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I'm never going to use a tiling window manager, but I also never touch Mission Control (or Spotlight). I use Alfred.app to call things up; before Alfred.app, all the way back into the early aughts, I was using Quicksilver.app, which does the same thing. CMD-Space, type a couple letters, blam.
I have an uncle that is extremely old and until a year and a half ago he was still working. But he needed a car for his job and he decided that he's going to get rid of the car before he ends someone else's life and so he had to give up his job too. He's a super nice character, has a great sense of humor and in general is probably one of the most fun and optimistic people that I know. He'd be working still if not for the car and I know that the loss of the job and a chunk of his independence is hard for him. But he does not let it get him down for long, just finds new things to do (he's currently studying bridge like his life depends on it).
I don't think so.
Consumers don't care about whether an LLM is local, and one that runs on your phone is always going to be vastly worse than ChatGPT.
I see zero indication that Apple is going to replace people going to chatgpt.com or using its app.
All I see Apple doing is eventually building a better new generation of Siri, not much different from Google/Alexa.
While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.
In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” Calibri is “informal” when compared to serif typefaces like Times New Roman, the order said, and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead.
As far back as I can recall, this is a politician who has railed against 'political correctness'.
This is awesome, but minor quibble with the title - "hallucinates" is the wrong verb here. You specifically asked it to make up a 10-year-in-the-future HN frontpage, and that's exactly what it did. "Hallucinates" means when it randomly makes stuff up but purports it to be the truth. If some one asks me to write a story for a creative writing class, and I did, you wouldn't say I "hallucinated" the story.
> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything—while America struggles to get a single transmission line permitted.
I have been saying for years that upgrading civilization requires more power output, not conservation and windmills. If we had been investing in nuclear since the 1960s we would be ready for the needs of next generation technologies and we could do it without burning fossil fuels.
The compilers available at the time that the 8087 was commonplace were overall horrible and easily beaten anyway.
On the other hand, skilled humans can do very very well with the x87; this 256-byte demo makes use of it excellently: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53816
Yesterday I released a Rust-with-Python-bindings package that was mostly coded with Claude 4.5 Opus: https://github.com/minimaxir/icon-to-image
I'll write about the process after I've released a few more things as I have some disagreements with the current discourse.
The Supreme Court requires Century (which for any use other than maybe a newspaper is infinitely better than Times New Roman—and for a newspaper, Times is better than TNR.)
> Good. In this case, let it be diluted! These extra "restrictions" don't affect normal people at all,
Yes, they do, and the only reason for using the term “open source” for things whose licensing terms flagrantly defy the Open Source definition is to falsely sell the idea that using the code carries the benefits that are tied to the combination of features that are in the definition and which are lost with only a subset of those features. The freedom to use the software in commercial services is particularly important to end-users that are not interested in running their own services as a guarantee against lock-in and of whatever longevity they are able to pay to have provided even if the original creator later has interests that conflict with offering the software as a commercial service.
If this deception wasn't important, there would be no incentive not to use the more honest “source available for limited uses” description.
That's probably true: of Jewish people in Israel, "most" originate in the MENA countries surrounding Israel, both in the Levant and from places like Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, and Iraq. As the Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war, so too were Jewish people from their homes throughout the rest of the region.
Hehe, that's lovely.
Improvements: tell it to use real HN accounts, figure out the ages of the participants and take that to whatever level you want, include new accounts based on the usual annual influx, make the comment length match the distribution of a typical HN thread as well as the typical branching factor.
> Garbage collection pause during landing burn = bad time.
That one was really funny. Some of the inventions are really interesting. Ferrofluidic seals...
2025 called and wants your argument back.†
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434
† this is a joke; i feel it works on multiple levels
Some things I've learned over the years:
1. do not show a slide full of code. The font will be too small to read. Nobody will read it
2. don't read your slides to the audience. The audience can read
3. don't talk with your back to the audience
4. make your font as big as practical
5. 3 bullet points is ideal
6. add a picture now and then
7. don't bother with a copyright notice on every slide. It gets really old. Besides, you want people to steal your presentation!
