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Shades of https://xkcd.com/1319/
Reading these comments, "The Tragedy of the Commons" [https://pages.mtu.edu/~asmayer/rural_sustain/governance/Hard...] comes to mind: those who frequent London's many little known free roof terraces know that mentioning them here instantly blows their cover.
I don't understand this angst over AI replacing humans. We already have models like the Gulf states, where only 10% of the population is citizens and all the work is done by people who are, from the perspective of citizens, quasi-human automatons. That arrangement seems to work fine for the citizens. It seems to me that AI and robots solves the principal problem with that arrangement (the mistreatment of the non-citizen population that does the work).
This isn't, like, TikTok. It's a firm that provides a transformative improvement in quality of life to diabetics.
(Not above criticism, of course, but weird to lump them together as insidious "tech companies").
It deprives for example the LLVM community to profit from PlayStation compiler optimizations.
These kind of posts always miss the point that in a team of 10 not everyone needs to be a domain expert, and that now the same work can be delivered with a team of five or less.
Bad luck for the remaining ones.
Let's just not get blinded by this to the true nature of the problem. The web being hard for agents isn't an accident - it was done on purpose. More specifically, it's a consequence of the web evolving to defeat automation and limit access.
Most websites are exist to make money from specific audiences in specific ways, often defined in contracts between hundreds of business entities, and none of them want you to be able to automate access, or interact with the website in any way other than the one that spins the money-making machine. Consider that the flip side of "basic tabular interface" is "skip website entirely, access underlying database"; the flip side of "screen readers" is "ad blockers"; the flip side of APIs is "competitors can scrape my listings and use them against me", etc.
Agents are hot right now, the whole business side is still blinded by hype, so things like MCP and .md endpoints are not just getting a pass, but are even pursued by the business people ("we have to do something with AI!"). This won't last long, though - they'll soon realize their mistake, close off access, and enshittify the web some more.
Just like they did in the past - e.g. when APIs and mashups briefly became a hot thing, then went away as businesses realized this defeats the very thing that makes them money: total control over platform/user channel.
--
[0] - Even your most basic blog showing some ads creates a money-making chain, made up of dozens or hundreds of business entities, bound by actual contracts, and the "blog author that just wants to show some ads" is merely one party at the end of that chain.
Why is writing inline Assembly considered an advantage of C, a language extension even not part of ISO, and always used to point out issues when other languages make use of it?
Naturally there had to be a balance, until mid-90s what we consider AAA games, were mostly Assembly.
No, I mean what is missing is an AI solution to "nobody cares to pay for what you generated".
Who would use a coding tool that said "I've used library X out of all the alternatives, please pay the license now"?
I found an article about finding a seashell in the middle of the desert on GitHub...
More seriously, I wonder if there's anything inside. Somewhat reminds me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact
We had several of such languages in the 2000's. C# is basically becoming what Modula-3 already offered.
That is the curse of guest languages, see C and C++ as well.
That is why I always say keep with the platform, and why despite my endless rants on C, I keep myself up-to-date in regards to it.
Eventually they always diverge.
While I agree that domain expertise has always been a moat, I believe the author is missing something critical: there is a big difference between being able to verify the output of a system is correct, and being able to tell a system how to generate the correct output to begin with.
Personal example: I had a software engineering colleague who was the best coder of financial management systems I've ever encountered. He gained these skills through years of in-the-trenches development. One of the things he told me, and that I also observed, was that the vast majority of financial experts (basically, the people in the accounting department of companies) had an extremely difficult time just telling him what the rules of any particular transaction should be. But what they could do was tell him whether the handling of any particular transaction was right or wrong. So often times he would sit down with these accounting folks and go through lots of example transactions he came up with, and from there he essentially built up the requirements spec.
In my experience, that is the primary difference between people I've known who are good software engineers and those who aren't: people who can specify the detailed rules of any system, vs. folks who take a "well, I know it when I see it" approach.
