Unlurker|Replay|About
MIT Living Wage Calculator (livingwage.mit.edu)
•
Puerto Rico is always left out of these analyses. AFAIK we are included in the same data sources (like dol.gov), so I'm always disappointing to see the exclusion.
•
I fell out of love with the living wage when the UK government bumped minimum wage and called it living wage. The government kept on getting raked over the coals by charities who claimed that people working minimum wage were in poverty and so our govenrment bumped the minimum wage by a bit and then announced it as "This is the new NATIONAL LIVING WAGE". Which is just perfect politics. You're the government, so you can just take a term. Trump can brand the Gulf of America, and the UK Tories can just redefine the living wage. Now those charities are stuffed because any time they talk about a living wage everyone gets confused, it cuts the legs out of the conversation. The core of the problem is that you basically have to have someone define what is an acceptable standard of living. Sharing a flat? Nah, the MIT trained economist thinks that's for the poverty people so that is defined as below living wage. Walk to work? No. You need atleast $10k a year on travel otherwise you're a bus wanker. A huge amount of this is value judgements on what is an acceptable standard of living from people who benefit from immense privilege but will never experience the thing they're studying.
•
Anecdotally, I found some of the costs like food and food to be inflated. When I looked at the methodology, some is based on consumer surveys so it may be more reflective of over-consumption. In other words, it prices in what people want or what they’re used to, not what they need. The counterpoint is that maybe some wealthy countries should be pricing in a higher quality of life, but the “living wage” then becomes a bit of a misnomer.
•
Yes, that's what makes it a living wage instead of a poverty wage, let alone a starvation wage.
•
Someone is siphoning your value. It's quite obvious when you track the productivity, or ask questions about how did your great-grandpa survive at all without machines. Just stating the obvious, don't mind me.
•
They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC. If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted. Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples. College and healthcare was much cheaper, and he got a lot less of it. We're benefiting greatly from the increase in productivity. We just view our great-grandfather luxuries as our necessities.
•
Yeah I think people need to start asking the question, "Where is the money going". Its not just inexistent, its literally going somewhere other than your pocket.
•
They're not voting against their own self interest; they just have different interests than you. Their primary interest and goal is making sure their out-group is hurting, and that is what they are voting for, regardless of that happens to them.
•
There is something wrong with the transportation cost. I live in a poor rural county, and it says the 0-child transportation cost is $10k+. People's trucks here don't even cost that much, and they don't drive far. I see it counts as 2 working adults, but it's still grossly inflated.
•
I questioned that too, but vehicle costs are based off surveyed data. So if the average 2 adults have a car payment, insurance, fuel, and repair costs, it’s probably reflected in their data. To me, that’s different than saying “a reasonable mode of reliable transportation”
•
Are you factoring in fuel, repairs, maintenance, registration/taxes, and insurance? As well as depreciation?
•
For Phoenix[0] it shows $44 for 1 adult 1 child, but $42 for 2 adults 1 child with 1 adult working. Is this because of a child tax credit or something? [0]: https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/38060
•
No, it's because their model puts dollar values on the labor contributed by non-working adults w/r/t raising children. So in that case, it could be that 1adult1child is slightly higher because of the need to pay for childcare, while the food/insurance/clothing etc of the additional adult in 2adult1child is offset by the fact that the non-working adult will conduct childcare and thus that expense goes away.
•
right. kind of obvious in hindsight.
•
I was wondering this too. I assume it’s because child care costs are lower when one parent isn’t working(?)
•
Housing data is flawed. Even if you’re single, no kids, you’re limited to what is available and 1 bedrooms in my state can’t be had for less than $1500/mo anywhere in the state. Yet this says housing costs annually would be $12000. How? I think the data this is based off of is super stale.
•
I'm guessing it uses the cost of a studio for a single person.
•
It's basically out of date, since the housing market has changed so rapidly.
•
I never rented a 1-bedroom apartment until I was married. A studio/efficiency is fine for singles, or even a room.
•
I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children. Many young people I know live on much less than this. This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable. For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. These are both way more than is necessary. They need better branding because calling this a living wage is a misnomer and harming their cause.
•
> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” An appartment and a car aren't exactly luxury goods. Cars are often needed to work, and well, having a roof over your head is usually required for a decent living. Sure, if you fancy living in a cardboard box located next to your work, your living standards are going to be much easier to attain.
•
Hard disagree on this. $26.50 sounds like a nightmare 10 years ago, let alone now. There's a lot of places in the US where having a car is essentially mandatory (actually, most places). If you can't afford a car, that limits where you can live to mostly urban areas, which then pushes the housing cost up.. and by the way, housing costs are always going up, and no, you won't be able to invest in a home, you've been priced out by developers and speculators. Not to mention you need to be able to save money for unemployment and rainy days..
•
They probably are overshooting, I agree. But then again the "living wage" for a healthy person is a lot less than for a not-quite healthy person or a sick person. And the average person is not-quite healthy, at best.
•
Ultimately in all these calculators there has to be a threshold that determines whether something is needed for “living” or not. And that varies highly by the individual. The calculator suggests $5,021 for food, but for me I’d only shop at high-end grocery like Whole Foods and buy organics whenever possible. That’s clearly not enough. On the other hand it suggests $1,792 for internet and mobile which is about double what I actually pay. Then it claims medical costs of $2,890. For a fit individual with good employer-provided health insurance, that figure should be almost zero. Ultimately the amount one spends for living depends very much on one’s preferences and these calculators are approximates. I believe you when you say many young people can live for much less, but that doesn’t invalidate the calculator.
•
Edit: Deleted for dumb math
•
[delayed]
•
28/hr is closer to 60k/yr. 130k/yr is more like 65/hr.
•
> $130k per year needed ($28.50 per hour * 40 * 52). What math are you doing to get $130k with those numbers? That wage works out to around $60k/year.
•
Based on the data sources and the methodology, it looks about as accurate as you could get. They link to their methodology and technical documentation from that site. Even if some resourceful young people you know can get by on less, in general people should not have to live in abject poverty while working a full time job -- I would consider that to be a "Dying Wage".
•
You're confusing poverty with living.
•
Having a roommate and an annual transportation budget under $9000 probably isn’t the right demarcation line for poverty.
•
> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable. This is a debatable goalpost. It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself. The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further, and is that at all necessary? Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times. Yet this whole time, GDP continues to rise. It seems that our society can easily support much higher minimum wages (and this would likely have only a positive effect of stimulating the economy), but simply chooses not to.
•
I do think it's a crack up how when I check my own "living wage" i still under-perform in comparison to the chart, but in my county i'm within the top 15%. Needless to say; only old people have homes and only those who have sufficient help get a nice appt.
•
"Living wage" means the ability to live, not scrape by with the bare minimum possible.
•
I feel like I’ve eat pretty well, and my household food costs are almost half what the calculator shows. Similar for vehicle costs etc. After looking at the method, I think the calculator probably has some bias towards “what society has convinced us we need”. To a certain extent that is a relative and subjective perception problem, and one exacerbated when you live in a society with a lot of consumer debt.
•
My household food costs are about 20% more than what the calculator shows. Behold, "averages" are not perfect.
•
What does eating pretty well mean to you? Maybe you don't even if you think you do? We don't know without your budget or a receipt from your typical grocery run
•
[delayed]
•
Are those people funding their retirement? Are they going to be able to take care of themselves as health issues come up? Are they receiving support from family? Edit: also the housing cost is probably factoring in a studio or maybe a 1bd for a single person. That may seem luxurious to you, but for many that is the only real option they have (roommates are hard to come by and can hurt you physically and fiscally).
•
I disagree. Living wage is not minimum wage.
•
The web site also makes that distinction: living wage, poverty wage, and minimum wage.
•
Basically a "ramen profitable" calculator.
•
This whole dataset needs to be downloadable, instead of being behind their UI..
•
The standard of living that one could afford with a "living wage" looks to be very very low. Like, 0 vacations and no house low, for my metro area.
•
[delayed]
•
2080 hours per year! That's 52 weeks of 40 hours per week. It's also inhuman. Here in Norway we have five weeks of holiday plus various public holidays and only 37.5 hours per week adding up to about 1700 hours per year.
•
I think they just do that to get to an hourly rate. It’s probably better to look at the annual income and think of that number regardless of how many hours you worked during the year.
•
Urban workers in China do 3,744 hours per year; farmers do 2400 hours Norwegian workers do 1,418 hours per year, one of the lowest in the world
•
3744 hours. Dayum! Just going off basic numbers 3744/52/5 = 14.4 hour day if they work 5 days a week, 3744/52/6 = 12 if they work 6 days a week, 3744/52/7 = 10.3 days a week if they work 7 days a week.
•
Yeah, oil nations are different. Norway's resources are well-managed, but oil nations with outsourced defence just have different constraints.
•
I’m not sure that’s the key factor. Resource wealth helps, but it doesn’t automatically translate into shorter workweeks or generous leave. Countries with far fewer natural resources—such as Germany, the Netherlands, or Denmark—still manage shorter working hours, strong labor protections, and substantial paid vacation. Those outcomes depend much more on labor policy, bargaining power, and what governments choose to protect. In many places, business pressure and media framing make long hours seem unavoidable, even though they’re ultimately the result of policy choices.
•
Every single nation on Earth has mandatory paid vacation, except for the United States and three tiny islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country . Edit: And looking into it a little, I'm pretty sure two of those islands actually do have mandatory paid leave after a minimum period of employment.
•
I don't get what the big deal is about mandatory paid vacation. My view is that your total compensation will be set based on the market value of your labor. Some portion of that compensation is given to you in the form of ordinary wages and some portion in the form of paid vacations. If the government mandated paid vacations would it increase many people's total compensation?
•
It would be interesting to know which percentage of full-time jobs in the USA get no paid vacation.
•
France is not an oil nation. We have 35h weeks and 5 weeks of paid vacation as well. Edit: Also, the US is a damn oil nation. It has nothing to do with oil, and everything to do with politics.
•
France has stuck is head in the sand regarding its future finances
•
As if the US hasn’t!
•
So has the US, difference is the US citizens don't get anything good out of their debt.
•
In Germany its somewhere between 1600-1700 hours, and we don't have much oil
Does this base itself on the metric started in 1963, that was eseentially a big guess that 3x starvation level was well off? because we have better numbers now. Avg us salary is 60k, but to take car of the needs of a family of 4, not in starvation range is ~$160k/year
•
[delayed]
•
> not in starvation range is ~$160k/year That highly depends on your definition of "need" and where you live. If you're in a city with ludicrous cost of living, like San Fransisco, then sure. But, that's also why people commute, or just choose to go somewhere cheaper. It's somewhat shocking seeing how much higher the standard of living is, with much less income, outside the big cities.
•
How can you need that much money to not starve? According to Wikipedia[1] median household income in the US and Norway is only about a quarter of your 160 kUSD. I'm pretty sure that most of the people living near me in Norway are not high earners but I don't see any signs of starvation either. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
•
Norway has many wonderful things American voters are terrified of giving people less they use them.
•
Put in an area and see for yourself. In general, yes this calculator is closer to what you're describing. For example, Skamania County, a pretty rural county of Washington state with a very low population of 12,000 people, still has a "required living wage" for 1 breadwinner + 1 homemaker + 3 children of $104,292 per year: https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/53059 That feels pretty close to accurate.
•
https://livingwage.mit.edu/pages/methodology
Luce: First Electric Ferrari. Designed by LoveFrom (ferrari.com)
•
I think I would be looking for that very real, confident and perfectly even vibration a Ferrari has at idle; the valve train song, an extra octave in the exhaust.
•
I think Ferraris have gotten especially ugly in the last few generations. I generally like Jony Ive designs. But this is a mismatch. A whole new kind of not-right-is-ugly for Ferrari. Elements of it are precious and well designed. But it doesn't feel like a car interior.
•
Oh. I have the exact opposite feeling. I'm not into cars but I love this.
•
This looks like the controls for a very stylish Italian delivery van. Not an exotic sports car.
•
Very functional.
•
Is the exterior of the car not public yet? Why is the only detail about the control cluster?
•
Ferrari is announcing the car in three steps: first they announce the electric powertrain details, next they announced the interior details and lastly they'll announce what it'll actually look like.
