HN Leaders

What are the most upvoted users of Hacker News commenting on? Powered by the /leaders top 50 and updated every thirty minutes. Made by @jamespotterdev.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]

Because you feel like you have to. You will likely fail, but you are driven to try. Most fail, but sometimes the lottery ticket pays out.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #45 [karma: 74841]

But TFA says that it was people exactly in this situation who were apprehended by ICE and then set for deportation proceedings. According to the current administration you are NOT allowed to stay, and that's where the Catch-22 is.

The whole thing just further exemplifies the "cruelty is the point" ideal.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172199]

> Not every idea deserves the participation trophy of being taken seriously

They are literally the ones bringing it up.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172199]

"In August she declared in an Irish Times article that she intended to use those royalties 'to go on supporting Palestine Action.'

...

Following that statement, she said she had been advised that any such payment to her for those televised dramatisations could be a breach of terrorism laws."

The author may choose to withdraw her books because her publisher won't pay her as long as she publicly commmits to using the proceeds to fund Palestine Action. The title makes it sound like someone is pulling her books; that does not appear to be the case.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172199]

> Because your coworkers and management are there

And investors.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172199]

> Argentina has defaulted nine times in its history

Argentina doesn’t make a habit of hosting its creditors’ troops [1].

[1] http://eng.mod.gov.cn/xb/News_213114/TopStories/16353167.htm...

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79403]

I can't help but wonder how the efficiency compares to generating electricity, running that over wires, and having that run heat pumps.

The conversion to electricity loses energy, but I assume the loss is negligible in transmission, and then modern heat pumps themselves are much more efficient.

And the average high and low in February in 26°F and 14°F according to Google, while modern heat pumps are more energy-efficient than resistive heating above around 0°F. So even around 14–26°F, the coefficient of performance should still be 2–3.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126080]

> if AI generates something that is equal to existing code, then the license of that code applies.

No, it doesn't, if the generation is independent of the existing code. If a person using AI uses existing code and makes a literal copy of it, then, yes, the copyright (and any license offer applicable in the circumstances) of the existing code may apply (it may also not, the same as with copies of portions of code made by other means), and it's less than clear if (especially for small portions of code) that legally such a copy has been made when a work is in the training set.

Copyright protects against copying. It doesn't protect against someone creating the same content by means other than copying.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]

Thanks Dan, Tom, and the others who keep this a place that still brings joy and satisfies the curiosity brain itch.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234026]

What a wonderful comment. Thanks.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99030]
jrockway ranked #48 [karma: 73173]

Grok still has that annoying tone, it just uses it to say weird things.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]

Russia's manned space flight program has very likely ended with this failure.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 182497]

This is a very important point - the market for training chips might be a bubble, but the market for inference is much, much larger. At some point we might have good enough models and the need for new frontier models will cool down. The big power-hungry datacenters we are seeing are mostly geared towards training, while inference-only systems are much simpler and power efficient.

A real shame, BTW, all that silicon doesn't do FP32 (very well). After training ceases to be that needed, we could use all that number crunching for climate models and weather prediction.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157546]

There's an unofficial desktop version.[1] It lags the hosted version quite a bit. Anyone tried it?

[1] https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157546]

Aw, it's just a joke. I thought someone was ready to really try it.

Eventually, there will be AI CEOs, once they start outperforming humans. Capitalism requires it.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157546]

It seems to have worked, too.[1]

Batteries are the invisible change in the power business. They don't take up much land area. They're not visible to the public. Just being able to charge batteries during low power cost periods changes the whole economics of the industry.

Whether battery banks should be allowed to sell back to the grid is a tough question. Texas says no.[2] It's potentially "dispatchable" power, but only until the battery runs down.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-17/califor...

[2] https://www.ercot.com/mktrules/keypriorities/bes/ktc8

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99030]
Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157546]

So why isn't the section that needs consistency enclosed in a transaction, with all operations between BEGIN TRANSACTION and COMMIT TRANSACTION? That's the standard way to get strong consistency in SQL. It's fully supported in MySQL, at least for InnoDB. You have to talk to the master, not a read slave, when updating, but that's normal.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 77973]

Technology in the classroom has completely and utterly failed at improving education.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157546]

There's the other side of this issue. The current position of the U.S. Copyright Office is that AI output is not copyrightable, because the Constitution's copyright clause only protects human authors. This is consistent with the US position that databases and lists are not copyrightable.[1]

Trump is trying to fire the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, but they work for the Library of Congress, not the executive branch, so that didn't work.[2]

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/trump-supreme-court-copyright-off...

