish it had my favorite in it so that I could do a blind test to see if it really is my favorite: https://juliamono.netlify.app
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I clicked this link with the thought "I'm curious, but I don't think I really have strong opinions about fonts", and was almost immediately proven wrong with the revulsion I felt at Xanh Mono. Though it turns out that VS Code default (Droid Sans Mono) is (to my eye) basically identical to my winner (Roboto Mono), so the exercise was mostly academic.
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Did the whole thing. I got IBM Plex. Actually looks great
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This is my daily driver, although recently I have been enjoying Cascadia Code for something fresh.
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I like, as it is quick to decide, and you can see font names afterwards (some indeed looked similar). At the same time, it would be wonderful if window sizes were more consistent (now things are obstructed, with scrolling, etc). And I would love to download the ranking graph!
I already use Inconsolata but had customized it to a point where I didn't recognize it here. It won anyway. Validation!
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It told me I should use Incosolata. I've used Consolas for as long as I can remember, so I guess they must be pretty similar. Also, about half of these fonts look utterly unsuitable for coding to me. Nobody really needs serifs and loopy l's in a coding font, surely?
Nowadays I use a lot of Iosevka. Previously I was on Ubuntu and JetBrains Mono, both are great fonts. A bit of PT Mono as well, even Terminus for a bit. One of my favorites has got to be Liberation Mono though - the most readable font I’ve ever found, even if Iosevka lets me put more stuff on screen horizontally. Oh also I’ve started enjoying Cascadia Code recently, surprisingly pleasant.
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Yeah I was disappointed that Cascadia was not in the fonts on the site. What won me over for Cascadia was: I decided to try it for a couple weeks. By the end, I was certain that Cascadia must be larger than my previous font because it was so much easier to read, so I opened two terminals side-by-side and counted the rows+columns that fit between my old font and Cascadia. To my complete shock, Cascadia fit a couple more lines on my screen, indicating that it was actually _smaller_ despite being easier to read.
My coding font is comic-shanns-mono, here's how it looks: https://github.com/jesusmgg/comic-shanns-mono?tab=readme-ov-file#what-does-it-look-like
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Thanks, I hate it.
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diabolical
72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes (eco3min.fr)
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- Shift back to exchange based taxes away from income taxes. - Spin down the federal reserve, establish a US bank and adjust the self-loans against the future into a solid repayment plan at a minimal interest rate. - Reestablished precious metal backing to core currencies (gold, silver, etc.) - Establish constitutional amendment establishing non-living entities and restricting speech rights as such. If a CEO wants to donate personal funds, cool, no corporate backing to political organizations full-stop. - Strong protections and some spending in favor of domestic security and production. - Drop subsidy spending for GMO commodity foods and byproducts. Eliminate GRAS protections against any "food" that didn't exist in the US food supply before 1880. FDA acknowledgement when more than one region considers an engineered food product as unsafe, minimally processed animal and plant products excluded.
And yet the feels surrounding $1M net worth have not been and likely will never be adjusted for this.
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Sure they will. Making “$100,000” used to be a crazy milestone. Not anymore. Likewise, a millionaire isn’t a millionaire until about $10M.
They export something else.
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You're on to something, aren't you? Like... Maybe manufacturing isn't the end all?
What inspired Trump to do this? The Epstein files?
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I think fuentes' theory holds merit: It's that in running for re-election trump was trying to avoid prison, so he was desparately looking for approval from many disparate and conflicting interest groups (some anti-war, some anti-immigration, some pro-immigration) one of which was pro-zionist. So not so much the epstien files but more just impending criminal charges in general (The epstien conspiracy voters were actually one of the interest groups trump wooed). I also read an article here that suggested trump's bombing of iran during peace talks at the same time as israeli attacks established that if israel attacked then USA would also be a valid combatant (which wasn't the case previously). So this bombing of iran's nuclear facilities earlier was sort of a trap that made it so that israel could rope us into any conflict at any later time- which they did this time, they threatened to strike iran with or without us. Lastly, I imagine that success in decapitating the venezuelan regime gave trump and his cabinet confidence in going to war. This whole war seems good for israel but in the long term it doesn't really pan out in the long term for them either. It is sort of the cart leading the horse. There is a theory proposed by prof. Jiang (PredictiveHistory) that this war was catalyzed by a certain apocolyptic eschatology of jews/christians in a couple high places. Whether the Netanyahu or Trump adminstration is captured by this chohort or just pursing short term goals is hard to say, but this is the only explanation I can find for who benefits long-term from this action.