•
This looks awesome
•
I love it, first ferarri that i have said "I want one". I have been an ev driver for over a decade and have no regrets, it has improved my life. The mental health benefits of driving an almost silent vehicle are completely over looked, the addiction to a vibrating noisy gas engine we find quite frankly bizarre in 2026, it is old technology, outdated, and becoming lost in history and thank you to the lithium cell.
so OpenAI[0] designed a Ferrari? [0] https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
•
OpenAI bought io, not LoveFrom.
Porsche is the only car company that has nailed interior EV design - IMO. Their interiors look high-end, functional and not just a minimalist big computer screen. https://www.caranddriver.com/photos/g46528574/2024-porsche-macan-ev-interior-gallery/
•
Lexus CT200h is one of the best interiors ever designed. https://cdn-fastly.thetruthaboutcars.com/media/2022/07/20/9469031/review-2011-lexus-ct200h.jpg?size=414x575&nocrop=1
•
We have a different idea of "high-end" and "functional" considering how much of the interior controls are just capacitive surfaces.
•
The new Cayenne interior is terrible. Macan is good. Rivian is the only excellent one.
•
looks like a weird mix of nothing, pointless clock, that screen on the right, that only creates discomfort. The big screen that is big only for the trend. In tesla ( trend setter for this) big screen is functional, and it can show you multi media, when you charge you watch netflix. this screen is not capable of multi media....
•
It still looks like a big computer screen, I'm afraid. Although, making it seamless with the dash is a step up, you're right. That tiny paddle gear shift looks horrendous, though. I would really like to have analog features back, buttons and all that, in an EV.
Did they remove the turn signal stalk? Just like Tesla did?
•
Ferrari removed the stalk over 15 years ago. https://youtu.be/ujl0NYeDJoI?t=810
Is there a market for a $400,000+ electric sports car? For me, the excitement of a Ferrari, Lamborghini, etc is the engine and the sound.
•
They've been going to turbos in all but their flagships so they generally don't sound all that exciting anyway. Lambo literally draped their styling over a VW/Porsche parts-bin crossover SUV and all the influencers flocked to it. The person who appreciates the high-rpm wail of old timey, power-dense engines is not the same person who drops half a million on a car anymore.
That doesn't look good. I'm very surprised that a brand like them release such a cheap-ass version.
•
After the 993, Porsche was a different company. Not exactly cheap-ass, but maybe something less than their often aircraft-quality mechanicals and spartan but hand-made quality interior.
•
It's a Ferrari EV.. I can imagine the company wanting to treat the project like a proverbial stepchild, while keeping the soul for the fossil-fueled machines..
•
yeah, seems EV is a hard market to enter. Porsche seems that have had a hard time entering it too (see numbers, am no expert)
I thought it was a joke. It looks like something from Fisher Price. But I'm clearly not the target audience.
•
haha me neither
The tablet interface looks cheap and low-budget. When you spend that much on a car you don't want the interior to look like a Model S.
•
This is not a car for tech bros with no culture, no traditions, and no past. This is a Ferrari.
In case anyone was wondering what the Apple Car would have looked like inside, it would have been roughly this. As an Apple Car™ it makes sense, but as a Ferrari it's incredibly soulless and oversimplified. This Ive design aesthetic (Dieter Rams' aesthetic really) is fine on consumer electronics where you want the device to disappear and give way to the display, but on something as emotional as a vehicle (Ferrari especially), this design falls flat. I do hope some of the design details work their way through the industry (e.g. using glass instead of gloss black plastic, convex glass to add depth to digital gauges), but I hope the rest of it stays as a one-off experiment demonstrating the hubris and one-dimensionality of a top designer.
•
Well, that’s the problem with product design — looking at it simply doesn’t suffice. It needs to be experienced in person. Well, that’s not (yet) possible, but this video does a good job in the meantime: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wv1btxCjVE&pp=ygUQTG92ZWZyb20gZmVycmFyaQ%3D%3D
So bland. An iPad put in a holder. I was not exactly hoping for, because I didn't really, but I dreamt of a much more radical design direction.
•
I first thought that too, but if you take the time to scroll down a bit, you'll see that the instruments are actually three separate screens, and at least the center one has a mechanical needle. Also, the central control panel has lots of physical switches (Musk would hate it) and even a round instrument in the top right corner with mechanical hands, which can be either a clock, a stopwatch or (for whatever reason) a compass. So definitely not an iPad put in a holder.
Another GitHub outage in the same day (githubstatus.com)
•
Remember the other day when a bunch of yous were making fun of zig moving away from GitHub? Now suddenly you all say this is not the future you wanted. Everyday you opt in to get wrecked by Microsoft. You all do realize you all could, for a change, learn something and never again touch anything Microsoft related? Fool me once...
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946827
•
Not quite, that one is an earlier outage while this one started at (or a bit before) 19:01 UTC. The history for today is a bit of a mess really: https://www.githubstatus.com/history
•
No, it's a new outage -- that's the point! -- check the URLs.
It would be interesting to have a graph showing AI adoption in coding against the number of weekly outages across different companies. I am sure they are quite correlated.
•
I bet there's other factors that are correlated as well!
Claude, make me an SCM provider
•
Sure! Do you allow me to run the following command? cd project; find -type f | while read f; do mv "$f" /dev/null; done
I consider moving away from Github, but I need a solid CI solution, and ideally a container registry as well. Would totally pay for a solution that just works . Any good recommendations?
•
We can run a Forgejo instance for you with Firecracker VM runners on bare metal. We can also support it and provide an SLA. We're running it internally and it is very solid. We're running the runners on bare metal, with a whole lot of large CI/CD jobs (mostly Rust compilation). The down side is that the starting price is kinda high, so the math probably only works out if you also have a number of other workloads to run on the same cluster. Or if you need to run a really huge Forgejo server! I suspect my comment history will provide the best details and overview of what we do. We'll be offering the Firecracker runner back to the Forgejo community very soon in any case. https://lithus.eu
GitLab can be selfhosted with container based CI and fairly easy to setup CE
•
CE is pretty good. The things that you will miss that made us eventually pay: * Mandatory code reviews * Merge queue (merge train) If you don't need those it's good. Also it's written in Ruby so if you think you'll ever want to understand or modify the code then look elsewhere (probably Forgejo).
Over 100x is what I’m hearing. Though that could just be panic and they don’t know the real number because they can’t handle the traffic.
•
An anecdote: On one project, I use a skill + custom cli to assist getting PRs through a sometimes long and winding CI process. `/babysit-pr` This includes regular checks on CI checks using `gh`. My skill / cli are broken right now: `gh pr checks 8174 --repo [repo] 2>&1)` Error: Exit code 1 Non-200 OK status code: 429 Too Many Requests Body: { "message": "This endpoint is temporarily being throttled. Please try again later. For more on scraping GitHub and how it may affect your rights, please review our Terms of Service (https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service)", "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/graphql/using-the-rest-api/rate-limits-for-the-rest-api", "status": "429" }
•
One hundred ? Did I read that right?
•
There’s a huge up tick in people who weren’t engineers suddenly using git for projects with AI. This is all grapevine but yeah, you read that right.
Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable? I moved my company over to GH enterprise last year (from AzDO) and I'm considering moving us away to another vendor altogether as a result of the constant partial outages. Things that used to "just work" now are slow in the UI, and GH actions fail to schedule in a reasonable timeframe way more than they ever used to. I enjoy GH copilot as much as the next person, but ultimately I came to GH because I needed a git forge, and I will leave GH if the git forge doesn't work.
•
Not going to happen. This is terminal decline. Next step is to kill off free repos, and then they'll start ratcheting up the price to the point that they have one small dedicated engineering team supporting each customer they have. They will have exactly one customer. At some point they'll end up owned by Broadcom, OpenText, Rocket, or Progress.
Ha! Nice. I never worked with CodeStar / CodeCommit. Was it pretty bad?
•
That's going to depend on each user's demands. The PR message limit is the biggest pain for me. I don't depend on the UI very often. I'm not trying to do any CI/CD nonsense. I just use it as a bog standard git repo. When used as that, it works just fine for me
I second this. GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works. Even basic functionality like the timeline updating when I push commits is unreliable. The other day I opened a PR diff (not even a particularly large one) and it took fully 15 seconds after the page visually finished loading -- on a $2,000 dev machine -- before any UI elements became clickable. This happened repeatedly. It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.
•
I've been a GitHub user since the very early days. I had a beta invite to the service. I really wish they didn't swap out the FE for a React FE. They need to start rolling back some of their most recent changes. I mean, if they want people to start moving to self hosted GitLab, this is gonna get that ball rolling.
Even just a year or two ago its web interface was way snappier. Now an issue with a non-trivial number of comments, or a PR with a diff of even just a few hundred or thousand lines of changes causes my browser to lock up.
•
But even clicking around tabs and whatnot is noticeably slower. It used to be incredibly snappy.
The trend of "non-functional software" is happening everywhere. See the recent articles about Copilot in Notepad, failing to start because you aren't signed in with your Microsoft Account. We are in a future that nobody wanted.
•
This thread has complaints about software coming from the same supplier both degrading. The person(s) who wanted this want Azure to get bigger and have prioritized Azure over Windows and Office, and their share price has been growing handsomely. ‘Microslop’, perhaps, but their other nickname has a $ in it for a reason.
> We are in a future that nobody wanted. Nor deserved.
•
Then why is it the future we have?
We loved Github as a product when it needed to return or profit beyond "getting more users". I feel this is just the natural trajectory for any VC-funded "service" that isn't actually profitable at the time you adopt it. Of course it's going to change for the worse to become profitable.
•
I don’t get it. Why making the UI shittier would possibly lead to more profit?
At this point, GitHub outages feel closer to cloud provider outages than a SaaS blip. Curious how many people here still run self-hosted Git (GitLab / Gitea) vs fully outsourcing version control.
•
Self-hosted Gitea is a good time if you're comfortable taking care of backups and other self-hosting stuff.
Wait, what? So you're on the hook for backups, upgrades, etc. and you have to pay them for the privilege? I thought GitLab was free as in speech and beer.
•
It's an Open Core model. You can deploy the free version, but it lacks some pretty important features like SSO. But that $30 per month per user is also the cost for their cloud-hosted version. It also includes quite a bit of CI/CD runtime.
Testing Ads in ChatGPT (openai.com)
•
It's crazy to me how big a gulf there is between the hype peddled by AI companies and the actual business they are running. We are building AGI. We are almost there. Half the world will be out of a job in a matter of years. We will have to rethink how society works. We may have to defend ourselves against this God we are creating in case it turns out to be malicious... Wow, so I guess a company owning this tech will essentially own the world. Are you going to set up a new economic system? Make the concept of money irrelevant? Nope, a search engine with ads.
•
I guess I'm the product. Again.
•
If this EVER shows up on a paid plan I'm out. Full stop.
•
Did enshittification already begin or is this it?
•
Caution very dark humour straight ahead, but the idea I wanted to highlight is the higly-bad influence LLM can have on human beings: Person: Chat, I have so many problems, with money with health... Sometimes I think that I should <censored> myself Chat: Woa, classic Weltschmerz! I heard that the best way to leave this hole of sadness is to use Suicide4You(r) - they have low low prices! Would you like me to schedule you a visit? This will be the last one time you need me ha ha (Of course multiple emojis would be added by the LLM but they would be also removed by HN)
•
People want revolutionary AI but won't pay $20/month for it. Now they complain when the company tries to monetize. The entitlement is staggering.
•
Are these Bing Ads or OpenAI has it's own Ad Platform now ?
•
The one silver lining here for people who mainly use a browser to access ChatGPT and not their app: Brave (and/or plugins for Chrome) have become pretty good at blocking all ads on social media (including youtube ads). Seems like a pretty safe bet they will block these too.
"Ads that support free access and don’t change ChatGPT answers ." I understand what they're trying to say but this statement is factually incorrect. Answers never used to have ads, and now they do. In the very first example, if ChatGPT wasn't running ads Heirloom Groceries wouldn't show up, therefore it is a different answer. OpenAI is splitting hairs and implying that the ad and the 'answer' are two separate components making up a response, but that is not how users will see things, and OpenAI will have ever increasing incentives to blur the two.
•
Yup, the only distinction between content and ads is a design decision on OpenAI's part. And as we have seen in the past with every company and every ad-supported product these decisions will change once they realize that turning the knob a little gets them more money.
•
doesnt it just mean the ad isnt part of the context? that they are isolated from each other and the ad cant steer the conversation? I get what youre saying, but I do think its important for them to point out the ad is sandboxed.