I have a strong suspicion that folks who have a high degree of domain expertise in a particular area will fail as software builders even in an agentic world because they will struggle to elucidate clearly the rules in their head that they've learned over years. As an analogy, it's kind of like asking a native speaker for the grammar rules of their language. Often times they can't, but they'll just say "well, that sounds wrong." They may be "domain experts" in their language, but they'd have a hell of a time prompting an AI system on how to grade a test for grammar correctness.
That is how GNU userspace exists in first place, no compromise.
> Surely there exist experimental aircraft
What was the last aircraft anyone kept secret? Modern satellites and smartphones just make this incredibly hard.
I mean, sure. Just let people and cargo walk in. Sanctuary cities become tariff free.
I did. SunOffice, then OpenOffice, then LibreOffice. It still isn't very good, though.
'cum' is latin for 'with', and it is commonly hyphenated when inserted in between other words.
It's also a slang word for semen, but that's not relevant here.
Someone was airdropping bomb threats?
That’s essentially equivalent for claims like this. File an arbitration claim. Let Microsoft pay. If even a few thousand customers do this, it’s about as painful as a class action lawsuit, which anyway gets eaten up mostly by legal costs.
It is self-evidently not correct that companies that can't keep DNSSEC running can't keep certs running. Entire TLDs have fallen off the Internet because DNSSEC has broken. A certificate never took Slack down for half a day. It's just obviously not true.
There's just no way this can be true. Every project I've committed to has been a bet made with incomplete information. Sometimes it pans out, sometimes it doesn't. Every time I've made one of those bets, I've had to shoulder the opportunity cost of 2-3 other 1/8th-finished but promising projects I could have driven to completion instead. Not having that opportunity cost anymore wildly changes the dynamics of what I build.
This weekend I'm playing with a SwiftUI MusicKit player (everything I'm doing lately has been Swift/SwiftUI, itself a radical change from just a couple months ago when everything was a TUI, and then a few months back from that and all the way back to 1993, when everything was a CLI) with a Responses API hookup that turns the player into an agent, with tool calls to let the model see what I've been playing. "Keep a continuous queue of music playing while I'm working in the wood shop".
Worked a treat. I'm genuinely interested in where I can take this. I have a real problem, one that's been annoying me since ~2000, which is that I "own" a lot of music but find myself stuck in an epicycle of the same 200 songs. Problem solved-ish. I never, ever, in a million years, would have built anything like this before.
It's really hard to sell me on the idea that nothing profound has changed here in terms of the projects we now pick up. Go build an operating system. I'm serious! Claude will practically one-shot it. Mine has smoltcp hooked up to a Rust virtio-net driver Claude pulled out of its butt.
Look at generational C-suite shifts in Silicon Valley. Post the financial crisis, all regulatory efforts concentrated on banks and brokers for a decade, and tech firms were given a free rein. Boards apparently chose 'growth over anything else' types to lead.
You can configure extra search tools that search private data.
Microsoft 365 apps use a digital certificate to validate licensing. The certificate currently in use expires on July 13, 2026.
...and I'd almost be willing to bet that, as usual, the cracked version will remain perfectly functional.
An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder.
It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's possible to do. An individual developer can take on significantly more challenging projects now, because the ultimate constraint has always been time and AI can help you get more done in the time available.
But the stuff you can get done with that time is a whole lot harder. You have to understand lots more things, and get radically outside your pre-AI comfort zone.
It used to be acceptable to spend several days refactoring a codebase, or figuring out how to ship a small feature because it's in a part of the system you hadn't worked in before or involved learning a new library in order to build it.
Coding agents mean you can climb those curves a whole lot faster, but you still need to climb them - and the volume of information coming your way is much higher.
If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard!
>A fartlek (Swedish for "speed play") is an unstructured, continuous running workout that mixes fast bursts of intense running with slower, recovery jogging.
It is, kind of. The Canon Cat is a good text editor. That's about all it does.