It's meaningful because you pay capital gains on nominal increase in dollar value even if there is no real change in value. Inflation is thus a tax on realized non-gains at roughly 1/5th the cumulative inflation.
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I'd argue that's more of an issue with the tax code than a fundamental problem with inflation. In and ideal world we would be able to write off losses to inflation, I'm sure many financial geeks have griped about this before, heh
Also we’re looking at periods that involve dramatically different monetary policy (gold standard before WWII, Bretton Woods from 1944-1976, then the current regime).
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One could argue that the defining aspect of each of those shifts in monetary policy has been to devalue the dollar further. I have a relatively basic understanding of economics though, and do understand the arguments that even if that's the outcome it's not an inherently bad one as an american, though a notable effect appears to have been massively widening inequality.
Exactly, it doesn't matter to me how much COVID contributed to the erosion of 1901 100 Dollars.
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It (presumably) does matter to you how much COVID policy contributed to houses doubling in cost, though.
That’s ~3.17% compounded annually. Modest, stable inflation is good. It encourages investment & discourages deferring consumption for indirect monetary reasons. “Stable” is the hard part.
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This is dogma, but I'm not sure it's possible or even ideal. Booms and busts seem endemic to any economy that targets inflation, and of course most entities (that don't understand the balance) want to encourage booms and limit busts. Meanwhile, there's another way to think of inflation (and also deflation): Inflation obfuscates the value of money and therefore of goods, services, etc. In an environment where value is volatile, it makes sense to keep moving, keep trading, because you might come into possession of something that was undervalued before you owned it, or that you'll need in a future when it would otherwise be too expensive. The people who skim off the top of all of this activity love this environment. Deflation, on the other hand, makes value readily and immediately apparent. What was speculative and risky goes to zero and people hold onto things with intrinsic value. Those who skim profit off of economic activity hate the slowdown, obviously, but maybe you need periods of this to reset when valuations becomes too far removed from reality. Is it a bad thing for people to buy what they need, when they need it, instead of being forced by inflation to anticipate their needs further and further out?
"worth" can have two meanings in this context. $100 from 1917 can be worth exactly $100 today. Or it can be worth what you can buy with it. Some folks will see a $100 bill from the era and see an old $100 bill. Some folks will imagine what that $100 took to save back then, and what it bought. FWIW my brain automatically went with "the goods that can be bought with $100" - such as what I could buy in a grocery store today with $100 would be about what I could buy with $3 back then. I never considered the other reading until this thread. It was obvious to me the author meant "you can buy 97% less stuff today with the same $100".
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I don't understand how you mean. They say $100 back then, in what meaning is a $100 bill back then worth the same as having $3 today?
#1: US military war spending concerns are largely overblown. It's expending what it already has. The spending is mostly on its own internal industry i.e. the US economy (with due respect to broken window fallacy). It arguably makes it all back from the increase in oil prices. It's a very different thing to fire a $5m missile that you imported vs one that you made domestically with all-domestic components and labor.
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I'd say firing a missile into another country is technically firing finite or hard to acquire resources into another country. All the resources for the new rockets have to be sourced from somewhere and it's not really important where they came from. They are a real cost not some circular funding. It's more or less blowing up big piles of cash that can not easily be replaced.
One of the goals of the Heritage Foundation is a weak dollar. They believe they can bring manufacturing back to the US this way. I don't think they're right. I do think they will continue weakening the dollar.
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> I don't think they're right. it's worse then them not being right the only way a weak dollar would majorly matter for bringing back production is iff production is cheap so a 20% weaker dollar must not come with 20% higher "dollar" prices (living cost, salary). You need to decrees living cost and dollar value in lock step (i.e. weaker dollar without inflation!). But this seem impossible IMHO. And if we look at what happened, if anything, it went the other way. And if you try to force it anyway you are basically saying "we effectively disown most money of most US citizens" and use that to try to attack manufacturing, while likely not relevantly affecting the wealthiest. That is just plain evil. And not very surprising if you consider that many "manufacturing countries" have pretty horrifying working conditions often not "that" far apart from slavery. Worse this likely wouldn't work either, because iff your countries population doesn't have the money to buy stuff anymore, and investments are risky, why would you even bother to produce there? To then export to countries where investments into production lines are more reliable? Like how is that supposed to work? Naturally things can be different if we only speak about high-tech / high-end manufacturing. But the current steps do not seem promising to archive that either: 1) this kind of manufacturing lines need even higher investments, i.e. act even more allergic wrt. trade instability and uncertainty 2) Trump has brought some high tech manufacturing into the US with a mixture of force and bribes/subsidization. But honestly it looks a lot of it is mostly hollow promises, not making a relevant difference long term. 3) More then one case where companies did agree had a lot of big problems. One of the biggest issue being, that missing in depth know-how requires temp. importing people which can make sure things work while teaching that know how (if you want things to get going fast. If you go slow you can send your people to other countries to learn.). But a destroyed visa system makes this a high risk for anyone coming to the US and did lead to more then one person like that being detained and deported by ICE. The other risk is if this people don't teach enough you become dependent on foreign workers in a strange way for a while. Either way nothing in the current politics seems to be actually well thought through ways to archive (relevantly) more manufacturing in the US long term. But everything seems to be designed to destroy the wealth of the majority of US citizens.