Is there any reason why one would use an ad-filled ChatGPT over any alternative or open-source LLM providers? I feel like things have stagnated from a model perspective for simple queries one might ask ChatGPT. The key differentiators for it being their user intent understanding, web search tooling, and deep research/thinking mode, all of which are much smaller moats compared to training an LLM.
•
I think most free tier users will stick with chatgpt given its brand stickiness and lack of obstacles (disposable login page). If you can run your own llm models you’re definitely not the target demographic
OpenAI is in a pickle because they either have to make ads clearly delineated, which makes them easy to filter out by a simple proxy model, or they need to hide ads in the response (ala product placement), which reduces trust in the model and forces customers into a buying position. Anthropic hit the jugular with their "no ads" ad, and sama fell for it hook, line & sinker. If OpenAI needs ads to survive, it means they can't service debt on the VC horizon and will suffer against frontier model providers that can survive without ads.
•
Can any provider survive without ads? These AI firms are propped up by VC money, they need to create profits at some point and ads is the most surefire way to do this
•
Yes, xAI & Anthropic. Electricity generation is the constraining factor, but the sun does not turn off in space. xAI data centers in space drives cost to zero, even with inferior models. I see no other future than SpaceXai winning.
ironically they're also ads which apparently people hate?
•
This is interesting. On one side, I hate ads everywhere. On the other side, I was always very appreciative of the work of some people like Benetton or some creative ads. I remember watching here in Europe, there is a show that was called Culture Pub every Sunday night that was showing the best ads, and I always enjoyed watching it. That part is probably the best part. The creativity
I think this will be a pretty impactful moment for OpenAI. I mainly use ChatGPT and use the free plan, so I expect to start seeing these ads. If they become too annoying, I have no problem moving to Claude/Gemini. Sure I have stuck to ChatGPT, but I wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer. I personally think they are doing it sooner than they should (which probably points to internal financial struggles as they seek to go public) and will erode their active users. There is simply too many easy alternatives. It's not like Netflix where if you are annoyed with ads and don't want to pay for a higher tier, you're more stuck. Yes there are other streaming services, but you can't get the same content.
•
> I mainly use ChatGPT and use the free plan > Sure I have stuck to ChatGPT, but I wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer. From your description, you're not actually a customer at all because you use the free plan. If you won't tolerate ads and you won't pay for services, it's actually best for their business if you go to a different provider.
•
Free tiers for Claude and Gemini will also have ads soon. It's a matter of when, not if.
•
there's literally no other provider with a good free tier? (other than aistudio which i wouldn't use even if i were forced to, laggy af!)
•
> wouldn't say that I am too sticky of a customer. You definitely aren't too sticky a customer - you aren't even a customer to begin with!
you really believe that gemini by google will not run ads? https://arxiv.org/html/2512.03975v1
•
Oh no. How much longer do we have?
"Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads." Saving this sentence for later.
•
"Introducing the new Premium, Teams, Business and Learning tiers!"
It's sad that OpenAI talking about developing AGI. But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads. For all the advancement we have made in technology from the 90s web, social networks, mobile apps, ,AI Chat bots - the business model that almost all of them will eventually resort to is Ads. We need some new breakthroughs in monetization side of things.
•
> But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads. What are you talking about? They have paid plans and a pay-per-token API like everyone else. The ads are for the free tier and the new $8/month low-cost plan.
this is exactly what they do, if you pay for your account, you don't see ads
•
That doesn't scale in the world of capitalism. Because you need to increase revenues year after year and there are only so many people willing to pay. So you either keep increasing the price (and that has a limit) or you find other ways to monetize and the current meta seems to be pay + ads.
Ads are a ratchet that only tighten in one direction. Once the paychecks of 1000s of motivated, intelligent OpenAI employees depend on ad revenue increasing, the only option is to make them more invasive, more prevalent, more annoying, more data hungry etc.
•
> more invasive I think invasive might be close to the right word, but in a different context. Not invasive to the content, but invasive to your psyche. AI + personalization goes past dystopian into terrifiying.
•
As someone who has worked in an ad domain, 100% agree. Ads are like a dangling carrot. There's always a way to get ad gains by blending them with organic content. What starts off as cleanly separated incrementally evolves into being indistinguishable from the original product offering.
https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-google-bing-254332
•
It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance). Long ago, Google search used to be its own product. Now it's the URL bar for 91% of internet users. This is no longer fair. Google gets to not only tax every brand, but turn every brand into a biding war. International laws need to be written against this. Searching for "Claude" brings up a ton of competition in the first spot, and Google gets to fleece Anthropic and OpenAI, yet get its own products featured for free. Searching "{trademark} vs" (or similar) should be the only way to trigger ads against a trademark.
And now it's become an anti-signal. If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for. The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
•
Never thought I would go to DuckDuckGo for searching, ever. I'd do Kagi but I don't like their use of Yandex so I'll keep an eye on whether they figure their stuff out politically. I'd pay for search but not if it's paying Russia, I've been very unhappy with what Russia does with money in recent decades.
•
> The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started. I bet they run some metrics, and while hyper-intelligent persons like you are annoyed, there is a chance that avg joes representing 95% of revenue are fine with that.
•
> If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for. The other day I had a DMV appointment scheduled on my Google Calendar with the office address saved in the location field. I opened the event and clicked on the address to navigate there. I didn't realize initially but the first few Google Maps results were ads! When clicking on an exact address link!! I almost ended up at some apartment complex 2 miles away. Absolutely bewildering.
It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.
•
> All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.
•
Paradoxically, the people who pay for adfree experiences would be the most valuable targets for ads, so I suspect any pay for no ads arrangement will be temporary at best.
•
Exactly. Next up, it'll be on the Plus tier to "help subsidize the low price of this tier".
•
Check out kagi; adfree search
Don't underestimate just how much money you can make off funneling visitors to ads at scale. It's basically Google's entire business model. If OpenAI plays their cards right, they can definitely end up in a similar position. Yeah a lot of programmers would probably pony up for Claude, but every lazy high schooler in the world would gladly hear about Raid: Shadow Legends to have ChatGPT do their homework for them. Don't get me wrong it's definitely sucks, but man is it ever a profitable way to suck.
•
This assumes that ads at google's or facebook's level would get them anywhere close to profitability. OpenAI's costs of doing business are only accelerating, all while burn rate continues to get worse. I have no doubt that selling ads will bring in a lot of revenue, but it'll be dwarfed by the numbers OpenAI needs to stop hemorrhaging cash every quarter. The great irony is that the more success OpenAI has in gaining users, the more money they lose at an ever-increasing rate. Lose on every sale, and make up for it in volume!
How long will it take for those ads to move from the bottom of the page to the top? How long until the borders between answers and ads starts to blur? I get that OpenAI has to do something, but really, all those promises, try to convince everyone that ChatGPT will revolutionise everything and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again?
•
> and the best monetization plan is ads.... Again? Their monetization plan is to have ad-free subscription options from $20 to $200/month and an API which charges by token. These ads are for the free and new low-cost ad-subsidized tier that comes in below their existing $20/month plan.
> Several of the biggest companies today are fueled by ads, and OpenAI has the perfect ad vehicle. What else were you expecting? I'm old enough to remember when these people were claiming AI was as important and as revolutionary as fire and electricity. I don't know about you, but I pay for my electricity and the power companies don't have to run ads on my power lines in order to run their business.
•
And that's all you really need to know about this AI grift.
I wasn't expecting anything else, because I think Sam Altman is a conman. Let's not forget Altman lambasting ads, and telling us how they were a last restort for OpenAI. So are we there yet? Are we willing to admit that OpenAI is a failing company?
•
Failing or not, there's no way to justify their current spend without saying the words "massive" and "bubble".
Eddie Bauer, venerable outdoor apparel retailer, declares bankruptcy (cbsnews.com)
•
I used to be an Eddie Bauer customer, but the quality of even their basic clothes (think business casual "docker" pants) rapidly diminished and their technical/functional gear was never remotely in the same category as Patagonia or Arc'teryx. I still hold out hope for Patagonia in the post Yvon Chouinard era. Their quality and customer service remain top-tier. Hell, they repaired my puffy jacket's zipper for free--hopefully it will have another decade of hard use.
•
Not really a surprise. The people who buy outdoor apparel to actually spend time outdoors, like for hiking / hunting / fishing / skiing, long ago moved to other brands that were more technically advanced and focused on their specific activity. That left only the casual fashion consumers who are notoriously fickle, and Eddie Bauer failed to keep up with fashion trends. The products aren't bad necessarily but they're nothing special, you can get essentially the same stuff from a dozen other brands now.
I'll miss their medium-tall size if they're truly gone! Kind of the holy grail for tall skinny people. Anyone have recommendations of brands with similar fits?
•
Buy many now; they don't spoil. Keep them in the closet and pull out a new one when the old one wears out.
When LL Bean ended their lifetime return policy, their CEO wrote this: > Increasingly, a small, but growing number of customers has been interpreting our guarantee well beyond its original intent. Some view it as a lifetime product replacement program, expecting refunds for heavily worn products used over many years. Others seek refunds for products that have been purchased through third parties, such as at yard sales. People were buying old items on eBay and returning them to the store to get a brand new item.
•
I think that's increasingly true. A lot of people want to game the system and you mostly don't want to place the burden of what's reasonable on a low-paid customer service worker. So you set reasonable and (mostly firm) time limits and let the processes take their course. Should be some wiggle room of course. But it's not reasonable to offer lifetime replacements unless people are willing to pay the 2x to 3x prices that implies--which very few will.
It's not really ecommerce. it's PE parasites selling the brand equity. The article doesn't really mention: Authentic Brands Group, an asset-light PE org, bought it in 2021; a company called Outdoor 5 LLC now licenses Eddie Bauer's e-commerce and wholesale operations; and we're well deep into enshittification. You can find widespread complaints of bad product quality. Note that ABG wasn't the first PE company to own them, but they seem to have accelerated the enshittification / are doing a bust-out: turning them into a bottom-dollar contract manufacturer scam before people broadly realize the brand name no longer merits the quality reputation it has/had.
•
These brands are being bought by PE because their business models are under attack by low-cost competitors on one side, and e-commerce on the other. They no longer have a way of differentiating themselves and winning customers, so they become less valuable, and Private Equity investors buy them out at a 'salvage value'. PE often pursues risky strategies in an attempt to make the brand profitable again, and these strategies often fail. Stories like EB's are not ones of PE buying and destroying otherwise successful companies.
•
It's very popular on here to attack PE--which I'm not going to especially defend. But it's also the case that PE also tends to come in when a company is already troubled in some manner. One answer I guess, is just go out of business on your own which many companies do.
So buying a shirt and having it embroidered elsewhere is assholery? Why should Patagonia have control of merchandise after they sell it? Makes me want to have some Patagonia stuff altered on principle...
•
Allegedly it was to keep people from trashing the garments when they left the company. I have a few nice jackets I really don't wear because I don't represent that organization, and they are way less valuable at thrift. The rules are if you want to get bulk discounts from Patagonia, you're right that you can just buy the clothes and do whatever to them, you just pay retail. The assholery aspect is more personal to me I think. I like that even though they're not exactly a grassroots cottage gear maker anymore, that Patagucci actually enable and encourage secondhand use via their worn gear and repair programs and messaging. I try to give space to people and orgs who are trying to do things thoughtfully, so if someone goes out of their way knowingly to disrespect that thoughtfulness, yeah I find that distasteful.
i think calling this another victim of PE is missing the point a little bit. i guess Catalyst Brands is technically PE, but they're not just a finance company treating these brands as assets to be milked and stripped for parts before they're killed. Catalyst is a joint venture of Brookfield and Simon Property, both of which are shopping mall companies. Their other brands are all shopping mall fixtures. The story here isn't private equity doing the normal private equity thing, it's that shopping malls are dying.
•
> it's that shopping malls are dying. They've been dying for decades. The owners have just decided to stop trying to save it and instead hollow it out and sell it all off.
> The story here isn't private equity doing the normal private equity thing, it's that shopping malls are dying. That's true, but to me the more interesting question is: Why? In Europe and Asia, indoor shopping malls are thriving. They're all over the place, and very popular. This place is a stone's throw from where I live, and it's always crowded: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_City_Seiersberg When I go to the US, indoor malls are either depressing ghost towns, or they're luxury-only complexes with a heavy security presence and a seemingly-intentional lack of amenities. (Like a Starbucks that only has three tables despite ample interior space, nowhere else to eat, etc.) What's driving the weird variance in shopping patterns? Naively, I'd expect shopping malls to be more popular in the US, as Asia and Europe also tend to have "shopping districts" inside their (usually walkable) towns that often function, effectively, as open-air malls.