8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
10. email a copy of your presentation to the conference coordinator beforehand, put a copy on your laptop, and phone, and on a usb stick in your pocket. Arriving at the show without your presentation can be very embarrassing!
11. the anxiety goes away
12. don't worry about it. You're not running for President! Just have some fun with it
The rules are written; they're just not all in that one document. The balance HN strikes here is something Dan has worked out over a very long time. There's at least two problems with arbitrarily fleshing out the guidelines ("promoting" "case law" to "statutes", as it were):
* First, the guidelines get too large, and then nobody reads them all, which makes the guideline document less useful. Better to keep the guidelines page reduced down to a core of things, especially if those things can be extrapolated to most of the rest of the rules you care about (or most of them plus a bunch of stuff that doesn't come up often enough to need space on that page).
* Second, whatever you write in the guidelines, people will incline to lawyer and bicker about. Writing a guideline implies, at least for some people, that every word is carefully considered and that there's something final about the specific word choices in the guidelines. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" for a lot of nerds like us.
Perhaps "generated comments" is trending towards a point where it earns a spot in the official guidelines. It sure comes up a lot. The flip side though is that we leave a lot of "enforcement" of the guidelines up to the community, and we have a pretty big problem with commenters randomly accusing people of LLM-authoring things, even when they're clearly (because spelling errors and whatnot) human-authored.
Anyways: like I said, this is pretty well-settled process on HN. I used to spend a lot of time pushing Dan to add things to the guidelines; ultimately, I think the approach they've landed on is better than the one you (and, once, I) favored.
I think it hasn't clicked with you that you're effectively advocating for the end of all renting.
That's great!
Take a look at the HTML. The layout is all tables!
> There wasn't any German internment
There was, in fact, but the proportion of German (and Italian, also) nationals and citizens of German (and Italian) descent interned was far lower compared to the population of such foreign nationals and citizens than was the case for Japanese nationals and citizens of Japanese descent.
> White people got a pass.
Relatively speaking, yes, but there still were internments, including of US citizens based on German and Italian descent. (But with more individualized review before internment or eviction from coastal areas than was true of citizens of Japanese descent.)
A key feature of liberal democracy over the pre-existing aristocratic oligarchies was providing a classless society (which, superficially, as classes were defined under aristocratic systems, it does.)
The entire analysis of capitalism which articulated the class system with which it replaced that of the pre-existing aristocracy and revealed the elimination of class to actually just be a switch in its structure and elevation of a new ruling class was by Communists.
Its plainly using a charity as a mechanism to funnel work to the founder's for-profit business, so that the 501c3 is, in fact, organized and operated for the benefit of a private interest, which isn’t merely “dubious”.
> Those questions aren’t monetizable. ... There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make.
There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the wrong way:
I'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor...
Technically, this will eventually be solved by some hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at that, and the ones that are require substantial resources.
What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask for help.
Useful Douglas Adams reference: [1]
Hasn’t worked based on the evidence, so we’re moving on to something effective. Australia is up first, others will follow, just as we limit access to nicotine and other drugs or harmful products. The data is robust social media is toxic to kids, and Meta even knew about it and doesn’t care.
Social media bans are like GLP-1s: we know that will power is not a thing, so we use an intervention to help the human. Same deal. “Just do better good luck” is not actionable.
“We have seen the enemy and he is Big Tech.”
Personally I would find a video that's slides with audio just as compelling as a video where the speaker was visible in terms of helping me understand if that person could give a competent presentation or not.
> Now everyone pays e.g. 30% but gets a $12,000 credit, so someone who makes $40,000 is effectively paying zero, someone who makes $80,000 is effectively paying 15% and the effective rate approaches 30% as the number goes up.
This only maybe works if you count capital gains as regular income. Otherwise they do the Steve Jobs $1 salary thing.