> One of the goals of the Heritage Foundation is a weak dollar. They believe they can bring manufacturing back to the US this way. Only cheap labor can bring manufacturing back to the US. Are Americans willing to work in factories for the same wages as the Chinese and Indians? I don't see it happening.
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You have a baseline of prosperity and life in your head. The Heritage guys have a weird perspective where they idolize the early Federalist US and the Reagan Era. Prosperity for the common man wasn’t a highlight of either era, to put it mildly. In 1790s New York, for example, “local control” meant that many of the people of upstate New York were a sort of serf-like tenant living on the estates of the great men, Dutch patroons who played ball with the colonial and State political infrastructure. They had the freedom to pay rent until their landlord was willing to let them go. That existed into the 1840s, when the country started getting woke. So we can address housing issues with creative solutions. Why do poor people need their own apartments? Stuff them into a tenement. You can easily fit 15 people in a two bedroom apartment so they can build drones or whatever.
It's not the optimal course for most billionaires either. Maybe it is for a few of them.
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I mean ”optimal” is not well defined. It is not great for the economy or societal stability and if wealth is more and more unevenly distributed. But the wealthy benefit in the short term by gaining power in society.
> white people are likely a minority in corporate America. I don't see how this can possibly be true. > that has disproportionately affected hinterland communities but immigrant groups seem immune to Or this, especially in light of data such as this: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db549.htm
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The data you linked shows that Native Americans, Blacks and Whites have the highest per capita rates of overdose (in that order), which validates my claim. White American overdose deaths per capita are 6x that of Asian-Americans.
Even if not quite true, it doesn't change my argument since it was more about the rate of change. You can construct the definition of white collar in a way that makes it seem like it's mostly white people, but among high paying job titles within a company, absolutely I would say there are fewer than 50% non-Jewish whites.
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> Even if not quite true, it doesn't change my argument This is one of the main points of bigotry. The facts don't matter. So when a person says something obviously ridiculous like > among high paying job titles within a company, absolutely I would say there are fewer than 50% non-Jewish whites the proper way to interpret is "I feel like there are too many unworthy people working there," where "too many" is entirely subjective and could be as few as one.
Why “non-Jewish”?
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Jews are culturally isolated enough to effectively count as their own race. Race is generally a misused concept because 99% of the time people actually mean culture, and anyone from any race can be part of a culture.
A service-based economy is also a "real" economy and not a "paper" economy
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The fundamental problem is the asymmetry of value creation. Software is perhaps the pinnacle of this, and why tech companies are so unfathomably wealthy. A team of 10 SWEs can create a product worth $1B with the cost of 10 laptops. You get ten people worth $100M each. To create $1B in value with any kind of manufacturing business, is going to take hundreds of people utilizing millions in various costs. You end up with something like 10,000 people worth $100k each once you wind your way through all those supply lines.
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You said it better. I think the idea is that certain "paper" economies are disproportionately valued in the economy when the dollar is strong. A strong dollar leads to offshoring manufacturing, which leads to an over weighted "paper" economy, which leads to an eroding middle class.
No one actually paid 90% income taxes. I wish that myth would go away.
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So nobody would mind going back to that reality right? Companies would totally pay less in taxes than they do now, right? Oh, they fight that actually.
The problem with that plan is that no one wants to trade hard commodities for a currency that can’t be spent. One part of the dollars appeal is that it spends the world over. The sanctioned countries frequently have more liberal access to dollars than to unsanctioned yuan. So no one is going to take up a lot of yuan trade unless that changes or they are forced to. But that puts China in a bind. Liberalizing their currency is going to require very careful and slow actions, China threads this needle now in a very fraught way. If they openly start trading oil at any real size in yuan that will break their peg as you’ll be able to trade through the oil markets. This is the main reason there isn’t more petro yuan already, it’s bad for China.