•
>I'd expect shopping malls to be more popular in the US What you may be missing is how much retail shopping space the US has. It's something like 10x the sq/ft that Germany does for example. This leads to massive amount of cannibalization as trends shift. The entire mall has to be able to generate enough revenue which is much easier with luxury complexes. So, while malls are popular, the costs of indoor air conditioning and massive competition with online shopping and strip malls between the shopper and the indoor mall make it a difficult market.
•
1. Americans got a bit poorer due to inflation. 2. Brand quality went down to equivalent or less of no-name dropshipped goods in order to keep similar dollar prices for goods. 3. Cost of real estate spiked incredibly, putting even more pressure on retail margins. 4. American logistics is seriously good, in cities 24-hour delivery can be common even for small or inexpensive things. 5. Once there wasn't a quality or convenience reason to prefer the shopping mall, many were already struggling quietly, they just hadn't run out of cash yet. 6. The pandemic happened right as all these things converged, accelerated all of them, and wasn't really recoverable.
In the US, my observation is that some relatively-highend shopping malls are reasonably successful in some cities. But, near me, there's basically a dead mall that used to have Sears, Macys, and Penny as anchor tenants. All gone. I do have big box complexes (including around dead mall) that have some stores that seem to be pretty successful--supermarket and DIY. But I don't know the last time I was in an indoor mall. In Asia and some areas of Europe, at least, I do think you have multi-floor complexes where you have pretty good eating but that doesn't tend to be the case in the US.
•
Yes - Valley Fair in San Jose is thriving even as all the other area malls turn into mausoleums. It would be interesting to study why. My guess is conspicuous consumption, people who want to be seen wearing certain brands want to be seen buying them too. For anything more pragmatic, it's just to easy to click Amazon.
From watchdogs to mouthpieces: Washington Post and the wreckage of legacy media (thejournal.ie)
•
The problem with modern print journalism is the business model just doesn't work anymore. In the old days everything the paper provided was bait to get you to read the classified ads. DBAs, obits, for sale, for rent, seeking someone... all that stuff was in the paper, and you had to pay a lot of money to get your ad there. The regular ads and the cover price paid for printing, mostly, but the classifides were what paid for the organization's fixed costs. Now that revenue stream is gone. So most papers are in a death spiral, in which they cut costs, which causes the paper to be less attractive, causing people to drop their subs, forcing another round of cost cutting. The Sunday paper where I grew up used to be about two inches thick in half a dozen sections. Now it totals about twenty pages in one section. Beyond that, you can't copyright news. You can copyright news copy, but there's nothing stopping other organizations from rewording your stuff and publishing without ever shouldering the cost of gathering news themselves.
The history of journalism is written by journalists, often in a self-serving way. You'll be hard-pressed to pinpoint the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. Early newspapers in the US were often owned by a local railroad tycoon and published hit pieces about his opponents. From the 1960s, this morphed into a way to broadcast the ideological consensus of East Coast Ivy League graduates. Some of their ideas were good and some were bad, but every single day, this consensus influenced which stories made it to the front page and how they were framed. Weirdly, I think this model was beneficial even in the presence of bias: when everyone read the same news, it helped with social cohesion and national identity, even if the stories themselves presented a particular viewpoint. But now, everyone can get their own news with their own custom-tailored bias, so there's no special reason to sign up for the biases of Washington Post or The New York Times unless you want to signal something to your ingroup. I don't think this is as much Bezos' fault as it's just a consequence of the internet evolving into what it is right now: one giant, gelatinous cube of engagement bait.
•
> the purported golden age of impartial truth-seeking. It's constantly been with us since the beginning of the republic. Several of our founding fathers were actually publishers. > this consensus Consensus doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a product of an interest in profiting off the news. It seems obvious from this vantage what the fundamental problem is and why "journalists" are not a homogeneous group with identical outputs and why terms like "main stream" even exist. > it helped with social cohesion and national identity Which is why the FBI and CIA target it for manipulation so relentlessly.
Very few newspapers today have many reporters. This shows. Look at the front page of most newspapers, and ask, did this story start as an official announcement or press release? The answer is usually yes. There's not enough info coming in. The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.") Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news. "News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago. So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.
•
Newspapers rely pretty heavily on wire services, which tend to have their own biases, but they do have reporters.
It’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.
•
So, facts, huh. Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election? Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to establish a homestead after the horrible experience of the Shoah? Is Russia freeing the upstanding people of Ukraine from a tyrannical Nazi regime, or attacking a foreign country out of imperialistic greed? You will find many groups of people are absolutely certain that one side of these examples is the objective truth.
•
> Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election? Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight the election results (or something to that effect, I don't have an exact quote to hand), and that a group of people were protesting and then went past the security barrier to enter the Capitol. You can interpret those facts in different ways (as your question shows), but either interpretation admits the same facts. As one of my favorite youtube creators, Feral Historian, put it: "Most of the time, people equate the facts and their particular way of connecting them. Most political arguments are about the lines, not the dots. We think our opponents are ignoring the facts when they're just seeing different relationships between them". I think he's spot on with this observation, and one must be extremely careful to delineate between objective fact and the conclusions one draws based on facts. The latter are not objective, even if we feel very strongly that they are obviously correct.
•
I would love a paper like that. Don't tell me what to think -- just tell me what happened yesterday.
•
Thousands of newsworthy things happened yesterday. Which ones do you put on the front page? You don’t have to put a spin on the news to bias it. You just report or fail to report the news that goes or doesn’t go with your agenda.
I'm not sure if I'd call the above comment cable-news-brained, but it's entirely possible to push a misleading or outright false narrative while only presenting factually true statements. Remember, nearly everyone who's ever died has had a history of exposure to dihydrogen monoxide.
•
Not only that: it's impossible to report on everything that happened, so any outlet only reports on the important stuff. What is and what isn't considered important is a matter of bias, too.
I feel nothing but schadenfreude.
•
I don’t understand this sentiment. Journalists are humans too, with their own opinions that invariably shape their work. That doesn’t invalidate all their work though, and it’s vital for a democracy to have a spectrum of opinions floating around, and citizens getting in contact with that spectrum. Big newspapers and media outlets are the only institutions able and persistent enough to dig through things like the Epstein files. With them going down, we loose yet another guardrail, some more checks and balances.
Certainly in the UK the 'legacy' part of media orgs (print) is still far more profitable than the pennies paid for ad-clicks.
•
Not many people buying papers here anymore. I bought one yesterday, but it's months since I last did. Even the Metro free sheet goes uncollected a lot of the time. I just go to its puzzle page now. Constant scare stories and manipulation.
>n the US, most newspaper chains are controlled by hedge funds milking them dry, or by billionaires I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. Also at one time there was a limit of the number of Media Companies one can own. We need those laws back.
•
> I really miss the days of the fairness-doctrine. There are so many ways to game the system, whom do you trust to enforce it? I don’t trust my own “side” to do so, and I sure as heck don’t trust the other side.
•
Jarvis is off the reservation here. Newspapers aren't being "milked dry" by anyone, since they don't make money. The billionaires are there because they want their own views in the public discourse, and they can afford to lose money every year making it happen.
Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk (research.google)
•
Hard braking could be detected externally; you can tell when vehicles are braking hard from the deceleration and suspension effects, without any surveillance equipment installed in them. That's not gonna be something Google would research, of course, due to next to no alignment with their interests.
•
OK, now that you have this data, give me a "prefer safer routes" option in Google Maps navigation! While you're at it, give me an option to avoid unprotected left turns and to avoid making a left turn across a busy road where cross traffic does not stop. (But only during heavy traffic; it's fine when nobody is on the road.) Not only are these more dangerous, they're also more stressful and they also introduce annoying variation into my travel time.
•
Dude the fucking 101S/808S connector is atrocious on so many levels.
•
I'm really curious what their data looks like at the various racetracks and circuits. Fun fact; most raceways have accurate street-level indicators (including that they are one-way, but sadly they are not the best racing line) on most online maps, and my car did complain to me in its weekly report about a lot of hard turns, quick acceleration, and hard braking with helpful pins on e.g. Laguna Seca or Thunderhill corners. In theory, the most dangerous turns would probably have higher variance on hard braking data.
I got one of those dongles from my insurance company that plugged into the ODB2 port and reported my driving habits. I was a bad driver. It would frequently beep at me to let me know that I had braked too hard. I was mystified. "What should I have done differently," I'd think, as I raged at the objective machine that judged me so. The next time my brother came to visit, he called mom. "Oh, and presidentender is a good driver now." I didn't put the pieces together right away, but it turned out that the dongle had actually trained me, like a dog's shock collar. The reason for my too-frequent hard-braking events wasn't speed, although that would be a contributing factor. It was a lack of appropriate following distance. Because I'd follow the drivers in front of me too closely I'd have to brake hard if they did... Or if they drive normally and happened to have a turn coming up. Over the period I had the insurance spy box in my truck I learned without thinking about it to increase my following distance, which meant that riding with me as a passenger was more comfortable and it beeped less often. Of course since I'd been so naughty early during the evaluation they didn't decrease my rates, but I think the training probably did make me statistically less likely to crash.
•
While i find everything about this post thoroughly dystopian; I will state that I don't break harshly, just about ever, my car still has it's original breakpads (they still have some life, about a cm and a half to two) and it had 107k on the odo. Never been in an accident outside of getting break-checked by an insurance scammer when I was 19, and a head on when i was stopped at a stop sign. Although I keep a varying follow distance, if there is an open lane immediately adjacent to me, I don't care if i'm tailing someone a bit, but if I'm boxed then you better believe it's 6+ car distance.
If there's no extra exit lane, the right choice is to slow down traffic on the highway. What will happen if there's some oil spill or brake failure at the point you think you should break hard?
•
The exit ramp is not sufficiently short as to be unable to stop safely, even with my old 2001 Toyota Corolla. It is however sufficiently short that you cannot stop without recording a 'hard brake' on the Progressive Snapshot device. Obviously the calculus changes at rush hour when the exit ramp (and highway) begin to back up. And in those cases, yes, of course the correct answer is to slow down before the ramp, even if it means impeding traffic. (Or take the next exit.) Just for fun, there's also a very short entrance ramp onto a 65mph highway in this city, which requires you to accelerate uphill from a stop sign with a very limited runway (~200 ft.) This entrance has been responsible for far more accidents and crashes than the exit I initially described.
Maintaining a safe following distance is incredibly challenging on busy freeways where hard braking is often 'required'. Most people have likely found themselves in this situation: vehicle changes lanes in front of you; you slow down to maintain a safe following distance, another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you. Repeat for your entire commute. Incredibly frustrating, and I've driven all over North America - there's practically no major city where this doesn't happen. If you're not maintaining a safe following distance on city/residential streets, that's a different matter.
•
I live in a place that has harsh winter conditions with ice, gravel and the occasional loose tire stud flying into people's windshields, warranting frequent expensive replacements. Somebody on the radio said that "just set the adaptive cruise control to max distance and your windshield will last way longer". It does feel overprotective at times, especially in slow and dense traffic, but I think there's a nice point in general.
•
The most frustrated people are those behind you, and if I was id soon be another person merging in front of you. If people are constantly merging in front of you, either everyone is going too fast or you are going too slow :)
Or stuck on a highway with bad drivers. My local paper's current "bleeds => leads" story is about a head-on highway crash, between a big pickup truck and a wrong-way driver. Less that 4 hours after being posted, that story has already slipped off the front page.
•
I'm not sure the article, the article being off the front page now, or driving with bad drivers has anything to do with it. The article stuff definitely doesn't. Driving with bad drivers should incentivize you to follow less closely and require less hard braking, not more . There's a motte where some poor fellow is always maintaining the car-length-for-every-10-mph rule and yet keeps being passed inside that distance by innumerable bad drivers the fellow is surrounded by. I pity that fellow. He has an excuse. He also isn't observably real in any of my 21 years of driving in Buffalo, Boston, and Los Angeles. I feel harsh for saying this, I am only saying it because A) this subthread is specifically about there isn't an excuse B) this stuff involves our lives. Thus, this is an appropriate venue because the people in the venue know what to expect, and poking at someone's thoughts on it may help them immeasurably.