Even the capital gains can be largely evaded. https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc... https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec... etc.
I've vibe coded a few things in C now as experiments, but I haven't been brave enough to put any of them into production code yet. I don't trust myself to review them properly.
C extensions for SQLite: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/23/building-c-extensions-...
This one is closest to something I might use because it's C compiled to WebAssembly, so the blast radius for any dumb bugs is strictly limited: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/cmarkgfm-in-pyo...
They're a neat design. I started using them on my blog the other day as part of trying out Django 6: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/faec3532183...
> I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke.
Until the first Cambridge Analytica-sized privacy story hits a major cloud LLM provider, maybe.
It was never a reasonable goal of the WebPKI to authenticate entities; only to help establish end-to-end encryption between unrelated parties on the Internet. The WebPKI can ensure you're talking to whoever controls `ycombinator.com`, but it has to be up to some other layer of the security stack to decide whether you want to be talking to `ycombinator.com`. (This is in fact part of the logic behind FIDO2 and phishing-proof authentication).
It's a problem.
I see it the most with blogs, I'd say there is a "2025 voice" which you hear a lot on LinkedIn that will get people to accuse you of using an LLM -- when I made this accusation of one blogger he told me that he'd gotten a lot of pushback for writing a blog post with AI and he'd resolved never to do it again.
But yeah, you're doing the right thing to show your creation process, sooner or later the haters will look bad.
I think you're going to need a superhuman intelligence's idea of a super-superhuman intelligence at the very least if you're going to expect C programs that are memory safe.
I'll admit that I'd like to do a programming challenge with or without AI that would be like "advent of code" in assembly but if it was actual "advent of code" the direct route is to write something that looks like a language runtime system so you have the dynamic data structures you need on your fingertips.
You know I would be happy to offer this service to investors for a mere tens of millions of dollars. I'll send you photos of our weekly money bonfire, built with your money, and when you're tired of pictures of your money on fire, I'll simply... stop.
Heck, in accordance with the several zeitgeists of our age, I'll even do you the solid of fraudulently generating the money-on-fire pictures with AI, so when you get tired of seeing your money on fire I'll even hand, say, 25% of it back to you, as the result of my tireless efforts to bring value to my shareholders. That's a better return than you'll get from most of these investments!
> PE buyers use 60% bonus depreciation and cost segregation studies to create a $70-80K writeoff on a $120K asset
Source? That looks like a juicy target for state taxation…
I actually disagree, in certain cases. Just today I saw:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46204895
when it had only two comments. One of them was the Gemini summary, which had already been massively downvoted. I couldn't make heads or tails of the paper posted, and probably neither could 99% of other HNers. I was extremely happy to see a short AI summary. I was on my phone and it's not easy to paste a PDF into an LLM.
When something highly technical is posted to HN that most people don't have the background to interpret, a summary can be extremely valuable, and almost nobody is posting human-written summaries together with their links.
If I ask someone a question in the comments, yes it seems rude for someone to paste back an LLM answer. But for something dense and technical, an LLM summary of the post can be extremely helpful. Often just as helpful as the https://archive.today... links that are frequently the top comment.
That's a really, really interesting point.
It makes me imagine a programming language designed for LLMs but not humans, designed for rigorous specification of every function, variable, type, etc., valid inputs and outputs, tightly coupled to unit tests, mandatory explicit handling of every exception, etc.
Maybe it'll look like a lot of boilerplate but make it easy to read as opposed to easy to write.
The idea of a language that is extremely high-effort to write, but massively assists in guaranteeing correctness, could be ideal for LLM's.
I put up metaverse rendering tests on Hardlimit.
https://video.hardlimit.com/c/aninats/videos
(It's discouraging having put in so much effort on trying to make the Metaverse work, and then having the entire sector die.)
> can't think of a single reason why you would need an LLM to search through PowerPoint files
Kati’s Research AI is genuinely great at search. It tries to answer your question, but also directly cites resources. This can help you when you’re not sure where the answer to a question lies, and it winds up being in multiple places.