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> The problem with that plan is that no one wants to trade hard commodities for a currency that can’t be spent. One part of the dollars appeal is that it spends the world over. > So no one is going to take up a lot of yuan trade unless that changes or they are forced to. Related on the “forced to”point, this is where Russia is stuck with its crude oil sales to India where the payments have been made to it in Indian Rupees. There’s almost nothing that Russia can do with the Indian Rupee. This is a huge and growing problem because India’s imports from Russia eclipse its exports to Russia by more than 10 times. [1] [1]: https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/india-russia-summit-can-modi-and-putin-bridge-the-60-billion-trade-gap/4064397/
For that 30% control number to make any sense you have to believe that: the gulf states are going to allow Iran to control their existential oil trade long term, that they will do so in the face of a currency getting manipulated adversarially against them, that no manufacturing bases can be built up to be alternatives and that none of that is going to have major impacts on the economy or political elites in China. All of that happening with the worlds biggest oil producer, its second biggest manufacturer, who is food independent and has the worlds most powerful military just lets it happen. And no shooting war breaking out between them. I’m betting on slow currency liberalization and a transition to a multi currency petroleum industry and subsequent inefficiencies in global trade. But feel free to bet how you want.
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I am not betting on one or other happening, I am simply stating, the downstream effect of Iran being able to hold onto Hormuz, i.e. by outlasting US political will create conditions for GCC petro-yuan. Which may not be out of question because we're not in nothing ever happens world anymore. > make any sense GCC petro-yuan scenario is predicated on BIG IF that Iran can control Hormuz oil. Rest is the downstream logic for ~10 years, i.e. before any alternative buildout/pivot by GCC states to some how insulate... which apart from Saudi, they might not (too small). This also why PRC hasn't exactly enthusiastically signed up despite IR offer, because it would burn GCC bridge when IR fate uncertain. But if alternative is IR can hold hormuz hostage, PRC would rather participate in petro-yuan than not, at which point having priority access to energy, possibly at discount is net win. Note in this case IR as SLOC guard dog actually has leverage over PRC, gating energy access also offer PRC cannot refuse. > US Hence big if, if US has appetite and capability to break Iran, and it matters US settlement/conditions, because if US reasserts control over Hormuz oil and tries to throttle PRC oil as victory, then PRC may go all in on Iran support. Situation is fluid, the wild card is in fact US or ISR deciding to simply break GCC oil. There is still plenty of room for escalation and shenanigans.
It's not advantage, it makes for artificial demand for your currency, which completely screws up all the relevant metrics and makes you unable to actually inflate the currency when getting less competitive. It's resource curse on steroids.
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We are assuming a resource curse on steroids, the ability to sell the ‘resource’ is used to distort the economy and pay for the cost of running an empire. The US chooses to do this because it is controlled by those who benefit from this not for the long term benefit of the country. Saying it’s not an advantage is to assume those in control want to have manufacturing in the US, while such noises are made there is very little action beyond capricious crony capitalism tariffs that no normal business can possibly rely on.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in Our Office Lab (iptechnics.com)
Wow, TIL! https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo4oD5UON30
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Thanks, I hadn't heard of it either.
> They explain a lot of things but I can't see the advantage over prox other than they wanted to use it. A huge, totally obvious, advantage is that FreeBSD isn't using systemd. I'm now nearly systemd-free, if not for Proxmox. But my VMs are systemd free. And, by definition, my containers too (where basically the entire point is that there's a PID 1 for the service and that PID 1, in a container is not systemd). So the last piece missing for me is getting rid of Proxmox because Proxmox is using systemd. I was thinking about going straight to FreeBSD+bhyve (the hypervisor) but that felt a bit raw. FreeBSD+Sylve (using bhyve under the hood) seems to be, at long last, my way out of systemd. I've got several servers at home with Proxmox but I never, on purpose, relied too much on Proxmox: I kept it to the bare minimum. I create VMs and use cloudinit and tried to have most of it automated and always made it with the idea of getting rid of Promox. I've got nothing against Proxmox but fuck systemd. Just fuck that system.
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Whether an appliance OS uses SystemD or not is as silly of a concern as “does the lead developer prefer cheddar or brie” What about performance characteristics? Recoverability of workloads? I’m interested in a FreeBSD base OS because it seems ZFS is better integrated and ZFS has a lot of incredibly useful tools that come with it. If Bhyve is at least nearly as performant as KVM, I’d be hard pressed not to give it a whirl.