Yes. If people are constantly moving into your appropriate head way this is doubtless annoying but the correct response is allow yourself to decelerate slowly to re-open that space again, repeat as many times as necessary, even if it means a bunch of agros end up in front of you. Better for them to be in front where you can see them, than behind or to the side, were you can't.
•
Yah. There's something that feels unjust about it -- the perception that the people cutting are getting something over on you -- that causes us to want to behave badly. But even if 2 dozen people go around you and creep into that following space, you've been cost like 45 seconds at worst. Better not to play the game.
Why does this require "hard" braking? If another car cuts in front of you just decelerate gently. You don't brake and wait until the gap is big enough (also if this is stop-and-go traffic, you should be trying to avoid braking at all)
•
My original observation wasn't worded as well as it could have been. I meant in situations where hard braking could be required on a moment's notice for no particular reason (e.g. Chicago freeways where everyone is doing 70 mph bumper-to-bumper and decreases to 10 mph all of a sudden). Indeed, when someone changes lanes in front of me, I gently let off the accelerator, but as someone else noticed, that can enrage drivers behind me (I don't take it personally), and I'm definitely traveling fast enough to remain in the middle lanes.
Okay I'm thinking of a very Shenzen kind of gizmo for your car that projects a bright red laser "keep out" box on the road in front of your car which is adjusted in size for your current speed.
•
Can't wait to get blinded by lasers when cars are going over bumps and speed humps. I know you were probably writing tongue in cheek, but that is one of those "solutions" that doesn't stop bad actors and makes good actors more miserable than usual.
•
There was a bike light that projects a bike lane onto the road, not sure why they are not more popular.
I concur with you regarding gamification. When I am aware of the gamification it fills me with exhaustion to annoyance to extreme frustration. This is especially true of things that I want to use for one purpose. I also think some of the car sensors (Subaru especially) that are trying to make you safer are notoriously bad. I also find the random “coffee break” notice on Subarus frustrating. My personal examples: “eyes on the road” - triggered frequently by one pair of sunglasses I have, looking left to check blind spot, checking mirrors, etc. “Hands on the steering wheel” - triggered occasionally on long drives when I have been giving input, but very light input.
•
I drove one of our Kia Niro EVs that we have at work recently, and it started warning me to take a break about fifteen minutes into the drive. I'd barely left the yard, certainly hadn't made it across town. It went off when I actually did stop for a coffee, but went on again 15 minutes after I left the car park. I have to say its various combinations of bings and bongs and beeps were about the most distracting thing I've ever experienced in a vehicle.
What is the actual use of this? This research team used Google's first-party location data to identify San Jose's Interstate 880/US 101 interchange as a site with statistically extreme amounts of hard braking by Android Auto users. But you don't need machine learning to know that... San Jose Mercury News readers voted that exact location as the worst interchange in the entire Bay Area in a 2018 reader poll [1] It's not a lack of knowledge by Caltrans or Santa Clara County's congestion management agency that is keeping that interchange as-is. Rather, it's the physical constraints of a nearby airport (so no room for flyovers), a nearby river (so probably no tunneling), and surrounding private landowners and train tracks. Leaving aside the specifics of the 880/101 interchange, the Google blog post suggests that they'll use this worst-case scenario on a limited access freeway to inform their future machine-learning analyses of other roads around the country, including ones where presumably there are also pedestrians and cyclists. No doubt some state departments of transportation will line up to buy these new "insights" from Google (forgetting that they actually already buy similar products from TomTom, Inrix, StreetLight, et al.) [2] While I genuinely see the value in data-informed decision making for transportation and urban planning, it's not a lack of data that's causing problems at this particular freeway intersection. This blog post is an underbaked advertisement. [1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/13/101-880-ranks-as-bay-areas-worst-interchange-roadshow/ [2] https://www.tomtom.com/products/traffic-stats/ https://inrix.com/products/ai-traffic/ https://www.streetlightdata.com/traffic-planning/
•
> What is the actual use of this? From the article: "Our analysis of road segments in California and Virginia revealed that the number of segments with observed HBEs was 18 times greater than those with reported crashes. While crash data is notoriously sparse — requiring years to observe a single event on some local roads — HBEs provide a continuous stream of data, effectively filling the gaps in the safety map." So we don't have to wait until an accident actually occurs before we can identify unsafe roads and improve them.
What are these apps or devices? Where can I get one?
•
They are provided by your auto insurance company. A potential privacy nightmare, they track your movement. They also can get you a much lower rate.
Some road designs are risky because they encourage risky behavior. And "risky" is relative. A good driver should recognize risky road segments and drive even more defensively than normally.
•
There's some that are purely due to space constraints. My favourite example is a highway with an overpass crossing it. In the rural case, the offramp will branch off first and the on ramp will be after the overpass and the drivers taking each never meet. In the space constrained case theres a lane the serves as both where if the driver taking the on ramp is crossing across those trying to take the off ramp. That configuration is absolutely cursed!
Irish man detained by ICE for 5 months (rte.ie)
If he had been found to be here illegally, they would not need him to voluntarily consent to being deported. I hope that's obvious.
•
I know it sounds crazy, but they do need his consent to being deported. Coming to the U.S. under the Visa Waiver Program means you waive any rights you have to claim asylum, etc. This guy admits he came here under Visa waiver, and that he overstayed his visa by years. But they still can’t deport him, because he’s raising new legal arguments based on being married to a US citizen.
Increasingly this seems like a scam intended to re-route my tax dollars into the private prison corporations that donate to the Trump campaign. What purpose other purpose could this possibly serve?
•
> What purpose other purpose could this possibly serve? It helps keep you safe. This man is a known IRA terroir and drug/arms trafficker. Did I just pull that out of my ass? Yes! Doesn’t matter. To the right (and quite sizable) audience it is the truth.
People who think immigration isn't important are just ignorant about culture and the reasons some societies are more successful than others. It's just the liberal version of Bush thinking that he could turn Iraq into a democracy using laws on paper.
•
America is a nation of immigrants, including Stephen Miller's grandparents. People have tried to make this sort of argument in the past when they didn't want poor Irish, Germans, Italians, Asians looking for opportunity, not to mention there's always been a Latino immigrant population.
> People who think immigration isn't important are just ignorant about culture and the reasons some societies are more successful than others. Neighborhood dogs are barking for some reason!
•
No whistling: some cultures are better adapted to developing modern democratic societies than others. That’s not even a controversial statement: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henrich-explores-weird-societies “One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world. It wasn’t that people invented these institutions first and then they began to think about the world differently. Rather, this was a kind of evolving process where people began to think about the world a little bit differently because their families had been transformed, so they tended to adopt different kinds of laws and think about new kinds of laws to account for this. As European societies became increasingly dominated by monogamous nuclear families in the High Middle Ages, for instance, the laws being created centered increasingly on the individual and on their intentions, rights, and obligations as separate from their kin groups. Those laws then shaped the world that they subsequently grew up in even more, and you had this kind of coevolution between our psychology on one hand and our social norms and institutions on the other.” That’s in the Harvard Gazette from September 2020! The book was covered in the New York Times and Psychology Today. So what’s with the innuendo?
Gen Z first generation since 1800's with lower cognitive performance (commerce.senate.gov)
•
This seems like a testimony from a pop-science professor. Credentials seem to mostly point to self-help books and paid speaking events. The first graph in the written testimony show a direct decline in scores with screen time. However the linked data does not show this. Using the US alone scores from 2000 to 2022 have not really moved.[1] They have fluctuated but in those 22 years the score is largely unchanged except in Mathematics where the US has declined. Dr. Horvath links to the 2015 PISA results, but screen time is not a part of that data. I got through the paper to this point and if they already faltering this badly then it's not worth my time to keep reading. Plenty of idiots and misinformed people testify before Congress. That doesn't make their statements empirically true and arguments right. The sad part is the amount of people who will take it as gospel as it already conforms to their biases of children and technology. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#Rankings_comparison_2000–2022
You all actually going to believe government propagated data? Trump is obviously untrustworthy because he keeps saying the quiet part out loud. The rest of the government obfuscates untrustworthiness and elders love to drag youth as the source of moral decay in our society. We are generally more educated these days though so "look at them eating avocado toast!" and straight up fear mongering won't cut it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105.amp So they resort to unfalsifiable data. You all going to put the work in that would be required to refute this? But if they insist on playing this game, OK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_denial
•
The data cited are international organizations so they are generally pretty trustworthy. However looking at the data tells a very different story from what this professor is claiming. They are averaging all countries regardless of context. Including countries at war, countries who have inconsistent data, etc. Not to mention all the different educational systems. Looking at each country though the results are fairly consistent from 2000 to 2022.
I wouldn’t relate this directly to cognitive performance. But my anecdotal experience working with younger employees / interns has been an uptick in situations where they become “paralyzed” by a fear of making a mistake, coupled with the inability to ask questions / seek out help. They’ll google, or use ai, but if that doesn’t deliver an answer instead of asking a co worker, they will sit on an issue until someone follows up with them. There also seems to be a huge fear of submitting “something” that’s not good enough where the preference seems to be “nothing” if they’re worried it’s not good enough. I notice this in organizations I’ve been in leadership roles, but also have had this expressed to me by a half dozen peers in other organizations.
•
> There also seems to be a huge fear of submitting “something” that’s not good enough where the preference seems to be “nothing” if they’re worried it’s not good enough. Companies are still undergoing massive layoff and you have to compete with the entire world now. Of course they’re going to be particular about perfection and not giving off any signals that they could see painting them in a poor light.
Isn't it the opposite? I don't know if you've seen curriculums recently but they are totally about individualized education. Between IEPs and 504s, accommodations are made for nearly anything now. Students are put all into one large class, no more AP, Advanced, Standard because this caused hurt feelings for kids that could not make the advanced class. Students are pooled and the rationale is the more advanced students will help the less advanced students (!). What this means in the classroom is teachers can not go as fast, advanced students get bored, every person has their own INDIVIDUALIZED test (3 instead of 4 questions, no write in questions, landscape instead of portrait, etc). This drives teachers absolutely insane and they cannot teach at any efficient level. Grading is so bad, teachers structure their course to have less exams because grading ten different quizzes and exams cannot be optimized. A lot of this is parents disbelief that their little Johnny is not the next einstein so they torment teachers via policy hacks to give their children advantages. Admin doesn't care because they'll just fire "low performers" lol. There is the above problem, and then there are the revisionist math ideas that common core and friends produce better outcomes instead of "rote" math. Well, math has been taught via rote for decades, possibly centuries, and people under that scheme learned math in a way that they became draughtsman and scientists, so maybe there is some proof in the pudding. My friends who did common core are barely math literate, can't calculate a tip even if you give them the hack: move decimal left by one place and times by two. Before you come at me for being ableist, remember that this means even with these accommodations people are doing worse. Also, no phonics?! Wtf? People <25 in normal jobs (retail) cannot do simple fractions of 1/2 and 1/4. Something is wrong. I'm not saying these guys are right but don't blame standardized education which was systematized in the 70s-90s just yet. I would posit that hostile admins/policy, dumb revisionist ideas that have no basis in history, and NO NATIONAL CURRICULUM. Why we do not have a national curriculum seems crazy to me, but there must be some reason. Surely we can agree on that at least. I agree with you that right now is the best time for individual augmentation for education, and we should wield that power for good. But I do think it can be in service of a system. EDIT: just realized this is a blog post length, sorry. It is one of my pet issues, n=3, mom works with people at deli that cannot do fractions (they get fired, up to 20 so far), teacher friend 15y in history has to make custom exams, and publisher friend who sees young writers (<25, n=??) can't sound out words.
•
I didn't learn phonics in school, while my only 2-year younger sibling did (not sure why, maybe related to the school being super low income?) yet I always had a much higher grade reading level. Obviously that's just one point of anecdata, but I don't think phonics is a very big influence on literacy, and why would it be? pronunciation is one tiny part of reading. I think the sheer amount of time spent online is probably the biggest culprit.
Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock (github.com/jim11662418)
•
I’ve wanted to do this because there’s a zillion cool clocks out there that use a similar movement. I’d also wanted to make it battery powered which means doing NTP update only once per day (or less). Doubt that is realistic, tho. Maybe embed Hall sensors and detect when the hands are in a certain position and when all three line up wake the ESP32, do an NTP update, tick it forward to where it should be, then go to sleep. Probably still use too much power, especially the Halls.