Unless your query is super simple and of low consequence, you still need to open the files. But LLM-powered search is like the one domain (apart from coding) where these fuckers work.
The socialist sense of “private property” refers specifically to ownership of physical (or at least, nonfinancial) means of production, other than by the workers whose labor is applied to it.
It does not refer to all ownership by individuals of real and personal property, restrictions on other personally-held property are separate concerns from the abolition of private property, and socialists regimes, including those in the Soviet bloc, frequently have retained private home ownership, which is not fundamentally inconsistent with socialist theory.
There is an AI bubble just like there was a dotcom bubble; the fact that it is a real technology with real uses we with world changing long-term impacts does not mean that the recent investment hype will not soon be recognized as excessively exuberant given the actual payoffs to investors and the timelines on which they will be realized.
(And putting masses of people out of work and and thereby radically destabilizing capitalist societies, to the extent it is a payoff, is a payoff with a bomb attached.)
I’m sure this is the school someone will want to get this sort of credential from /s
This is fun. Fun is allowed on Hacker News, just disappointingly rare.
A real “so you hate waffles?” moment for HN
I navigated using touch on my iPhone and it felt a lot like playing Genshin Impact
Strikes me as super-informal language as opposed to sycophancy, like one of those anime characters that calls everyone Aniki (兄貴) [1] I'd imagine that the OP must really talk a bit like that.
I do find it a little tiring that every LLM thinks my ever idea is "incisive" although from time to time I get told I am flat out wrong. On the other hand I find LLMs will follow me into fairly extreme rabbit holes such as discussing a subject such as "transforming into a fox" as if it had a large body of legible theory and a large database of experience [2]
In the middle of talking w/ Copilot about my latest pop culture obsession I asked about what sort of literature could be interpreted through the lens of Kohut's self-psychology and it immediately picked out Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Great Gatsby and Neon Genesis Evangelion which it analyzed along the lines I was thinking, but when I asked if there was a literature on this it turned up only a few obscure sources. I asked Google and Google is like "bro, Kohut wrote a book on it!" [3]
[1] "bro"
[2] ... it does, see https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Fox-Popular-Religion-Imperial/dp... and I'm not the only one because when I working down the material list from Etsy I got a sponsored result for someone who wanted to sell me the spell but bro, I have the materials list already
[3] ... this "bro" is artistic license but the book really exists
Consider the subject of the post, not just the username in isolation.
Sure, and cache and cloche.
But the question here is chs, not ch. Which though rare, is widely understood to be a kind of guttural sound or "k" sound followed by an s. In -uchs or -ichs coming from German.
Not the "sh" sound in fuchsia.
Mistral have used janky licenses in that a few times in the past. I was hoping the competition from China might have snapped them out of it.
Why bother with which? I don't understand the question.
Delivery is for less frequent things that last much longer.
Local ships are for more frequent things that spoil quickly.
And adding the heavier/bulkier things to my local trips, even in smaller quantities, just makes the bags too heavy and unwieldy in the end. I only have two hands. Plus it's way more expensive to buy paper towels as individual rolls than in packs of six.
Related:
Wood banks in Maine are increasing and so is the need for heat - https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/11/21/hancock/increased... - November 21st, 2025
Residential Heating Fuel Sources in Maine - https://www.maine.gov/energy/sites/maine.gov.energy/files/in... - October 2024
Alliance for Green Heat: Funding for Firewood Banks - https://www.firewoodbanks.org/
Maine Wood Banks Network - https://woodbanks.org/explore-our-network
National Wood Bank Project - https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/woodbanks/
Unreal devs have Unreal C++ dialect with GC, Blueprints and soon Verve to worry about.
The times of pure manual memory management game engines, across all layers of what requires to draw a frame are long gone.
Naturally someone is going to point out some game engine using compiled C dynamic libraries for scripting, those are the exception.