When Raskin was active, there was a whole industry selling "word processors", special purpose computers that just did text processing. Wang and IBM were the biggest makers. The IBM PC was descended from the IBM Displaywriter and used the same monitor. So at the time, word processing looked like the core desktop computer function.
So Raskin perfected the word processor interface. What he didn't get was that computing was not going to stop at word processors.
You need to free yourselves told to slaves.
Well, to who else you'd say it?
Bad argument.
> Through systematic quantification of distinguishable conscious states and their historical dependencies, we establish that the minimum information required to specify a conscious state exceeds the physical information capacity of the human brain by a significant factor.
Distinguishable conscious states doesn't mean every historical record needs to be present and fully encoded.
It can, and very likely is, lossy - in fact, it certainly is very lossy. So the "calculated" "bit-length requirements for representing consciously distinguishable sensory "stimulus frames" are bogus.
While "Distinguishable experiences require distinguishable physical states" is a pretty basic and obviously true statement, the idea that we carry all of our historical experiences, and do it faithfully, is bullshit.
> "If conscious states necessarily incorporate their historical antecedents, then the minimum information required to specify any given conscious state must include information about all preceding states."
No, it just needs to carry SOME information about SOME preceding states, potentially lossy and heavily compressed.
For a simple math example, a neural network can be fed terrabytes of data, but the end result is just some weights that encode "memories", "features", "functions" etc in the data.
I recently left my 25 year software career to attend violin making school. I am literally having the best time of my life (I was also extremely fortunate to have lived relatively cheaply the past 25 years so it's not hard for me to downshift my expenses).
I think the biggest thing I love about violin making is respect for expertise. Violin making is not a whole lot changed in the past 300 years, though we do use a lot more modern tools for evaluating acoustics and wood properties. In tech, things change so quickly that expertise is made obsolete very fast, and people are generally cast aside. I've heard a lot over my career that "any good software engineer can learn a new language in a week", and while that's partially true, real depth of expertise in any framework took much longer. All that depth of expertise has become incredibly devalued. And I've also heard a lot about how senior engineers are now more valuable with AI, as they are better able to orchestrate agents and detect hallucinations. That may be true, but I feel like the nature of the job has changed so drastically that it's just not something I would enjoy doing day to day.
I also think the thing that is fundamentally different about this paradigm shift is that it is younger people who are (unsurprisingly) most against it. E.g. when I started my career, web apps were just taking off, and a lot of older engineers at the time found the shift from native apps to be relatively daunting. While that may also be the case with AI, it's a lot of younger folks who are most against it, and that wasn't the case when the Internet really exploded in the late 90s.
Short version: "It turned out our chosen base address for the FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Card) bus had a default memory type of Normal Cached."
They accidentally put an external non-memory device behind the cache. That's never going to work right, but might work some of the time.
I bet there were textile workers who would have written articles like this if the internet had existed back then.
Visionary, yes.
Behind the Macintosh project, yes.
Behind the Mac, as in, behind the Mac as it actually shipped, no. His ideas had little to do with it - it was almost entirely stuff designed by others when he was out of the project.
Sure, but he'll have optimized those away already.
It has been a prime destination for nazis for a long time. I guess they have a friendly government now.
> By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models
Check out Kagi Ultimate.
> It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed.
There are big forklifts for taking containers off trucks and stacking them. Some recipients buy in bulk, store for later use, and stack their own containers. But most distribution centers want to get the contents into pickable inventory and start selling it.
The US military does a lot of container stacking, because they want reserves, not a "just in time" supply chain. "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Gus Petronis, covers this. He handled logistics for the Gulf War.
This is also why RISC would never have happened if it weren't for the fact that, for a brief period in the history of computing, RAM was faster than the core. Single-cycle instructions only make sense if the fetch can keep up.
If you cannot drive without glasses, the sensible thing is to keep a backup pair in the car. After all, glasses can fall off and get lost under the seat, get stepped on, etc.
Man, the older I get, the more I think that second and third and fourth order effects are way more important than first order effects.
> Who is investing in that?