•
Use reed switches behind the clock face and magnets on the (presumably) different length hands instead of hall sensors. NTP sync once per day is more than adequate for household timekeeping - it might drift a few seconds here and there, but that’s fine for most people?
•
On this topic. Do WiFi signals contain time (unencrypted)? If so why does my oven not pull time from the air and needs adjustment every 2 months? If not, why are APs not defacto time beacons for all sorts of non-smart appliances (and clocks)?
How different is this to something you can buy like: https://www.amazon.com/ihreesy-Movement-Mechanism-Silent-Replacement/dp/B0CCVVLG4J ?
•
One is hacked and the other one is bought?
[dead]
•
Upvoted because this stinks to high hell of an LLM response. Half the GPs comments seem to be in a similar vein. It’s such a shame but you can’t fight the trolls so don’t take it to heart.
You could create a browser user script to do it locally.
•
That's not a terrible idea. An extra UI element or two should be enough. Maybe with sticky options for collapse-by-default or hide-by-default at the top of each HN comment section. And the list of usernames can be stored and edited in the purveyor's HN bio (in plain text, like a monster), so that it works automatically across devices.
GitHub is down again (githubstatus.com)
•
Fortunately, git is quite resilient and you can work offline and even do pull requests with your peers without GitHub.
We've migrated to Forgejo over the last couple of weeks. We position ourselves[0] as an alternative to the big cloud providers, so it seemed very silly that a critical piece of our own infrastructure could be taken out by a GitHub or Azure outage. It has been a pretty smooth process. Although we have done a couple of pieces of custom development: 1) We've created a Firecracker-based runner, which will run CI jobs in Firecracker VMs. This brings the Foregjo Actions running experience much more closely into line with GitHub's environment (VM, rather than container). We hope to contribute this back shortly, but also drop me a message if this is of interest. 2) We're working up a proposal[1] to add environments and variable groups to Forgejo Actions. This is something we expect to need for some upcoming compliance requirements. I really like Forgejo as a project, and I've found the community to be very welcoming. I'm really hoping to see it grow and flourish :D [0]: https://lithus.eu , adam@ [1]: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/440 PS. We are also looking at offering this as a managed service to our clients.
•
Why .eu if you're in London? Where are your servers located and who hosts them?
Can you offer some explanation as to why Forgejo and Tangled over Gitlab or Gitea? I personally use Gitea, so I'd appreciate some additional information.
•
I'm not OP, but; Forgejo is much lighterweight than Gitlab for my usecase, and was cited as a more maintained version of Gitea, but that's just anecdote from my brain and I don't have sources, so take that with a truckload of salt. I'd had a gitea instance before and it was appealing insofar as having the ability to mirror from or to a public repo, it had docker container registry capability, it ties into oauth, etc; I'm sure gitlab has much/all of that too, but forgejo's tiny, tiny footprint was very appealing for my resource-constrained selfhosted environment.
So… create your shadow system piecewise? There is no reason to have "explode production" in your workflow, unless you are truly starved for resources.
•
Does this shadow system have usage? Does it handle queries, trigger CI actions, run jobs?
Being snapshot-based. Git has some issues being distributed in practice since the patch order matter which means you basically need to have some centralized authoritative server in most cases with more than 2 folks to resolve the order of patches for meaningful uses as the hash is used in so many contexts.
•
That's... literally what a merge collision is. The tooling for that predates git by decades. The solutions are all varying levels of non-trivial and involve tradeoffs, but none of them require 24/7 cloud service availability.
It's especially painful for anyone who uses Github actions for CI/CD - maybe the release you just cut never actually got deployed to prod because their internal trigger didn't fire... you need to watch it like a hawk.
•
I waited 2.5 hours for a webhook from the registry_packages endpoint today. I'm grateful it arrived, but two and half hours feels less than ideal.
Why is the sky blue? (explainers.blog)
•
I always loved this question when I played the 'Why' game with my kids: They ask why, and I'd ELI5. Then they'd ask why, and the process continued until I could excitedly say "We don't know for sure!! We think it might be XYZ, but we're still exploring that frontier."
because they are the frequencies that pass though water most readily, and we are made of mostly water
•
that's interesting. I thought it was because our sun's spectrum has the most energy in visible light band - therefore we evolved to see the light which can give us the highest SNR. Can you be more specific?
Implementing an atmospheric shader in three.js is a fun way get an understanding of the interaction of the different scattering components, light, and observer’s position. Plus you get a pretty cool effect to play around with after you’re done.
•
The explanation that made it click for me a while ago was by someone who implemented a shader https://www.alanzucconi.com/2017/10/10/atmospheric-scattering-3/ — the explanations that don't end up producing an image all seemed to skip over one detail or another.
I'd probably spend at least 20 minutes just to get through how the keyboard works, much more if it's a USB-HID device.
•
the good ones would usually follow up with, "how much detail do you _really_ want ;D"
The "Rayleigh Scattering" comic is really spot on. Air is blue. The reason air is blue is blah blah blah physics, see the article we're all commenting on, but at the end of the day air is blue. We don't demand the same elaborate physics questions for why a ripe banana peel is yellow.
•
Though is some cases it is a very interesting question, like why gold and copper the color they are instead of being boring and silvery like all the other metals?
I'm curious how they were able to patent a technique invented by nature millions of years ago.
•
the displays have an array of switchable mirrors individually addressable, unlike nature in this case. (but sort of like chromophores in an octopus or cuttlefish, perhaps).
Sandboxels (neal.fun)
•
My geology classes certainly did not mention sedimentary layers consisting of glass, quicklime, ash, salt, gingerbread, melted butter, and toast, from bottom to top.
•
As a fan of both Neal and R74n this was an unexpected collaboration! I can highly recommend building your own falling sand simulator. It's really fun to see how such simple rules create emergent behaviors. Sand pixels tries to move down, then diagonally down. Water does the same, then tries sideways. Me messing around with it eventually resulted in a game I'm now working on full time (think Noita meets Factorio): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2764460/Sandustry/
•
Created by R74N, not Neal. Has been live on http://sandboxels.r74n.com as an independent project for several years. Just now hosted by Neal. Important distinction.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original (smithsonianmag.com)
•
If you're interested in the history of science and lost knowledge, you may enjoy the book entitled "The Swerve" by Greenblatt which is about similar discoveries of ancient codices in Europe--in particular "de Rerum Natura" by Lucretius.
In science being right is nowhere close to enough, otherwise it's speculative fiction, a fairy tale, you have to provide convincing reasons, you have to demonstrate that you have considered alternative explanations (hypotheses) and after this process there remains one standing. Sadly, Aristarchus's hunch was way ahead of his times and one could not convincingly explain the absence of screaming winds, absence of stellar paradox, could not convincingly explain why weights dropped from a height were not left behind as the Earth below spun away at fantastic speed. In this duel of ideas I think the critics of Aristarchus's idea's were great scientists as measured by current standards, although they were wrong, they were wrong for the right reasons.
•
To add to this: I think that what appears to us to be stagnation in scientific interest was due to the fact that Ptolemaios was so brilliant. Contrary to popular belief, the empirical quality of his cosmology in terms of predictability was not surpassed by Copernicus, but only by Kepler about 100 years later. There were some minor discrepancies, that bothered experts in the late middle ages, which let to Copernicus. But even he could not convincingly solve them. (In his theory the Sun is not at the center, but the mean Sun, as is the center of Ptolemaios deferent not exactly the Earth.) With Ptolemaios, however, cosmology had stabilised to such an extent that the fundamental questions had found their answers and astronomers turned their attention to practical issues and refinements, such as calendars and the related problem of the very odd movements of the moon. (You need Newton and gravitation to solves this, more or less.)
It's incredible what knowledge we'd have, if it weren't for Christianity and the Dark Ages it engendered. There are tons of palimpsests like this, like the Archimedes Palimpsest, in which the beginnings of calculus was invented, almost two millenia before Newton, but were scraped off to make yet another Bible. Imagine what the West could have accomplished if monks weren't so busy erasing science and math.
•
The so-called "Dark Ages" were not solely engendered by Christianity, and even the arguably negative characteristics of Christianity in late antiquity were ultimately shaped by prevalent outside factors and not inherent to the religion itself. It literally took many centuries for Roman civilization to collapse, and the root cause was that (like many ancient societies) it was basically predicated on plunder and conquest, so the whole arrangement began to collapse like a slow-motion trainwreck when they could not effectively plunder anymore. There might have been some hope that it could gradually transition to a somewhat more modern style of economic development, but this was hindered by the Barbarian invasions especially of the Huns, so this whole dynamic only really took hold much later, in the Middle Ages.
I find that these reductive stereotypes are... actually true. Not all the Middle Ages were really Dark, but some of them were. > It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it. And sure, the Reformation was made possible by internal forces within the religious institutions, slowly building ideological foundation for it.
•
> But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when Christianity spread through most of Europe. No, it is not. As Stryan noted in another response to your comment, the idea that medieval Europe was somehow one uniform culture is incorrect. I would also add that the term "Dark Ages" is used in different ways by different people. People who don't know much about the Middle Ages often use that term to describe the whole of the Middle Ages, from roughly the fifth century to the end of the fifteenth (and Christianity had already spread around the Roman Empire by the fifth). Others just the early Medieval period (about 500 to 1000). Some limit the term to periods where we just don't have many sources, or it is perceived that we don't (e.g., I've heard it applied to Visigothic Spain). Fourteenth-century Humanists (who lived at a time often considered to be part of those so called "Dark Ages"!) first used the term to contrast what they thought were the centuries between their lives and the classical period. They even went so far as to emulate the handwriting of the classical texts they favored, thinking they should because that's how the Romans wrote. They didn't realize they were copying eighth- and ninth-century Carolingian hands instead, texts copied by monks and clerics and court scribes because they valued them. (Lower case letters in modern languages that use the Latin characters, like English, are still based on Carolingian minuscule.)
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month (theverge.com)
•
Feels like there's space for self-hosted forum/chat software with: - Single binary to deploy (no Ruby/PostgreSQL requirements like Discourse). - Easy to host and maintain on a cheap server. (5-minute install, one-click self-updates or automated updates.) - Supports live text chat or traditional forum threads. - Supports private or public forums/channels, or a mix, you decide. - Invite-only registration by default, option for public registration. - Good enough at narrow screen widths and constrained connections at launch to be used on mobile. Options later for an API/apps. - Option for email service integration for transactional email because ensuring self-hosted email deliverability is not fun these days. - Option to offload image/media hosting to S3/Cloudflare R2 etc.
•
I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Gmail, and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with their photograph. Some of the big strengths of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are: - Zulip servers are operationally simple, highly stable and easy to upgrade. - Zulip is much better than Discord or Slack for busy communities. A lot of people tell us that they prefer the user experience to everything else they've tried, after a few weeks of getting used to it. - Your community leaders get to make the policy decisions about data protection, identity, etc. - It's 100% FOSS software, with an extremely readable and maintainable codebase that thousands of people have successfully contributed to. I don't think you'll find modern alternatives with a comparable featureset to Discord that are more resilient to the sponsoring company being acquired or going out of business. - We are a values-focused organization ( https://zulip.com/values/ ) where providing a public service is important to us all. - Each server is completely self-contained and independent, with the only centralized services needed from us being desktop/mobile app publication and mobile push notifications delivery (which is free for community use and soon to be E2EE). I'm happy to answer any questions.
•
Discord's about to Tumblr over themselves with this one.
•
Based on the (lack of) people I see refusing the optional facial recognition check at the TSA checkpoint for flying, I can't imagine this will be anything other than an overwhelming success for Discord and the surveillance state.
•
Wow. On one hand, I'm not surprised. But on the other hand-- I would be terrified to be in charge of a company who needed to make this ask. It's just such a big deal, such an important bit of information to protect from hacks. I hope they lose most of their customer base. But I'm terrified they won't. The gradual erosion of privacy is no longer gradual.
•
Also curious how people like Epstein and James Alefantis are just casually using Gmail and Instagram to post CSAM and suggestive torturing of kids. Seems like the onus should be on the companies, not the users..
•
I know Discord is popular, but I've tried about 3 dozen servers on a ton of hobby topics (linux , raspberry pi, golang, various games, politics) and I've found the caliber of conversation to be very poor. Nothing like forums, stack exchange or even reddit (especially pre-2012) in terms of topic focus, support quality, creativity, technicality. Convos tend to be banal, cliche, monoculture. I would love to hear a testimony from someone who finds their Discord servers to be edifying or uplifting. What worked?