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234026]

I'm trying to imagine what a bunch of teenagers could do today to get a similar sense of accomplishment. Note that they weren't even doing particularly well at grade school.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157546]

Reddit may be next. The number of "promoted" items is increasing.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413999]

If you care about voice, you still can get a lot of value from LLMs. You just have to be careful not to use a single word they generate.

I've had a lot of luck using GPT5 to interrogate my own writing. A prompt I use (there are certainly better ones): "I'm an editor considering a submitted piece for a publication {describe audience here}. Is this piece worth the effort I'll need to put in, and how far will I need to cut it back?". Then I'll go paragraph by paragraph asking whether it has a clear topic, flows, and then I'll say "I'm not sure this graf earns its keep" or something like that.

GPT5 and Claude will always respond to these kinds of prompts with suggested alternative language. I'm convinced the trick to this is never to use those words, even if they sound like an improvement over my own. At the first point where that happens, I get dial my LLM-wariness up to 11 and take a break. Usually the answer is to restructure paragraphs, not to apply the spot improvement (even in my own words) the LLM is suggesting.

LLMs are quite good at (1) noticing multi-paragraph arcs that go nowhere (2) spotting repetitive word choices (3) keeping things active voice and keeping subject/action clear (4) catching non-sequiturs (a constant problem for me; I have a really bad habit of assuming the reader is already in my head or has been chatting with me on a Slack channel for months).

Another thing I've come to trust LLMs with: writing two versions of a graf and having it select the one that fits the piece better. Both grafs are me. I get that LLMs will have a bias towards some language patterns and I stay alert to that, but there's still not that much opportunity for an LLM to throw me into "LLM-voice".

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 94562]

MS Windows had an exclusive period for X1, but Google will support Android and ChromeOS on Qualcomm X2-based devices in 2026, which would require the pKVM/KVM hypervisor used by Android, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45368167

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126080]

> Some people really overdo HTTP verbs /GET, /POST, /PUT, /DELETE and leave much work to frontend. Irks me a lot.

If I understand you correctly, I don't think of it as overdoing HTTP verbs so much as using an excessively naive mapping between HTTP resources and base table entities.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79403]

Thank you, this is so much more helpful if you don't want to watch videos.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112479]

> Social media has become a reminder of something precious we are losing in the age of LLMs: unique voices.

Social media already lost that nearly two decades ago - it died as content marketing rose to life.

Don't blame on LLMs what we've long lost due to cancer that is advertising[0].

And don't confuse GenAI as a technology with what the cancer of advertising coopts it to. The root of the problem isn't in the generative models, it's in what they're used for - and the problem uses aren't anything new. We've been drowning in slop for decades, it's just that GenAI is now cheaper than cheap labor in content farms.

--

[0] - https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112479]

It does, by its very nature. Power is not magic, nor is it the Force. It's not a quantity you can stockpile and own - power is leased, it's granted to you by other people. It comes with expectations on how you will wield that power, and usually can be taken away just as quickly as it was granted, if you exercise it in ways they don't approve[0].

Power is obtained through meeting people, gaining their favor, entering deals, providing them services, eventually joining their ranks and advancing to the next level on the ordinal scale. Especially in politics, "power corrupts" by definition; by the time you gain any, you're so thoroughly entangled in mutual deals and friendships with other players you're no longer an autonomous entity - and if you're not willing to do that, you will never be given the opportunity to advance.