Sometimes doing nothing is the winning move.
Somewhat more difficult to run a business when an American multinational steals your revenue and your content.
On the other hand, the complainer mentioned is the Daily Mail.
I'd much rather see a non specific ruling over whether or not summarizing already short articles is copyright infringement - regardless of who's doing it. Copyright litigation and legislation tends to favor the richer party no matter where it happens.
Newspapers are notorious for lifting stories and photos from social media. They rarely bother to compensate the original creator either.
Perhaps a better approach is to make sure that the AI summaries are just as liable for libel actions, and regulator mandatory corrections, as the newspapers.
There are plenty of European businesses, our salaries don't grow on trees.
If you've actually mastered that quadrant - why would you be an engineer? Learn fundraising too (which in this environment is super-easy if you're AI-related, I've heard multiple reports of people in their 20s being offered $5M+ in seed funding if they start a company that has "AI" in the name) and make them acquire you. If you've got management and sales skills your startup might even succeed before they acquire you.
At this point in time I’d ask who doesn’t. He himself stated rather correctly he could just shoot a random person in broad daylight and his supporters would continue to support him.
A pocket calculator that would give the right numbers 99.7% of the time would be fairly useless. The lack of determinism is a problem and there is nothing 'uncharitable' about that interpretation. It is definitely impressive, but it is fundamentally broken, because when you start making chains of things that are 99.7% correct you end up with garbage after very few iterations. That's precisely why digital computers won out over analog ones, the fact that they are deterministic.
I don't think you understand.
Citations need to generate reference lists. Footnotes require automatic placement at the bottom of each page. Your examples of numbered tables are numbering the rows, not the tables. And figure numbers need to be referenced in the text.
None of what you're pointing to does what academic papers need. Why are you trying to push this agenda?
I haven't played the first one but I played Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I think it's still my favorite battle system in a JRPG to date. Not only does it have the obvious details you can see on a YouTube playthrough, but higher-end play with it also requires managing positioning, which is easy to miss as an option at all in the menus, or to think it has no purpose. A low-level challenge run would probably be a lot of fun.
Unfortunately in my casual playthrough I accidentally broke the combat system and by the end of the game nothing was a challenge; as with many other games there are "resistances" and "vulnerabilities" but also as with most non-Shin Megami Tensei games of the era, they aren't really strong enough or frequent enough to matter. I just pumped all my upgrades into Fire upgrades until eventually my routine end-game battle was one character to wipe all the enemies in one move, move to next battle. You could easily pump an elemental bonus enough to overwhelm the resistances the enemies had. More resistances and immunities distributed around would have helped prevent a degenerate strategy.
And of all the battle systems to have a degenerate strategy for, this one hurts the most because it is otherwise so good.
(Sadly, Grandia III was never completed. It was released... but it was never completed. The game as shipped has visible gaping holes in it, which is sad because what is there was quite good.)
In most elevators around the world, there are buttons to keep the doors open and also to get them to close. I've only seen symbols on them. Once, however, in the US, one gentleman got in, and instead of pressing the close button, pressed on the open button. So the doors, which were just going to close, opened again.
He complained - Why do they have these symbols, why can't they they just write Open and Close?
I've wondered about this every since - is it an American thing to have an expectation to have text everywhere? I have never heard anyone complain about those symbols before or since!
It's not a strawman.
> No, they haven’t coded a “country-wide kill kill-switch” but having the ability to kill individual accounts, and being in a jurisdiction that demands accounts to be disabled from time to time is equivalent to having such a thing.
That's preposterous. Disabling a couple of online accounts, versus disabling the computers of an entire nation, you think are the same thing?
I don't understand how you can make that argument in good faith. What are you even trying to achieve?
I don't know how they can be trivially improved.
I vaguely recall seeing some product with toolbar icons that attempted to depict a cell as part of a row, or column, with an "x" in the corner to indicate delete. I could never decipher them. It was all too small. Plus the "x" looked just like the "+" at a glance since it was so small. Even though every icon was distinct and meaningful, each icon was also ultimately a complicated jumble that took longer to decipher than just reading the label next to it.