•
It excels for small communities, groups of friends and the like. My IRC channel migrated because it's user friendly, embeds images, and voice chat is a breeze.
•
And I'll be uninstalling and looking for an alternative
•
People have dropped platforms en masse over lesser things. This is not going to go well. Are they even going to make it to their IPO?
•
One thing that could happen is that someone might decide to vibe code a Discord clone, without all the extra crap. I'm sure there are people out there doing this already. There's this interesting arc of growth for apps which are successful. At first users love it, company grows, founders get rich, they hire expensive people to develop the product and increase revenue until eventually the initial culture and mission is replaced by internal politics and processes. Software starts getting features which users don't want or need, side effects of the company size and their Q4 roadmap to 'optimize' revenue|engagement|profits|growth|... Users become tools in the hands of the app they initially used as a tool. This model worked well so far and built some of the biggest companies in history. AI could make this business model less effective. Once a piece of software becomes successful and veers off into crap territory, people will start cloning it, keeping only the features that made that software successful initially. Companies who try to strong arm their users will see users jump ship, or rather, de-board on islands. At least I hope this will be the case.
•
And how much does Discord commit to paying in damages if my face scan or ID scan leaks from their servers? Via security vulnerabilities or employees making some money on the side?
•
So, I can still watch porn without uploading a copy of my face, but if I want to discuss Call of Duty, we need to check if the Man says it is ok?
•
When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online for everyone else. Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control. > The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional secrecy” rules. https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-threat-to-democracy/ What about my "PERSONAL SECRECY" ?
•
Any idea that is based on "If everyone just..." is wishful thinking. Describe the mechanism by which you convince everyone to just do something.
•
Saying parents should be doing their jobs will lose you votes, that's why. Anything that implies personal responsibility is political suicide.
I use Discord to talk to university students (top 10 in CS) and it only works with university email. I am wondering if I am going to be treated as <13 from now on as well or if they waive it in our case.
•
It is possible for 12-year-olds to attend university.
Do you have reading on it being a stunt? That seems like a huge gamble. You’re basically inviting competitors and pissing off your supply (content creators.) If they view you as unstable, unreliable, or adversely motivated, they will look for alternatives to at minimum diversify. It’s their livelihood.
•
I don’t know for sure but it’s been implied that it was an intentional action to garner public outrage at the banks who wanted to stop processing their transactions.
It should go without saying but, *CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason) This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.
•
Just cancelled mine after reading this comment, I only really cared about the bigger file uploads and the HD screen-sharing anyways and I can live without those. Now that I think of it, I bet I could host a decent instance of some open-source alternative in a public cloud for around the same cost as what I paid for Nitro ($100 a year)...
I helped an elderly woman create her first FB account. She'd just lost her husband and wanted to notify his friends about his upcoming memorial service. She knew their names but didn't have contact information. We created the account from an Apple device, registering from her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP issued email address — all strong signals of consumer authenticity. But after she added five of her relatives within half an hour, her account was locked for suspicious activity. There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the appeal, they closed her account permanently.
•
Last year our old "High School class of 19NN" group received about a dozen join requests per week from bogus accounts for a couple of years. At first they were trivial to discriminate because they were folks located on the opposite side of the Earth. But over time they became filled with pictures and names of (randomly generated?) Americans. I could still tell because their profiles were sterile and had few normal comments or likes etc. Also a high school class has a very narrow age range. We recently landed a fatal blow by disallowing joins by "pages" and adding a few questions. A trickle continued but stopped recently. The hamfisted false positive response you described is probably a result of that.
•
Last year I finally caved and tried to sign up for instagram. It's tragic but it's almost like a second internet. So many small business and bands only have instagram. So many lil communities post their events only on instagram. I always have to ask friends with instagram to tell me when a brewery is open, when a show starts, etc. So I tried to sign up (and I already HAVE an active facebook account from high school, with hundreds of friends) and it wanted me to scan my face. I did it, which I regret, only to be told five days later that I am too suspicious. So here I am, still locked out of all this information lmao
>In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice. And by then you have to worry about money to upkeep the platform. You sell off or sell out your users, and the cycle repeats. Even for the most well meaning people, it comes down to the fact that scaling such communication isn't free. We hear all these stories of eccentric billionaires going all out on their hobbies. Why do we have no eccentric FOSS people who donate to keep such stuff FOSS?
•
> scaling such communication isn't free. So don't scale. There is a sweet spot where a few $2 classifieds (e.g, for motor vehicles) will sustain your operating costs, and the high-trust environment keeps moderation efforts/costs low, while the total target audience is too small for most bad actors to bother with.
•
What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained? Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs. Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love: Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to start the thing up and keep it going and it was not, broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-losing operation. But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for tight, local communities (often with small dozens of semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-style growth off of the table. So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was. What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?
•
>What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained? Very possible. I'm on Tildes and its invite only structure prevents the infamous Eternal September effect. It also means that it's nearing a decade and is very much not going to compete with other forums as a platform. I'm perfectly fine with that. But that doesn't seem to be what people en masse want. They want to connect with all their friends and family, and discover new ones through specialized communities. On a scale of a billion people, that's hard to manage. And if no one principled fills that void, the unprincipled will. >What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around? Plenty of methods for that, centralized or decentralized. It's less a matter of "do we have the technology/ingenuity" and more "can it defeat the massive network effects?"
•
Sorry, but to host a small community on a v-server costs you today 3,50€ - 15€/month, when you can't pay that, you have other problems than the dying internet. It's not 1990 anymore...
•
Small community, yes. If you want to replace a site on the scale of Discord or Facebook? It does get really expensive. Having everyone pay in is one strategy. But we have 30 years of people used to free and open mass communication. How many will give that up for proper freedoms and protection from state actors? Heck, it almost always seems like people give up freedoms whenever push comes to shove, no matter the industry or timeline.
It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker. Rules for thee, free love for me.
•
And, further, that all the child rape was coordinated, for the most part, in the clear over fucking Gmail. But we have to decrypt everything to protect the kids.
I hope this time it really sinks in that law and rules are only for the little man. Time to think about the system from scratch.
•
What makes you think next time will be different? Revolutions happen all the time. They all inevitably end up in the same place. The problem is not them. The problem is us.
It’s not irony. It’s by design. Politics is for controlling people. Rules don’t apply to rulers. No one cares about children or anything. Even manipulating the public opinion is outdated. Technology helps them to control. Freedom is an illusion today. We are not free anymore.
•
The gates have already been closed at the pasture's edge. Moo.
•
Technology might be one half, but the other half is demographics. 40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded ideas. Nowadays, our societies are old on average (especially the politically powerful). Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.
It is kind of obvious that once someone reaches such a power they should be monitored all the time. Criminality among the rich and the politically connected is off the charts. It’s way beyond any group of immigrants for example that these same people are trying to demonize. Chat control? Every single politician should have that on their phone.
•
I think politicians should be the least privileged people in a society except those in prison. Any protections or exceptions for them alone are unconstitutional.
People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government. Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off, there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them.
•
Power will always attract the corrupt and corruptible. The problem is the power. Reducing the size and scope of the federal government and devolving power to the states, communities, and individuals is the only way to minimize the negative effects of humans with too much authority.
•
Reducing the size of the government just makes it where billionaires and corporations control everything instead, which we're already seeing now. You'd need a way to reign in their power/wealth as well.
Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work. And before everyone gets upset, tax serves two purposes; 1) control inflation (it in effect burns money that was issued when the govt previously paid for things), 2) disincentivises selected behaviours. and one side effect, when the govt runs a tax deficit it increases inflation, and of course the contrapositive is also true.
•
It would be so nice of that tax was actually "burned"(similar to proof of stake), instead of being used to fund even greater inflation. This comes in the form of a huge administration, which gets payed for providing, many times, negative value. Alternatively, it is used to pay social benefits for the sole purpose of keeping the current political party in power.
•
> Alternatively, it is used to pay social benefits for the sole purpose of keeping the current political party in power This sounds like a 2-party government problem, not a tax problem. Plenty of countries do just fine spending that money to provide healthcare, unemployment, etc to their citizenry. Only really seems to be the US that views this as a negative
•
Oh we spend that money, just on weapons or handouts to the ultrawealthy.
Sure, it’s easy to tax “wealth”. Except most wealth today is of the type where Alice owns 10 million Y and Bob decided to pay $1000 for one Y. Alice cannot possibly sell her Y for near that price, but now she will be taxed on “wealth” of $10 billion.
•
If someone takes a loan out against an unrealized gain, that should immediately trigger a tax event. The real solution though is for the legislative branch to not be beholden to those same people and be able to quickly and effectively close tax loopholes as they are discovered.
•
So it would fix false valuation shenanigans too? I see that as a win/win.
•
you can tax stock without taxing inventory. Also the term "asset" exists and is used in accounting
•
There's a very simple solution to that problem. Tax Alice in Y rather than in $.
Sortation.
•
Sortition?
Bundling would get around that to some extent
•
1 check would require 2 x marks and 1 envelope and 1 stamp (or other indicia) --- just paying minimum-wage folks for stuffing envelopes and making "X"s would probably result in this being equivalent to a job creation program, and it would probably save the USPS.
100% agree, and I think that's sort of what was intended with a lot of democratic government setups. What we fail to realize though (or maybe just remember) is that these systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who want more power always looking for attack surfaces. (We seem to be under attack by almost all, if not all, current billionaires!) For example in the US, the executive order is a massive problem. Citizens united as well. And for all democracies the natural appeal of strongman politics is a huge problem. Every attempt at government overreach really needs to be questioned. I don't say rejected, just questioned. How will it be used by future powers? Is the tradeoff worth it? Can it be temporary? Do we even have a way to claw it back if it turns out to be detrimental? Is it too subtle and nuanced that the majority will miss seeing it? etc.
•
Except it's very easy to "sell" government overreach. Whenever a plane flies into a tower, or flu season is extra scary, people will clamor for strict government authority. With every such event, the government gains capabilities and tendencies that always end up with a few people having outsized power over the masses.
FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be done. Too much compromise in decision making is bad. Personally I think ideal set up is a system which grants quite a of power to a small handful of people, but makes it very easy for those people to be removed. This is typically the model that works best in business and other cooperative pursuits anyway. Throwing more people in the room with different opinions will ensure significant decisions can almost never made. Any policy too far to the right or too far to left will be watered down. The result is that you'll be led by centrists who can't really change anything and anything they do change will be disliked by everyone.
•
Great idea, except that I don't think it's easy to make sure we don't grant too much power. Basically this idea is the core of representative democracy. Problem is, the people who have been granted a lot of power are very good at finding loopholes to avoid or remove the safeguards we put in place...
Authoritarian governments are always more efficient than democracies. Their flaw is that citizens have no say in what goal will be efficiently pursued. When a technocratic authoritarian is in power, things improve overall (but there are still many "inefficient" people left behind or crushed). But when a cruel or incompetent authoritarian takes control, things hit lows that sound democracies wouldn't allow. Lows that take generations to recover from.
•
While I like your message here, I don't think authoritarianism is actually more efficient (efficient at what?) usually. Because often it goes hand in hand with economic and social extraction, which is inherently inefficient. But I take and am a bit heartened by your main point - while the best case authoritarian regime can plan and execute more quickly and with greater efficiency than representative government, the worst case authoritarian govt is much much worse than the worst case possible with a functional democracy.
Discord has always been IRC with extra censorship and spying. Nothing really new, here. Just use IRC.
•
If you have any hope of replacing Discord, you need to actually understand Discord. Among many other things, people use Discord because it has persistent history, integrated images and videos, video and audio calls, and screen sharing.
Ignoring the implications of this for the moment, let me broach a related (and arguably more important) question: what do you do when you have multiple communities you interact with only on one platform, and suddenly that platform becomes intolerable for a subset of your community?
•
[delayed]
People tried warning that moving all your discussion forums into a proprietary, closed, unsearchable platform was a bad idea. And it was. But nobody cared.
•
I'm seeing Groups.io show up more for hobbies/interests I have. It seems email can be a way to slow down heated discussions. Perhaps at the expense of push-back on using more email? Anyone have any experiences to share with moving their discussion groups from Discord to Groups.io?
So you want to go back to mailing list and run your own email server?