Big companies that see the opportunity to be "Not AWS"?
A VPS provider who wants to grow their marketshare?
Nation states?
Not saying it'll be a small effort, but if the US continues to wield national laws to coerce American companies to negatively affect European citizens, it's possible.
I worked in Systems Validation at Intel when the 8087 was current. Intel had an engineer dedicated to validating customer bug reports and reproducing them. Day in, day out, that's pretty much all he did. Sooooo many corner cases, and so many opinions on what the 'right' thing to do was when you lost precision[1].
[1] I'd say that over half of the bug reports were people who were annoyed that doing fp instructions in one order got them the right answer but in another order got them the wrong answer.
You can also roll your own strings in Rust just fine. Take the bstr crate, for example.
Is there some legal reason to scatter announcements with that many ® symbols, or do they just do it for style reasons / because they think it makes the announcement look more impressive?
It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value:
1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models.
2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public it's very useful to have hard limits so it doesn't cost you $1m overnight because someone started abusing it.
3. Their rankings are one of the more interesting signals for which models are popular, despite their flaws (most OpenAI and Anthropic users don't go via OpenRouter, it's currently not possible to tell the difference between many users switching v.s. one "whale" changing their preferred model)
Given how API costs are becoming meaningful for a lot of companies now, having a provider like OpenRouter to help measure your spend and easily experiment with and switch providers feels like a valuable service.
Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.
From the article:
> In the U.S. you generally can’t just up and fire someone, even if they are underperforming, even if it’s at-will employment, without risking a lawsuit and some sort of cash outlay. This is what makes hiring decisions so high-stakes.
I've been part of a few situations where someone had to be let go in the USA, and I can tell you it wasn't a trivial decision. There were legal aspects, sure, but there was also a personal aspect. As a boss said once "this is someone's life we're talking about here".
As someone who uses OpenRouter extensively (and wrote an unintentional adjacent PR piece a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294 ), it's definitely the best way to try out new models without fiddling with each providers distinct APIs which is becoming a recurring concern as of late.
That said, I don't understand the people who use something a full agentic backbone with expensive models like Claude Opus with OpenRouter because that 5% surcharge is meaningful at that level of cost instead of going with the source API providers. But people are clearly doing it, and it's pure revenue.
Fast.com has existed for 15 years yet isn't nearly as popular. It's easy to build a new speed test, but much harder to get people to use it.
Downdetector wins because of SEO. Most people don't get there directly, they google for "is $x down" and then get sent to downdecetor. Which from my understanding works by simply showing you how many people came to their site with those search terms. They don't actually check the sites.
And from this year: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/werner-herzog-isnt-afraid-f...
I found the whole thing utterly fascinating. Especially the way he talks about Los Angeles.
"Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States."
" First and foremost, cultural substance. But don’t forget that there’s a huge amount of industry there. When you fly into Los Angeles, you see all these industrial areas, flat roofs, gigantic factories. Reusable rockets are being built within the perimeter of the city. You don’t have this factory in the Bronx. You don’t have it near Wall Street. Of course, people immediately think the superficial side, glitz and glamor of Hollywood, that’s what I don’t mean. But serious art — all the artists that made New York important, there were late 1940s, early 1950s. The last straggler in a way was Andy Warhol. It’s a place where you consume culture, New York. It’s generated, in Los Angeles. The painters are living there nowadays — not all, but some very important ones. Writers, mathematicians. Also stupidities, like crazy sects, yoga classes for five-year-olds. I mean, it’s grotesque. Great universities. LACMA is going to open very soon and all of a sudden you will have one of the two, three most important museums in the United States. I mean, it has great museums already, and it’s going to be big. You see, I’m the one who says it at a time where nobody believes it, nobody notices it, and it’s wonderful to articulate it now."
Why are you talking like the Wicked Witch of the West?
> We can have actual conversations with our computers,
Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.