Sometimes unification can be an advantage. I run Proxmox at home, but now that I have been drinking the NixOS koolaid over the past 2 years, all of my homelab problems suddenly look like Nix-shaped nails.
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Well it looks like we might soon be able to have the benefits of NixOS while also having bhyve (and presumably Sylve): https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd
What does Sylve provide that proxmox doesn't? Or better, how does it do it better than proxmox? This isn't to say that proxmox is the best thing since sliced bread, I'm curious as to what makes sylve better, is it the API?
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Sylve appears to be a FreeBSD/BSD exclusive implementation of managing vms, etc. Proxmox is Debian/Ubuntu based. Both will have their advantages. It might not be about better or worse, the particular things you use may in some cases run better on BSD, or the security management could more fit what you are after. I wonder why not run both :). Proxmox is due for it's viral moment though.
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OP here. It’s less about Sylve doing something Proxmox can’t do, and more about a bunch of QoL improvements that come from us being heavy Proxmox users and building what we felt was missing. A few concrete things: ZFS-first UX: Not just "ZFS as storage”, but everything built around it. Snapshots, clones, ZVOLs, replication, all cleanly exposed in the UI without dropping to CLI. Simple backups without extra infra: Any remote box with SSH + ZFS works. No need to deploy something like PBS just to get decent backups. Built-in Samba shares: You can spin up and manage shares directly from the UI without having to manually configure services. Magnet / torrent downloader baked in: Sounds small, but for homelab use it removes a whole extra container/VM people usually end up running. Clustering: but not all-or-nothing, You can cluster nodes when you need it, and also disable/unwind it later. Proxmox clusters are much more rigid once set up. Templates done right: Create a base VM/jail once and spin up N instances from it in one go, straight from the UI. FreeBSD base: It's not really a benefit of Sylve, but rather the ecosystem that FreeBSD provides.. Tighter system integration, smaller surface area, no systemd, etc. (depending on what you care about) None of this is to say Proxmox is bad, it’s great. This is more "we used it a lot, hit some friction points, and built something that feels smoother for our workflows."
The phrasing of your questions is the problem. They are uninformed, too general, and assuming. The last sentence reads as if you outright dismiss bhyve because YOU can't imagine it was tested thoroughly. > It is not possible to come to a conclusion about everything in the world yourself "from scratch". No one has the time to try out everything themselves. Some filteration process needs to be applied to prevent wasting your finite time. It's totally possible when you know what your application requires but you didn't state anything. > Someone just said bhyve does not support nested virtualization (useful input !). What nested applications are you planning to run?
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Ok you have a problem with the way I framed my questions and my (unintentional) tonality. Fair enough. Let's move from critique of the way I asked my questions to what your experience with bhyve has been, if you're willing to share that. Have you used bhyve ? What has your experience been with it ? Have you used KVM+QEMU -- can you compare your experience between both of them ?
How to turn anything into a router (nbailey.ca)
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> While it may seem appealing, I would highly recommend against installing loads of software right on the router, and instead forward traffic to a device in a DMZ or VLAN. Why not? I use an old gaming PC as a "router" (machine exposed to the WAN), and run dozens of services on it besides the firewall/NAT (iptables). Among others: email, Web server, multiple game servers, and many internal services (DNS, hostapd, loads of Docker containers).
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Try it with this! https://www.dewalt.com/en-us/product/dwp611pk/dewalt-1-14-hp-max-torque-corded-electric-variable-speed-compact-router-combo-kit
I wonder if consumer routers will end up being built in a trivially-not-a-router configuration - something akin to a pull-tab or turn of the screw that closes a circuit, transforming the device from legally something else into a router after it's purchased. What a dumb timeline.
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"this here is a virtual network appliance, so called because it doesn't have any ports on it - wait, why are you taking off that blanking panel? That's illegal!"
Does routing on Linux have any hardware acceleration for IP packets?
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Yes. You can take advantage of Netfilter's flowtable infrastructure and if you have the right hardware (NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-5 or MediaTekMT7621) it will actually offload the processing of these packets to the NIC hardware. This only applies to established connections, however, but that typically accounts for like 95% of the traffic passing through.