So when you say "They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought," I completely disagree. It's actually really hard and there's a good reason they choose not to. And maybe don't be so insulting?
5% is 5%. If you have more employees, you also presumably have more revenue. That's why percentages rather than absolutes are the right metric. And keeping up with inflation isn't "jacking up pricing".
This. I've been doing a lot of accessibility work and it seems like the one thing nobody ever does is talk to a screenreader user.
> Pictograms let you parse a lot of information at a glance, because you can pattern match a group of differing symbols much faster than you can a block of text which all looks uniform
No you can’t.
I can relate to, never cared about any of circus around job applications, unfortunely we are not expected to say we do work for money, we have to want to change the world, leave our mark in the universe.
An AI-generated automated testing script in your pipeline will do great though.
The answer is so obviously "no" for the general case (making even a tiny dent to streaming/digital) that the article's title amounts to clickbait.
That's regardless of the fact that there has always been a vibrant extremely niche cassete scene, the same way there still are 8-bit home computer fans and clubs.
At best, on top of the above, a tiny additional niche of more mainstream "hipster" artists and fans might release/get cassetes as a statement.
Both numbers summed would still be so small compared to the overall music consumption market/methods that implying any sort of "comeback" is ludicrous.
SpectorJS is kind of abandoned nowadays, it hardly has changed and doesn't support WebGPU.
Running the whole browser rendering stack is a masochist exercise, I rather re-code the algorithm in native code, or go back into pixel debugging.
I would vouch the state of bad tooling, and how browsers blacklist users systems, is a big reason studios rather try out streaming instead of rendering on the browser.
Buried anything is just horrendously expensive. Partly because of other things that are already buried.
It would be great to have the saturn version + translation as well as the improved movie sequences
maybe there is a way to port them using the saturns mpeg add-on (?)
otoh probably fine to watch them on youtube in parallel
Go was created because Rob Pike hates C++, notice Plan 9 and Inferno don't have C++ compilers, even though C++ was born on UNIX at Bell Labs.
As for compilation times, yes that is an issue, they could have switched to Java as other Google departments were doing, with some JNI if needed.
As sidenote, Kubernetes was started in Java and only switching to Go after some Go folks joined the team and advocated for the rewrite, see related FOSDEM talk.
Europe has just started making a few inroads in a few places. Like the Schleswig-Holstein question. This is basically 1% of what would need to be done to be secure against state mandated compromise of Microsoft.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...
>Isn't the logical endpoint of this equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into your computer instead of copy-and-pasting?
Isn't the answer on SO the result of a human intelligence writing it in the first place, and then voted by several human intelligencies to top place? If an LLM was merely an automated "equivalent" to that, that's already a good thing!
But in general, the LLM answer you appear to dismiss amounts to a lot more:
Having an close-to-good-human-level programmer
understand your existing codebase
answer questions about your existing codebase
answer questions about changes you want to make
on demand (not confined to copying SO answers)
interactively
and even being able to go in and make the changes
Or, to put it another way, isn't "the logical endpoint" of hiring another programmer and asking them to fix X "equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into their computer"?
>And I pick Stackoverflow deliberately: it's a great resources, but not reliable enough to use blindly. I feel we are in a similar situation with AI at the moment.
Well, we shouldn't be using either blindly anyway. Not even the input of another human programmer (that's way we do PR reviews).
That is the whole point, assume there was no AMD64 to start with.
True, but you could make a warehouse of sysplexes work together using the same mechanisms we use for warehouses of generic servers, but, if each system takes four racks, and one sysplex takes 128 racks, it’ll be thousands of times fewer systems to be coordinated.
All that would remain is an eye-watering hardware and licensing bill.
Because customers tend to want to map why the Ferrari they asked for is a Fiat with bandages, given the fixed price budget, and thus want to map each requirement to the work time spent on it, and expensed budget.