It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
Yeah, your comment squares with (and the GP's point #2 contradicts) what I learned in my college Science & Gender class, which was a combined neuroscience/psychology offering where we read a bunch of papers. Most of them supported that testosterone was the primary driver of libido in both men and women, with higher T levels corresponding to higher sexual desire and lower T levels corresponding to the opposite.
Why would you replace it if doing so is uneconomic?
Panel lifetime is very high. The scope for efficiency improvement is not huge (unless there is a cost breakthrough in multi band photon capture). It's not a car, phone, or computer. It's more like the rest of the house electric infrastructure.
I had my rooftop solar over 10 years ago and basically intend to leave it until some maintenance issue forces action.
(Also, the kit secondhand value is hard to determine but far from zero; 30-50% maybe?)
Why do I care about your portfolio if I can just see how effectively you do the actual work?
I mean, the commenter you're responding to has assumed the position of sedevacantism, so I don't think you're going to be able to justify Vatican 2 to them from first principles. :)
No, it's important. Hacker News is tolerant of slop, and pointing out slop is not popular here.
I'm meta-complaining if you like, but it's a point that I'll stand by.
> A person close to Reckitt said the tighter marketing rules had weighed on growth but did not indicate a structural deterioration in demand.
Great work. Is it possible to use this dataset to calculate total plug in solar potential within the geographic constraint?
> Who ensures it followed the specs?
I mean, it's the same with building a bridge in the real world, right?
Someone has to check the work.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/27/g-s1-...
Musk: “So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.”
“As of early February, the U.S. was not providing funding to support testing and port screenings in Uganda because of Trump's freeze on almost all U.S. foreign assistance.”
“Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola. "Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team," says Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID's response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak.”
“As for the role of the CDC, Spencer says what its officials can do is limited by Trump's order that the CDC not communicate with WHO.”
>I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that
Way off, it's way closer, even if we're just talking EU. EU (the body) alone is about 200 billion/year. EU member states are like 1-1.5 trillion/year.
To be devil’s advocate: if you are just running commands with bash or power shell or the like there is no protection. You might have some rules that ban
rm -rf ~
but sandboxing in general is not an easy problem.
What? They had more features that we gave up, including native platform integration.
When you look at white noise from up close, you see dramatic changes, periods of calm, and what seems like patterns.
Only when you step back, you realise all that drama you read is mostly inconsequential. What will be the impact of Napoleon 1000 years from now? Of Columbus? If instead of Hitler Germany had Rohm? It’s all monkeys and typewriters all the way down. What matters are the structural forces, the natural resources, the geography, and so on. Chances are it’ll be all forgotten in a billion years.
Now, on a more serious note, did anyone else, at some point, started wondering whether the article was really about Wilhelm II?
I've always considered mine a 21st century Commonplace book/journal mashup. Write it/post it/move on...
Sometimes I miss washing my car on the driveway. I guess I’m far less emotionally attached to my car now than I was in the 1980s.
I’m sure Unisys will still support it for decades to come.
Oh. You mean that new thing also named MCP?
I am not sure how much KVM instance’s processes are invisible to the host. KVM is very thin.
That, in the x86 universe, has some heavy penalties in performance terms. I got myself a fanless “student” laptop (another name for “rugged”, but sells for less) and, while performance is acceptable, it ain’t fast - like a 10 year old i3.
Yes, and ideally in this case LLM would be translating your intent into a series of invocations of specific APIs or scripts to do the transformations, and correcting for unexpected failures or realizations.
Because it's often not just Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V. It's Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, except today paste is Shift+Insert, and in the other project it's usually C-y, and you actually need to check one more place for full list of things to copy, and then you discover one case needs a minor transformation, ...
LLMs can handle such annoying details intelligently.
> What's next? "Claude, rename the function doFoo() to performBar()"?
Yes. Such prompt can be issued in many equivalent ways, and works across environments, contexts and tool stacks. I can issue it from the phone, in form of "also doFoo -> perform... reame", and it will work even on Lisp code inside Word documents it accesses through Google Drive.