You actually don't even need two interfaces on the box if you have a managed switch. It's not too difficult to configure your only interface as an 802.11q trunk port, and then you can use the managed switch as a sort of "interface expander". This is referred to as a "router on a stick" configuration, and it's how my home network is configured. Plus, if it's a PoE managed switch, you can install some cheap enterprise surplus Aruba IAPs around the house for Wi-Fi which is a lot higher quality than a consumer router or a mesh setup. My home router was an old Thinkpad for a while, but then I switched over to a slightly newer Dell Optiplex that my work was throwing out. The plus side of that is that the i7 is total overkill for routing so I can also have my "router" run some VMs for network services and cut down on the number of boxen in my homelab rack. Alpine is a great distro for this.
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I have actually been curious about this: How good can a WiFi mesh get latency-wise, given the right equipment, and how close would a consumer router setup be to that, do you happen to know?
This is a great writeup! Perhaps I can put in a plug for the create_ap script which I have been maintaining for many years ( http://github.com/dlenski/create_ap ). It's a shell script that allows you to turn any ol' Linux computer into a WiFi router in one quick command-line: By default, it will setup your WiFi card as an access point (allows WPA2/3, MAC filtering, etc), setup packet forwarding and routing, and run a DHCP and DNS server. It will generally pick sensible defaults, but it's also highly customizable. If your WiFi card supports simultaneous AP and client mode, it will allow that. Its requirements are extremely minimal: basically just Linux, a compatible wireless card, and a few common configuration packages (hostapd, iw, iproute2, iptables, dnsmasq). No NetworkManager needed. I used it as my own home Internet gateway for many years, running on an ancient fanless Atom mini-PC. Because it can quickly setup and teardown WiFi networks on-the-fly, it's also a valuable tool for setting up test networks when reverse-engineering IoT devices. I use it frequently for this purpose (see https://snowpatch.org/posts/i-can-completely-control-your-smart-thermostat/#fn:3 ).
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Any tips on good wifi chipsets that do not suck in AP mode?
That's a bigger can of worms than you might expect. Most consumer WiFi chips only barely support AP mode, and I'm not aware of any that can do multiple bands simultaneously. You'd probably need 4 adapters on the repeater for triband. One to connect upstream, one for each downstream band. Three instances of hostapd all configured with the same SSID and auth for each downstream interface. Then there's the roaming issue. This is largely what the commercial "mesh" systems try to solve: deciding / helping inform when clients should switch APs. There are many solutions and none of them are without issues, including the commercial ones. Here's a starting point: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/roaming
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Super interesting, thanks for sharing
Anyone know how necessary UPnP is? From what I can tell, this setup does not run UPnP for automatic port forwarding
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Not necessarily at all and a huge security risk.
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You'd need to run a daemon like miniupnpd to enable UPnP, however I'd avoid it if you can, as it can be a significant security risk.
It becomes harder if you try to do it with 10 Gbps. Most CPUs struggle with it without dedicated accelerator chips.
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Absolutely not. My 8700k is able to saturate a 25Gbps link without breaking a sweat. It could still push more than 4Gbps of encrypted traffic (Wireguard tunnel).
Lots of "just use X" comments but the article is about showing the bare minimum/how easy the core part of routing actually is. Also, if you have ever used docker or virtual machines with NAT routing (often the default), you've done exactly the same things. If you have ever enabled the wifi hotspot on an android phone also, you've done pretty much what the article describes on your phone. All of these use the same Linux kernel features under the hood. In fact there is a good chance this message traversed more than one Linux soft router to get to your screen.
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Basically any computer is a router if you're brave enough. Windows PCs had (have?) that Internet connection sharing feature for a long time. It was really just a checkbox to enable NAT too. Sometimes I think combining a firewall/router/switch/AP/file server/etc into a device called a "router" really confuses people. Even people who should know better.
Surely something like OPNsense/PFsense would be better for the average user than setting up all the software manually?
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Not necessarily. For one, the BSD has, or at least used to have much worse driver support for wireless adapters. With a regular server/desktop Linux distro, it's also easier to run other services on the same device. For example, nothing prevents you from running nginx and hosting a website, or a personal email server.
nftables syntax is pretty tough to read. I wonder why they didn't go for an easier to read DSL. I do understand it's likely super fast to parse though, and has a 1:1 relationship to its struct in the kernel.
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I personally stick to iptables. nftables does not seem to be an improvement at all. iptables is terse but logical.