--

[0] - Yes, there are caveats and strategems one can use to hold on to power - usually by playing people against each other to coerce ongoing support; every history period and every movie with a villain has plenty of examples. It's another discussion; my focus here is on what power is, and where it comes from.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbitol

Study:

Intestine-derived sorbitol drives steatotic liver disease in the absence of gut bacteria - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.adt3549 | https://doi.org/10.1126/scisignal.adt3549

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99030]

The LLM v human debate here reminds me of the now dormant "Are you living in a simulation?" discussions of previous decades.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 81532]

It's telling that basically all of Google's successful projects were either acquisitions or were sponsored directly by the founders (or sometimes, were acquisitions that were directly sponsored by the founders). Those are the only situations where you are immune from the performance review & promotion process.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77215]

Quite the opposite in fact. Throughout history the most successful artists have been the well funded ones.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99030]

Perhaps in New Zealand but VERY unlikely in the U.S. what with current governance.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104304]

See "price stickiness" and what is simplified as "menu reprinting costs"; there's usually a cost associated with changing prices, and a cost associated with renegotiating prices for everything that's not being sold on a spot market. People cannot buy housing at spot, and while spot-labour pricing is definitely a thing for some services it's so socially destabilizing for anything skilled that most workforces operate on salary.

The reverse of this is that high inflation tends to cause a lot of strikes, because salaries refuse to go up and very high levels of inflation need salary repricing every month or even week.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234026]

Are those the only two options? If you think the answer is yes then that suggests a moment of reflection.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99030]
rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 182497]

Recently, with my mom’s passing, I realised I’m now an orphan.

It really sucks, at any age.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99030]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104304]

A more widespread piece of hostile hotel shower architecture is unlabelled controls. You need trial and error to work out which way is more water, and more heat.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104304]

In some ways, poor project management is like an algal bloom or wildfire: costs expand, feeding on other costs, unless a huge active effort to keep them under control is made.

And it ends up being a disaster for the public.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104304]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sovereign_Individual : 1997, since I had to check.

> Interesting how often you meet the same people if you just start digging a little.

Endemic problem in UK politics, and a lot of other countries.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104304]

It's notable that the BBC recent adaptation set in the present day was also able to make Watson an Afghanistan veteran.

I read the stories as an child, and seen various of the film adaptations; Holmes became a meme even within Conan Doyle's lifetime, but I'm sure I'd benefit from going back to the source as an adult.

ColinWright ranked #14 [karma: 133205]

Too late for anyone to see this comment, and it's just a trivial bugbear of mine, but the article has this:

> "... meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it."

They don't mean "a full light-day" ... they mean "a full day". They're talking about the time it will take, and "light-day" is the distance it's travelling.

A trivial type error that a compiler would barf on, that people will gloss over and not notice, but which niggles at me.

Sorry ... I now return you to your regular programming.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99030]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104304]

There is definitely a third option of "badly regulated through regulatory capture that favors incumbents, prevents competition and makes things worse for the public, while protecting actual malfesance". The US has a lot of this. The EU version tends just to protect the incumbent too much.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123213]

Anything that is a millimeter to the left in US politics, which happens to still be considered right in the rest of the world, gets immediately coined as left wing activists.

thunderbong ranked #19 [karma: 113234]

Clovelly in Cornwall still uses donkeys and sleighs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovelly

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104304]

I have a postit note idea that says simply "typesafe macro assembler".

I've not fleshed this out yet, but I think a relatively simple system would help deal with all the issues you mention in the first paragraph while allowing escape hatches.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 182497]

It’s often better to overlay caching and other tricks on top of naive implementations than making the implementation more complicated.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 181272]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104304]

It's all second and third order effects. You'd then be less impressed if you found the zoom out toothpick video was itself just made with AI. And even less impressed if you zoom out further, and discover your entire feed is just different AI toothpick sculpture videos, because that's what went viral yesterday so now everybody has prompted one overnight.

There are about 250k games on Steam and over 125M users. What happens when full sloppification means there's 250M games on Steam? You scroll forever without reaching a game that more than a few other humans have played. But you can't distinguish it from the thousands of other similar games. Choice is a fatigue all of its own.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104304]

Whole bunch of factors involved in this which HN is ill-equipped to deal with. But I think paranoia about "grooming" should probably be counted as a factor as well. A lot of people are going to be suspicious about an adult man who wants to hang out with children. So everything gets tangled up and shut down in the name of safeguarding.

If you ask the question "what proportion of girls and young women have a male mentor", the problem becomes even more obvious.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234026]

I'm flagging this based on previous experience with similar threads.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74503]

The difference is it's delivered via SMS, and someone wanted to sound cool.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234026]

It makes you wonder if Mixpanel would have disclosed this if not for OpenAI more or less forcing them to.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74503]

Exactly this. People treat LLMs like they treat machines and then are surprised that "LLMs are bad".

The right mental model for working with LLMs is much closer to "person" than to "machine".