Then comes all the argumentation why all those hours were required for each item, due to project delivery challenges on either sides, decisions that would require even more work, needless efforts spent in stuff we shouldn't have done as part of fixed price, and so forth.
This was perhaps my favorite part of Physics 390 ("modern physics") which was about quantum dynamics and relativity. The speed of light is defined in terms of a velocity (~300,000,000 m/s) but if you were traveling at the speed of light time stops (which keeps the rule that its constant in all frames of reference). That and time passes more quickly at higher altitudes and these days we can actually measure that. Wild stuff.
SaaS is the only solution so far that has worked against piracy, and helping open source devs whose entitled downstream users don't care about how they sustain themselves.
Yes, I miss the Windows developer experience from Balmer era, "Developers, Developers, Developers" certainly doesn't apply to Windows native development experience.
The only thing good from Satya era on Windows development experience, is the improved terminal, and that now I don't have to install VMWare Workstation any longer.
The last cafeteria chain seen in the SF Bay Area was Fresh Choice.[1] The business problem was that the outlets attracted too many old people who didn't buy the more expensive add-on items but just bought the fixed-price salad bar.
Today, the only remaining cafeterias in the SF bay area seem to be in-house feeding operations for employees. Many of the ones in hospitals are open to the public.
There's a minimum traffic level for a cafeteria, and it's fairly high. With low traffic, the food sits out too long and becomes leftovers. Like Whole Foods' salad and hot bars.
Restaurants seem to have fads. In the SF bay area, there are few French restaurants any more. California cuisine is dead. Fish is down. (Amusingly, on Doordash, all types of fish are treated as synonyms for "salmon".) Many restaurants no longer serve bread.
Strong disagree. This trend has been underway for a few years already. There are a few reasons for this:
1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great tool for just making you commit to a performance instead of editing it to death.
2. In similar fashion, young people are fascinated by a medium you have to sit through by default, because skipping around is inconvenient and might damage your tape. Not being able to listen nonlinearly promotes a different sort of engagement with the material from the fragmented one provided by streaming. To a lesser extent, music on tape has better dynamics not because the medium is superior, but because maximizing loudness over the entire track means the whole recording will be saturated. This is desirable in some genres (metal, some kinds of dance music), but most cassette recordings avoid maximizing loudness which sounds refreshingly different to people who grew up during the Loudness War.
3. Chinese bootlegs. In the 80s and 90s China was a target country for first world garbage disposal, so unsold CDs and cassettes would be damaged by being run through a table saw and then shipped to China in bulk for recycling, sold by weight. While publication or importation of western music was heavily restricted by censors, garbage imports were uncontrolled, and enterprising minds soon observed that damaged media could often be rendered playable, at at least in part. This led to the emergence of a "dakou" (打口 - saw cut) music scene, with parts of albums being sold to enthusiasts in semi underground stores with no regard to release date, genre, or marketing campaigns. This had a big impact on China's domestic music scene.
4. Differing media preferences. Other countries (but Japan in particular) never lost the taste for physical media the way Anglosphere countries did. Japan was always record collectors' paradise because industry cartelism kept the price of physical media high, but buyers were rewarded with high production quality of CD mastering, vinyl grade, and printed media, and labels would typically add bonus tracks exclusive to the Japanese editions of albums. A combination of Japanese taste for the best-quality version of something and 30+ years of economic stagnation meant Japanese consumers were more into maintaining and using their hifi equipment; if you watch Japanese TV dramas a fancy stereo is still a common status marker, much like expensive furniture. Record stores are still a big deal, and music appreciation its own distinct hobby and and social activity in a way that fell out of fashion in other countries.