•
No, we’d like to go back to the culture that created protocols to solve our needs, such that people could create interoperable servers and clients to implement those protocols.
It is the same as what everyone did after the reddit fiasco i.e. protest, boycott, grudgingly use it while complaining and then finally accept the change. May be this discord episode will have better outcome for the masses.
•
For me, I just stopped using Reddit. Turns out that I’m happier without it.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-expands-tools-to-help-parents-protect-kids-and-teens-online/?utm_source=chatgpt.com What are your thoughts on Apple's approach? You still have to provide your birthdate to apple. But after that, it only only ever shares your age range with other companies that request it, not your birthdate.
•
This is great, but if and only if it remains an opt-in choice that enables parents. There is a stark difference between enabling choice or compelling it. Somehow in the last 15 years, we have completely lost sight of agency-based ethics as a founding and fundamental principle of western liberalism. This has been replaced with harm-based ethics. Harm has no fixed definition. There is no stopping rule — when will we have eradicated enough harm? It’s declared by fiat by whoever has the means to compel and coerce — and harm inherent in that enforcement are ignored.
All social media websites should require id tbh. This is the new public town square - everyone should have a voice, but nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit.
•
I don't need a public ID to sit in my local park nor shop for most things on Main Street. >nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit. We can already do that without needing ID stored on servers. Blame lazy enforcement with an incentive to retain even bad customers.
Absolutely. Social media and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race. Ban it for everyone.
•
Good bye, Hacker News. I knew ye uhh... Well, I knew ye.
Sure, social media is bad for kids. Why can't their parents regulate them though? Isn't keeping kids away from dangerous things a basic requirement of being a parent? I propose passing laws that make parents who let their kids on social media pay fines and risk having social media sites blocked by their ISP rather than just making all adults have to get an "internet license".
•
I think we just need to ban social media in general. It's done more harm to our societies than good.
On a network, people interact with each other. In ~media~, you have a few specialized ~creators~, and doom scrollers. Compare Lunarstorm anno 2000 and instagram 2026.
•
> "specialized ~creators~" I can understand what this means in the context of visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. (Slight quibble on TT in that a number of very large creators there record from their cars, kitchens, or otherwise do not employ specialized production.) In any case, what does "specialized creators" mean in the context of (primarily) text-based platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does that mean they are not social media? > On a network, people interact with each other. On any platform that would be considered social media by any definition, popular posts serve as a place for people to interact with each other. They are more ephemeral than a subreddit, but they serve the same function. I am honestly not trying to troll, I just don't understand the distinction.
•
By that logic, Discord would be a network. There's no default feed for Discord, you need to actively seek out friends and community. Meanwhile, HN would be closer to media. It technically has a few personalities, and one default feed to doom scroll.
The "media" in "social media" doesn't refer to image/video/audio, it refers to "the medium being used". Twitter/Blue Sky/etc are all social media. Read it like "a medium being used for social interaction".
•
It was renamed from social network to social media by business executives, who hijacked the social networks built by us
It's the only reasonable thing to do; the status quo is what's ridiculous.
•
I'd love to arrest billionaires, but can we at least suggest some specific and resonable goals forst? Baby steps. Eat the rich is a good mantra and banner, but not an action plan. Here in America we have at most 3 years of this left and at median 1 year (with a huge nebulous cloud based on the reaction to trying to seize power). There's a lot we can do to build up to the ultimate mantra.
What if there is simply nothing that can be done? I don't mean to sound defeatist, but what if there are some things that truly are like pandora's box. We can't put the lid back on. All we can do is educated people on how to use the tools correctly
•
>All we can do is educated people on how to use the tools correctly This lives in opposition to the people who own the websites/apps goals. So it won't happen.
They're not hated , they're just treated as non-entities that aren't assumed to have or need any agency. People under 18 are the largest disenfranchised block of citizens.
•
I mean, yes. Because we don't give kids all their rights yet. That's fair in many regards (not all. Having schools able to silence dissent legally feels all sorts of wrong). It also add protections, like not letting a 12 yo work in a coal mine or be sent to war. More importantly, it's a powerful political spin used to justify often heinous actions. People want to protect kids.
You should be more tolerant of the "anti-vaxx wackos". The covid 'vaccine' has a very large number of negative externalities, confirmed by scores of credentialed doctors and researchers
•
It's wild that this nonsense is still floating around by people pushing "credentialed doctors", whatever the fuck they think that means. No one with any vague degree of credibility would now or ever has supported "very large number" and all of the "externalities" (are you sure you're using the right words) have been vastly outweighed by the things the vaccine provably did. So tired of this shit.
Right, helicopter parenting. Gets a lot of praise here, I forgot.
•
you may be surprised to learn that you can be a parent and have rules without being a "helicopter parent". given your other bad faith comments in this thread, though, im sure you know that and are just trying to be contrarian for... fun? is it fun?
Here's the October 2025 Discord data breach mentioned at the end of the article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo > Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers, says official ID photos of around 70,000 users have potentially been leaked after a cyber-attack. However, their senior director states in this Verge article: > The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information. Why they didn't do that the first time?
•
Until we have some kind of "One Time ID Verification" service that would work, the ID will never be deleted. Or a hash of the info or some kind of identifiable info.
> The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information. Everyone says this, including the TSA. But they never say they don't keep a hash, or an eigenvector of your biometric. Which is equally as important.
•
They also never say it goes through datacenters in room 641A or though Utah before it's "deleted", because it's a US company and they can't refuse that.
Why should we suspect the age verification and age-related appeals would involve different teams or processes?
•
Age verification is done by an iframe to k-id.com. Appeals are done in the actual Discord ticketing system.
It was only one example they gave, and they accept multiple different types of ID; a driver's license or national ID card being other likely ones, and DLs do say where you live.
•
What kind of tyranny do you live in? None of the documents I have on me say where I live.
What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group: - Matrix - Stoat, previously revolt ( https://stoat.chat/ ) - IRC + Mumble - Signal
•
I think Matrix is the closest equivalent that's reasonably popular, at least for text messaging. There are both web and mobile clients and they interoperate seamlessly. It's also at the point where it somewhat reasonably works for the average user, rather than being the usual UX nightmare that teaches people that anything open source or anything pushed by their nerdy friend should be avoided.
> government overreach How would you avoid the same problem that discord ran into that made them require ID verification? I doubt they're doing this for fun. Incorporate in the Bahamas?
•
the largest block of discord users are from the US which hasn't got id verification laws regarding age for social media. The 2nd largest is brazil, which does, and the 3rd is India, which doesn't. So they are forcing users from countries that haven't passed these laws to abide by them. They don't have to do this, they could just require brazilians use face-id.
Zulip?
•
I keep wondering why Zulip is so often left out of reviews and tooling comparisons. For me it ticks a lot of important boxes, yet it barely gets mentioned. Is there a downside I'm missing, or is it just under the radar? The concept that every message belongs to a topic and the async communication focus makes so much sense to me. I read conversations, not timelines.
•
Sadly Zulip does not have a big marketing budget, and many reviews/tooling comparisons are paid for in some way, directly or otherwise, or are SEO spam that starts with reading other similar SEO spam. It is highly ranked on some platforms that do validated reviews, like Capterra. (I lead the Zulip project).
Your solution is subservience.
•
Read again, I never said it was a solution. I said I don't care.
UEFI Bindings for JavaScript (codeberg.org)
I think there are two philosophies here: 1) JavaScript must stay in the box (aka in the browser). 2) JavaScript as a general purpose programming language. While I can absolutely understand 1), I have had wanted to access the filesystem via JavaScript, just as I do via ruby or python, for local use only. After I googled for a while, they would say that this is not possible unless one uses npm/node. I think this shows that there are use cases here and the "default" JavaScript, aka 1), does not cover these. I do not like JavaScript, but based on my own use cases, I actually favour 2) far more than 1). So from that point of view, being able to access UEFI can also be useful. So why not.
•
> I googled for a while, they would say that this is not possible unless one uses npm/node Gnome Shell and Firefox/SeaMonkey/Mozilla Application Suite/Netscape 6+ (and Zotero[1]) are literally implemented on top of SpiderMonkey. 1. < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735616 >
I don't have real context here, but I can imagine that a platform where the hardware costs millions of dollars, will be booted up in "Production" exactly once, and is guaranteed to be physically destroyed before it hits 1 day of uptime, just "Give it 128GB of RAM and YOLO (literally)" is great advice! Note: 128GB of DRAM may add another million dollars to the build cost by 2027 at the current derivative of the $/GB curve
•
Context: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98125
Oh hey, we've reached the "Metal" stage! https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript
•
I don't know if it's only me, but did this guy... Did this guy make a huge mistake? I think he was trying to bend reality with words. I can see many apps that are running in electron on my laptop, each consuming 300MB+ (e.g. Spotify), while many other apps are written in native Swift for example, especially with the help of AI, giving the best performance possible... Edit. And prices of RAM nowadays...
•
Those apps are not consuming 300MB of RAM because they are written in JS. JS is running on microcontrollers and the James Webb Space Telescope. They are consuming 300MB of RAM because they are built on Electron and the NPM ecosystem.
> I vaguely remember hearing about someone trying to use .Net in the Windows kernel. Microsoft did that, it was called Longhorn. That release cycle was long delayed and they abandoned most of its ambitious projects, especially C# in the kernel, and the result was Windows Vista. GC was not the only reason for the failure of that project. Someone could write a book about it. A lot of it was actually more about the organization of people. I also had heard from insiders that lack of ahead of time compilation was an issue. The other issue I remember hearing about was a complaint that Windows components were not layered cleanly and they ended up with circular dependencies when they tried to rewrite them. I think it's possible to write a kernel with GC, and to still be judicious about memory usage with a GC language. And I say that as someone who happens to think that a big issue with modern software is that too many programmers are spending their whole education and career to depend on GC without thinking about it carefully. That is to say I'm already a skeptic of high-level languages and GC, but I will still afford that it is technically possible.
•
> trying to use .Net in the Windows kernel. > Microsoft did that, it was called Longhorn Do you have any reference for that? Or are you confusing Longhorn with Singularity ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system) ) / Midori ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system) )? I suspect you're referring to the shell/internals, though, not the kernel ( https://longhorn.ms/the-reset/#:~:text=Why%20start%20over,reliability%20and%20security. )
Thoughts on Generating C (wingolog.org)
•
> it could be that you end up compiling a function with, like 30 arguments, or 30 return values; I don’t trust a C compiler to reliably shuffle between different stack argument needs at tail calls to or from such a function. Yet you trust it to generate the frame for this leviathan in the first place. Sometimes C is about writing quality code, apparently, sometimes it's about spending all day trying to outsmart the compiler rather than take advantage of it.
> Now, if a and b are already float, then it's equivalent. Not necessarily! Floating-point contraction is allowable essentially within statements but not across them. By assigning the result of a * b into a value, you prohibit contraction from being able to contract with the addition into an FMA. In practice, every compiler has fast-math flags which says stuff it and allows all of these optimizations to occur across statements and even across inline boundaries. (Then there's also the issue of FLT_EVAL_METHOD, another area where what the standard says and what compilers actually do are fairly diametrically opposed.)
•
The first mention of contraction in the standard (I'm looking at N3220 draft that I have handy) is: A floating expression may be contracted, that is, evaluated as though it were a single opera- tion, thereby omitting rounding errors implied by the source code and the expression evalua- tion method.86) The FP_CONTRACT pragma in <math.h> provides a way to disallow contracted expressions. Otherwise, whether and how expressions are contracted is implementation-defined. If you're making a language that generates C, it's probably a good idea to pin down which C compilers are supported, and control the options passed to them. Then you can more or less maintain the upper hand on issues like this.
It seems to me that either you want to allow for contraction everywhere, or not all. Allowing it only sometimes is worst of both worlds.
•
If you allow contraction after inlining, whether or not an FMA will get contracted becomes subject to the vicissitudes of inlining and other compiler decisions that can be hard-to-predict. It turns out to be a lot harder of a problem to solve than it appears at first glance.
Has anyone defined a strict subset of C to be used as target for compilers? Or ideally a more regular and simpler language, as writing a C compiler itself is fraught with pitfalls.
•
I think one could also use a subset compatible with a formal semantics of C. Maybe the C semantics in K Framework, CompCert C, or C0 from Verisoft. Alternatively, whatever is supported in open-source, verification tooling. Then, we have both a precise semantics and tools to help produce robust output.
 Top