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234026]

We have the same in dutch, but, surprise twist: it is often the dutch that get it wrong. And indeed, it is confusing, but then again, it is just a bit of noise injected into the bitstream and easily worked around once you attune to that particular speaker.

Note that for people not attuned to a language some differences that are clear as day to the natives are absolutely inaudible.

The difference between 'kas' and 'kaas' in dutch is obvious to me and if your language uses stressed vowels it probably is obvious to you too but if your language skills do not yet include that difference you will not even hear these as two different words.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234026]

Ok, I'll take a stab at that:

I would expect such a critical piece of code to be able to hot-load and validate a new configuration before it is put into action. I would expect such a change to be rolled out gradually, or at least as gradually as required to ensure that it functions properly before it is able to crash the system wholesale.

I can't say without a lot more knowledge about the implementation and the context what the best tools would be to achieve this but I can say that crashing a presently working system because of a config fuckup should not be in the range of possible expected outcomes.

Because config fuckups are a fact of life so config validation before release is normal.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74503]

This take has given me second degree burns. I must have never shipped anything then, what with vim being my favorite editor.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112479]

On the contrary; stubborn refusal to anthropomorphize LLMs is where the frustration comes from. To a first approximation, the models are like little people on a chip; the success and failure modes are the same as with talking to people.

If you look, all the good advice and guidelines for LLMs are effectively the same as for human employees - clarity of communication, sufficient context, not distracting with bullshit, information hygiene, managing trust. There are deep reasons for that, and as a rule of thumb, treating LLMs like naive savants gives reliable intuitions for what works, and what doesn't.

coldtea ranked #32 [karma: 89250]

The definition of functional in the context of the discussion is that in works in the way the manufacture explicitly designed it work, in a standard industry practice fashion, not as an unforeseen bug or malfunction.

Not some abstract notion.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97658]

This is reflexive pessimism with no substance. You're not articulating a set of particular challenges that need to be navigated/overcome, which could provide a roadmap for a productive discussion; it's just doomposting/demoralization that contributes nothing.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]
anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97658]

Make a blog post with examples, or you'll be collecting reactions that are impossible to validate.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97658]

I don't find any of this persuasive because nowhere does it articulate who or how the defendants came to be accused of anything in the first place. I can not make my mind about how to feel when the context is removed, even if I think the state's argument is entirely specious.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413999]

I'm pretty familiar with the capabilities Flock actually offers law enforcement agencies, and it's license plates, makes, models, colors, and some identifying characteristics. This stuff isn't an abstraction, I don't have to reason about it axiomatically; you can directly engage with your local municipal government to see what's going on here.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97658]

So only ~35 million people?

Maybe more people aren't running older hardware because it's too difficult, rather than because they don't want to. The basic idea is here is taht if a device can still hold a charge and the user is OK with limited features, they should be able to keep using it as long as they feel like it.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79403]

Pooping isn't intimacy.

This doesn't have anything to do with Americans.

zdw ranked #13 [karma: 136519]

The Jonsbo N3 case which is 8x 3.5" drives has a smaller footprint than this, which might be better for most folks. Needs a SFX PSU though, which is kind of annoying.

If you get an enterprise grade ITX board that has a 16x PCIe slot which can be bifurcated into 4 M.2 form factor PCIx4 connections, it really opens up options for storage:

* A 6x SATA card in M.2 form factor from Asmedia or others will let you fill all the drive slots even if the logic board only has 2/4/6 ports on it.

* The other ports can be used for conventional M.2 nVME drives.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126080]

> Why would any group of people book a single room?

To save money.

> Is there some secret trick where multiple people turn up and bring their own beds with them, only to be foiled by a missing toilet door?

Beds? Probably not. But, people (especially younger people, can sleep on the floor with climate appropriate (which, depending on the season and available heating, can be "none") coverings for warmth; I did this happily a fair amount in various groups aroun high school age, but I certainly wouldn't want to now in middle age.

zdw ranked #13 [karma: 136519]

None of this means that you have to be on a specific platform. GitHub as default/mandatory is a single point of failure for the entire tech industry.

For an example of another language that avoids being entirely coupled into Github, Go has it's real code hosting and CI interaction on a Gerrit instance, with some sync back and forth to GitHub for a few items.