Sounds interesting. I always wanted to use a Raspberry PI as router (to have one as backup in case the OpenWRT Linksys goes down), but couldn't wrap my head around properly how to overcome the single network port (I think the usual recommendation is to use an extra USB network card/adapter). Can you elaborate more about this VLAN stuff (you would put your modem, your router, and all your machines on the switch... and in the switch you tell the router connection to double use the connection for WAN and LAN separated via VLANs? And put the modem into the "WAN VLAN" too?) Ideally the PI also should to what the extra DSL Modem does… but I guess that's where the dram must stop. :D
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When you setup your single ethernet port (let's call it eth0) as a VLAN trunk port, you'll get the ability to configure multiple virtual interfaces off of it. How many virtual interfaces you get depends on how many VLANs you want to tag traffic for. For example, if you have 2 VLANS with ids 100 and 200 (100 being your public Internet-facing traffic, and 200 being your LAN traffic), you would then have interfaces eth0.100 and eth0.200 to work with that you can then use in your firewall scripts as if they were two separate, physical interfaces. This of course means you need a VLAN-aware switch that this single ethernet port can plug into, configured as a VLAN trunk (in Cisco terms) port. You would then want to configure one of the other switch ports as a VLAN access port assigned to VLAN 100 (untagged). This is the port you would plug your cable modem into. Then (in the simplest example) you could assign all the rest of the switch ports to VLAN 200 (untagged), and you would plug all your LAN devices into them.
Bird brains (2023) (dhanishsemar.com)
Worth nothing that the "mirror test" may not be accurate for a lot of animals - like dogs. Dogs are a lot more sensitive to smell, and can pass smell-based mirror-test-equivalents.
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Maybe also worth noting some evidence that ants can apparently pass the mirror test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects When it first came out I don't think anyone quite knew what to make of that, and I'm not sure anything's changed since.
If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. They have incredible memories and their own understanding of their world. It looks simple to us but they are not simple creatures. That being said, I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage.
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If you're referring to keeping parrots in cages outside of their natural habitats, that ship sailed when they were brought to non native locations. I'm being hyperbolic, but I assume you don't want them to be released in the wild and die, right? We have some feral colonies set up in places like Miami and San Francisco, but not all species thrive in warm locations. That said, my palm sized green cheek conure is rarely in his extremely large cage (it's 4 by 4 feet). Door is always open unless he's sleeping or we're out of the house. Usually he's with me on my shoulder when I'm working during the day and gives his "2 cents" when I'm in meetings. Most parrots kept as pets prefer it locked for security reasons. He'll get anxious if it's not when he's trying to sleep. I've seen a lot of terrible bird owners, but I also know plenty that enrich their bird's lives. My little conure has a surprisingly extensive vocabulary for a species not known for speaking. He says "poo" when when he has to poop, "what's up?" when he greets anyone, "whatcha doing", "<his name>", "yeah!" (mimicking Little Jon), "stop" (when he doesn't like what we're doing), "good boy", "Love you" and a few others I can't recall off the top of my head.
Many animals (including birds, dogs, horses) like the sanctuary and comfort of a cage and choose to use them, but obviously it shouldn't be used like a prison.
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I would agree with that in most cases. They treat them like their personal house, unless the owner decides to reinforce their use as a form of punishment. Not really any different than building a dog house for a dog.
Even prisoners walk back into their cells. Comfort doesn’t erase confinement. A bird’s world is the open sky—so an open door doesn’t make a cage any less of one.
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A pigeon was being being eaten alive by a sparrow hawk in my back garden just yesterday. All entirely natural, no human intervention.
How did you arrive at the conclusion that birds like cages?
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By watching them, and advice from experts.
Sure but housecats aren’t nature
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They're totally doing that same lynx stuff, though. They're not not nature.
Makes sense, given that to birds, optimizing for weight is everything. But seeing that the ridiculously smart border collies have a comparatively low density of neurons, clearly there’s more to intelligence than that.
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I don’t even know how you’d compare their intelligence, it’s so apples to oranges.. Most birds build nests so they have an advantage in tool use and that’s what gets them ahead in some tests. On the other hand, have anyone tried to train corvids to herd other birds/animals? I bet BCs will have an advantage there:)
Then to put it bluntly; you lied to your audience. > "I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off." If your audience conceived it as possibly being a merely repeated phrase that the researcher probably said thousands of times, not something the parrot actually understood, then it is very easy to brush off as something we already knew parrots could do.
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Thanks that’s fair critique. And apologise for the half truth there.
How the AI Bubble Bursts (martinvol.pe)
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Datacenters themselves are really weird... most of the announced 2024 data centers are nowhere near completion, most of NVidia's production is taking longer to deploy than to produce and will be upwards of 2+ years behind on deployments sometime in the next year. That doesn't even begin to cover the lack of actual electricity to power the data centers. We have more "dark silicon" sitting in boxes that aren't close to being deployed, while a lot of actual people can't manage to buy consumer products for anythign resembling reasonable... it's kind of insane to say the least.