5. Developing world and cheap distribution. Cassettes were popular in Africa and other developing economies for decades for reasons that should be obvious, and they're popular again with emerging/underground artists for similar reasons. You can self-release on cassette very very cheaply, at the loss of time efficiency. You won't make much money doing this, but you can make a bit, and it's a way to target serious fans who like collecting things and want to support obscure and cool artists who have not yet got big and sold out. Also making $3 on a cassette sale through Bandcamp or at a show may be easier than 1-2000 plays on Spotify or some other service for artists who are not already famous. Self-releasing on vinyl is also possible but typically you need to invest $1-2000, whereas you can get into duplicating your own cassettes for $50 or a few hundred $ in bulk. Vinyl is the way to go if you need to reach DJs but cassette players are dirt cheap or free for consumers and are less effort to use than a record player.
Physical media are still a Big Deal for people who obsess over music, who care about quite different things from the median consumer.
What distinguishes an Eames chair on display at the Cooper Hewitt from the same chair on display at MoMA or countless other museums in the world? What distinguishes it from the same chair on display, and for sale, at the Herman Miller showroom?
What, if not the stories that the institutions who collect these objects tell about them?
One of them is near enough to be a visited by me on a day trip. I can understand design museums being essentially franchised showrooms for contemporary culture objects, but I think he asks some reasonable questions about the point of curation and the role of museums in moden society.
No. They are a multi-generational institution at this point and they are constantly evolving. If you work there it definitely FEELS like they are dying because the thing you spent the last 10 years of your career on is going away and was once heralded as the "next big thing." That said, IBM fascinated me when I was acquired by them because it is like a living organism. Hard to kill, fully enmeshed in both the business and political fabric of things and so ultimately able to sustain market shifts.
I largely agree. Plato leveled somewhat similar criticisms at the early use of the written word millenia ago. I think what's fundamentally different with internet communication is the timed nature of the medium, conveying a sense of pseudo-urgency that necessitates disagreements be input in a timely fashion, and that failure to do so will imply correctness or at least tacit agreement.
Incidentally, I find your comment significantly more substantive and thoughtful than Weinstein's.
> I may eventually get to the wall label part but this is tough.
Good luck. After the first few paragraphs I thought of a great quote that I heard somewhere: "Twitter ruined my reading skills, but it vastly improved my writing skills."
If you're trying to actually get a point across (vs. writing something that is just read for pleasure) GET TO THE DAMN POINT.
> plenty of developer talent
> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off
There aren’t the same thing.
> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work
Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow, linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier technology (or "horses" in this case), happens very quickly - it's the tipping point at which the old tech surpasses the new. For some reason I thought of Hemingway's old adage "How did you go bankrupt? - Slowly at first, then all at once."
I agree with all the limitations you've written about the current state of AI and LLMs. But the fact is that the tech behind AI and LLMs never really gets worse. I also agree that just scaling and more compute will probably be a dead end, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that progress will still happen even when/if those barriers are broadly realized.
Unless you really believe human brains have some sort of "secret special sauce" (and, FWIW, I think it's possible - the ability of consciousness/sentience to arise from "dumb matter" is something that I don't think scientists have adequately explained or even really theorized), the steady progress of AI should, eventually, surpass human capabilities, and when it does, it will happen "all at once".
I read the abstract (not the whole paper) and the great summarizing comments here.
Beyond the practical implications of this (i.e. reduced training and inference costs), I'm curious if this has any consequences for "philosophy of the mind"-type of stuff. That is, does this sentence from the abstract, "we identify universal subspaces capturing majority variance in just a few principal directions", imply that all of these various models, across vastly different domains, share a large set of common "plumbing", if you will? Am I understanding that correctly? It just sounds like it could have huge relevance to how various "thinking" (and I know, I know, those scare quotes are doing a lot of work) systems compose their knowledge.
What you've re-invented is Keydoozle, from 1937.[1] This was the first automated grocery store. Three stores were opened, but there were enough mechanical problems that it didn't work well.
[1] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/keedoozle-automated-store-p...
> sheer number of disingenuous objections
This is unfair. Nobody wants to pay more for anything. And many of the objections resulted in policy adjustments that made the programme better.