The CI pain and operational blindness mentioned in the Zig post is entirely real.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126080]

> Result declares a type-level invariant — an assertion enforced by the compiler, not runtime — that the operation can fail.

“Can do X” is not an invariant. “Will never do X” (or “Will always do Y”) is an invariant. “Can do X” is the absence of the invariant “Will never do X”.

> Using `.unwrap()` is always an example of a failure to accurately model your invariants in the type system.

No, using .unwrap() provides a narrower invariant to subsequent code by choosing to crash the process via a panic if the Result contains an Error.

It may be a poor choice in some circumstances, and it may be a result of mistakenly believing that code returning the Result itself had failed to represent its invariants fully such that the .unwrap() would be a noop—but even there it respects and narrows the invariant declared, it doesn't ignore it—and, in any case, as it has well-defined behavior in either of the possible input cases, it is silly to describe using it as a failure accurately model invariants in the type system.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]

Great work! Thanks for sharing!

Questions:

How do you intend to scale up? Do you plan to become the aggregators you intended to replace? Or will you adopt a more cooperative model? What is your monetization or cost recovery strategy? What is your end goal for the product?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]

Both comments are true. We could go faster if fossil subsidies shifted to solar and batteries, but we will still go fast regardless. Most US solar is utility scale, but buying your own solar is cheap enough now you can almost go off the grid (battery price decline will catch up shortly) assuming you have enough space for panels. Utility scale solar is still a good investment, even with the loss of tax subsidies, and is the fastest way to deploy new generation capacity.

Regardless, we’ve reached a global tipping point where solar, battery, and EV deployment continues to accelerate and peak fossil fuel demand is very near.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103046]

That’s fair. I would also support pyrotechnic bolts or other systems similar to seat belt tensioners that cause doors to fail open upon impact. The primitives already exist to support isolating the high voltage battery pack in a crash event (triggered by airbag deployment) using a pyrotechnic switch. When Bad Thing happens, the vehicle should be designed to maximize occupant survival odds, including minimizing time to occupant extraction.

https://xray.greyb.com/ev-battery/tesla-crash-protection-tec...

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97658]

I largely agree, although in an emergency bystanders/emergency workers shouldn't be trying to figure out how a door handle works at all. As a general non-driver, I find it kinda disturbing how auto manufacturers are constantly making these cosmetic adjust that impact safety - excessively bright headlights, distracting animated turn signals, weird ass handles. Not all features are innovations, some are just bad ideas.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126080]

PRs aren't an optional feature, though acting on PRs is obviously optional; nothing prevents you from ignoring or (even automatically) closing all PRs from anyone who is not on a list of approved contributors.

steveklabnik ranked #28 [karma: 96152]

I ran a Rust server on an Oxide rack for me and some friends one weekend.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157546]

More info on "Strategy", the company, which is supposedly the world's largest public Bitcoin holder.[1] "According to its most recent X post, the firm has raised $11.9 billion through common equity, $6.9 billion in preferred equity, and $2 billion in convertible debt."

The equity part includes listed stocks: STRF, STRC, STRE, STRK, and STRD. Those are on the NASDAQ, not crypto exchanges. Here's a long discussion of Strategy's strategy.[2] They're leveraged, but the financing for the leverage is not from crypto markets, and has more strength behind it. The whole thing will come unglued if there's a prolonged drop in the price of Bitcoin, but they can ride through medium-length down periods. Strategy's various stocks have dropped more than the price of Bitcoin.

[1] https://cryptonews.com/news/strategy-reports-21b-raised-in-2...

[2] https://www.vaneck.com/us/en/blogs/digital-assets/matthew-si...

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172199]

> real concern that giving governments...the power to criminalize voluntary economic activity tends to entrench wealth and power rather than to lubricate mobility

Uh, sure. But this isn't a real political phenomenon. When concerns arise around power and wealth entrenchment, the solution has never been to reduce the state's power to regulate the economy.

jrockway ranked #48 [karma: 73173]

I just feel like this becomes time consuming after a while. Will there be soap? Toilet paper? A bed? You don't know unless you ask! But ... c'mon ... they can just tell you on the website.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 181272]
pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 181272]
anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97658]

Can you show off your toilet fetish on a more appropriate forum please

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 76603]

Unlikely, given that you don't know it has no door until after you get there.