> ⸻ Wow, I'm impressed at your usage of this. Apparently it's 0x2E3B, named "three-em dash". You must be human!
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Oh yeah, a month ago I was reading a comment section about LLM writing tendencies and someone humorously suggested using the loooooooong-em-dash to distinguish yourself from LLMs. I found it so charming that I made my keyboard output it when I double tap "-". On Linux you press Ctrl+Shifs+U and then type 2E3B, then press enter.
> Bottom line is that H100 prices are near 3 year highs, A100s are still profitable to run, B200 prices are increasing, no one has enough compute. Then why aren't the hardware manufacturers of components needed by AI companies making plans yesterday to bring new fabs online to meet demand? That isn't a gotcha question, I genuinely want to know. The money involved isn't that much compared to the money changing hands between Nvidia Microsoft, OpenAI, etc., and it's not like once in-progress data center construction is complete they won't need to buy more RAM and GPUs, especially with any new advances in technology that might happen. Inevitably someone will reply that hardware manufacturers don't want to be stuck losing money on a facility because the bubble popped and demand disappeared, but if Anthropic and OpenAI are going to "run laps around current big tech", it should be a no-brainer to increase production capacity.
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They are. They're making as many fabs as they can as fast as they can. The bottleneck is ASML, who can only make so many EUV machines. No one else can make EUV machines. Scaling chip fabs and chip equipment is much harder. And you have to understand that chip fabs go bankrupt if demand suddenly drops so they have to be more cautious by default.
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A new fab will need to be filled with advanced equipment like lithography machines. They are the most complex thing humanity has every built. There is one supplier of EUV lithography machines in the world, ASML. They are basically acting as an integrator for hundreds of highly specialized components manufactured to unimaginable levels of precision. Each of them has roughly one eligible supplier in the world who are operating at full capacity. To expand, they'll need yet another set of specialized and almost impossible to build equipment. So the supply chain moves incredibly slowly, and the slowness is intrinsic due to the complexity and depth of the supply chain. It can't be fixed with just money. IIRC ASML is aiming to merely double their production of EUV lithography machines by 2030.
> I think AI agents could completely replace Microsoft Office How? What do you think lawyers/government will use to write briefs?
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With ChatGPT
> RAM prices are crashing because new models won’t need as much Reality begs to differ [0] and following the link for that text goes to an article [1] where they talk about Google's TurboQuant which supposedly will lower the RAM requirements. Now if that means RAM prices come down (as speculated, not reported on, in the link) or the AI companies just do more things with their extra ram is yet to be determined. The fact this article links there with text "RAM prices are crashing" throws the entire rest of the article into doubt for me. RAM prices are most certainly not crashing (yet) and treating it as a forgone conclusion because _one_ lab found gains could be made and hasn't even reported on the efficiency of their method is just irresponsible. It's almost as bad as when LLMs link things to prove their point, you visit the link, and find it says nothing of the sort or even the opposite. [0] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ [1] https://tech.sportskeeda.com/gaming-news/how-google-s-new-turboquant-ai-might-end-current-ram-price-hike-crisis
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Even worse, 3 memory companies control well over 90% of the international market, with a history of cartel collaboration that's going to be ever harder to prove with fewer companies.
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Some also argue that the RAM price keeps rising because of the bullwhip effect. I was wondering if there's anyway for us to differentiate a sustained demand from the bullwhip effect.
> Reality begs to differ Honestly you're both wrong. RAM prices spiked speculatively, and they're going down for the same reason. Market people always want to argue in fundamentals, when in practice *ALL* the high frequency components of the signal are down to a bunch of traders trying to guess where it's going in the short term. At best those guesses are informed by ground truth ("AI needs a lot of RAM!" "Sam cornered the marked!" "TurboQuant needs less RAM!"), but they remain guesses, and even then you can't tell the difference between that and random motion.
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> RAM prices spiked speculatively, and they're going down for the same reason. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ Note how flat the black lines are. Then note how wide the gray bands are. That makes it very easy to cherry-pick a few examples to present as "supporting evidence" that prices are doing whatever you want to believe they are doing.
Would you still pay if prices were to increase,say $1500-2000 monthly?
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Probably. I assume the value would drastically increase. Companies will definitely continue to pay for it. It's irreplaceable now.
Anthropic also recently tweaked their usage limits to discourage use during peak hours. Why would they do that if inference was profitable?
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Those are subscription plans. They tweaked the limits/periods included in the subscription.
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