And also, when I travel with my kids, I still want to close the door.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99030]
jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 76603]

Pydantic also has a first party integration with DBOS, which doesn't require an external state server.

https://ai.pydantic.dev/durable_execution/dbos/

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101695]

Shorter term the Gregorian calendar has the ratio for leap years just a tiny bit wrong which will be a day off by 3000 years or so.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101695]

Love the quote:

  Every systems engineer at some point in their journey yearns to write a filesystem
It reminds me of a friend who had a TRS-80 color computer (like me) in the 1980s who was a self-taught BASIC programmer who developed a very complex BBS system and was frustrated that the cluster size for the RS-DOS file system was half a track so there was a lot of space wasted when you stored small files. He called me up one day and told me he'd managed to store 180k of files on a 157k disc and I had to break it to him that he was storing 150k (minus metadata) files on a 157k disk as opposed to the 125k or so he was getting before... With BASIC!

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157546]

"Network" is too broad. What you really want for most apps is "can only talk to its home domain from which it was downloaded".

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74503]

Was it made of glass?

I've stayed in a hotel where the toilet door was made of glass, and had big gaps. I was staying with an acquaintance, so things were really awkward. It didn't help that the shower was right in front of this frosted glass, so the person's entire silhouette was very visible when showering.

Another time, in Amsterdam, I stayed at an AirBnB where the toilet was on the balcony, and had a glass door (non-frosted) in the kitchen. Yep, if you needed to go, and someone was cooking, or was a neighbour, they were looking right at you.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79403]

The author has this backwards:

> but the new trend is surveillance pricing. A company will know that you just got paid and so charge you just a bit more for your chicken nuggets than they do when you haven’t been paid in two weeks.

First of all, no, a company has no idea when you get paid. The reality of lots of apps (like McDonald's) is discount pricing. You pay full price at the store if you're a rich person who can't be bothered with apps. Downloading an app and creating an account is the modern equivalent of cutting out coupons or buy-10-get-one-free cards -- price-conscious consumers will go to the trouble and get cheaper prices. They're just loyalty programs. Price discrimination like this is nothing new, and it lets rich people subsidize the lower costs for people with less money.

These apps run in sandboxes. There's not much to surveil. Obviously don't grant them permissions to see your contacts or track your location all the time. Will the app be able to tie all your purchases to a single identity? Of course. But the stores already do that anyways if you use the same credit card for each purchase.

I don't mind downloading apps for the 5-10 stores/restaurants I go to most. Beyond that, I obviously won't because it's too much of a hassle. But the loyalty discounts I get save me real money. I have no problem with that.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79403]

Seriously.

I upgraded my iPad to a USB-C version and discovered I couldn't use my 1st-gen (Lightning) Apple Pencil with it even though it's compatible -- because I first had to buy a special female-female USB-C<->Lightning dongle just to be able to plug it in to pair it. (Even though I can keep using my Lightning charger to charge it separately from my iPad.)

Moving from Lightning to USB-C hasn't been too bad for me since I use wireless charging with e.g. my Lightning AirPods. But the transition is a huge pain. Because of weird cases like the Pencil, it's not even enough to just have a USB-C charging cable and a Lightning charging cable.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126080]

> Porn, obviously, though if you look at what's popular on civitai.com, a lot of it isn't photo-realistic.

I don't have an argument to make on the main point, but Civitai has a whole lot of structural biases built into it (both intentionally and as side effects of policies that probably aren't intended to influence popularity in the way they do) that I would hesitate to use "what is popular on Civitai" as a guide to "what is attractive to (or commercially viable in) the market", either for AI imagery in general or for AI imagery in the NSFW domain specifically.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126080]

> Kants Categorical Imperative is a terrible way to model reality.

It's not a way to model reality, terrible or otherwise. That’s not what it purports to do.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101695]

By the stopwatch it takes 3x longer for me to upload a photo to the Instagram web app than it does to Mastodon. Facebook's blue website works pretty well but the Instagram site comes across like something that was vibe coded in a weekend or maybe a straw man that was made to prove SPAs are bad. Contrast that to the Mastodon application produced by a basically unfunded application that's fast and reliable.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123213]

Yes?

That is why some people are forbidden to contribute to projects if their eyes have read projects with incompatible licenses, in case people go to copyright court.