Magnetic field cameras exist:
https://matesy.de/en/products/cmos-magview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Visualization_of_magnetic...
As someone who has done RE for decades, I feel like I've been seeing a lot of new decompilation projects recently, but even before the rise of AI. Possibly correlated with the release of Ghidra? Either way, it's great to see and perhaps a sign of a greater trend.
Controversial opinion: I think the FOSS movement was a setback and distraction from attaining software freedom as well as giving an undeserved negative reputation to "reverse-engineering" in some areas. RMS had the right idea, but missed the mark when it came to practical application by focusing far too much on "source code". Other industries have long been making third-party parts by merely inspecting existing ones with measuring tools, and let's not forget the whole discipline of scientific research is largely what amounts to "reverse-engineering" the natural world. You don't need the original source code if you have good decompilers, and now LLMs to assist.
Decompiling a binary, finding what you need to change, and then patching precisely that piece, seems like a far more liberating process than getting the source code, figuring out how to build it in its entirety, and possibly changing more than only the piece you wanted to. Many years ago, I remember coming across a few Java utilities that were public-domain but not open-source, and the author explicitly told users that they were to use a Java decompiler to decompile, edit, and recompile if they wanted to make any changes.
> I've come to the horrific realization that hate and stupidity are easily weaponized
The FDR coalition was literally southern segregationists, immigrants, and black people, all in the same party. If "hate and stupidity" wasn't a barrier to people voting together in their material self-interest in 1936, it sure as hell isn't a barrier in 2026.
There is something appealing about "it's just a file" (it really isn't; it has locks and a WAL), but I agree with you.
I think people are afraid to read the documentation for postgres. You can start it up in milliseconds. Fast enough and light enough to run one copy for every test case in your test suite, or whatever you're using it for. (mkdir /tmp/whatever; initdb -D /tmp/whatever --no-instructions -A reject -c listen_addresses= --auth-local=trust --no-sync -c fsync=off -c unix_socket_directories=/tmp/whatever -U postgres --no-locale; postgres -D /tmp/whatever) Now you have a test database that behaves exactly like production because it's exactly like production. (OK, turning fsync off makes it a lot faster than production, so be careful.)
>“Humans are valuable.” You can just say it. As a human yourself, I advise you to. You do not need to qualify it. This is a robust1 statement that is not conditional on a point-in-time snapshot of the leading frontier model’s score on some recent benchmark.
Nope, it very much is conditional to it, as it's conditional to utility.
The OP is not going to come an pay someone who can't get a job and has zero market value due to AI.
So this "a human is (intristically) valuable" is just a meaningless pat on the back, while the human is devalued.
Did anyone else think this was a clever keming pun?
Fortunately, for those sites where either JS is required for the content or to remove the dickover, browsers still have an Inspect Element tool that makes deleting this and other annoyances not too difficult and rather cathartic.
Yes there is. Stop drinking the woke-aid.
Look at where advanced civilisations started, and it's clear as night and day.
It’s not about the petrodollar, Jamie Dimon doesn’t want to give up demand deposit account holders to crypto yield, as they are super cheap cost of capital for JPMC to lend against.
> As the bill came closer to a vote in the Senate Banking Committee in May, internal rifts between the banks started to emerge. Large depositors, such as JPMorgan Chase, remained strongly opposed. Other banks, which draw more of their revenue from activities like trading and are less threatened by competition from crypto platforms, were more willing to overlook the yield issue, according to industry insiders.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-slo...
> Banks like getting deposits from customers, because it’s cheap. On the other side of the ledger, banks make loans. There’s a myth that banks accept deposits and make loans with those deposits. That’s not true, banks first make loans and then find the deposits to finance those loans. If they can’t get enough deposits from local customers to match their loans, they will acquire higher cost deposits in various money markets. If they have deposits and not enough loans, they can just put their extra cash at the Fed, and make a guaranteed 3.6%.
> Profits are easy, as the Fed gives high rates to banks while banks offer low returns to depositors. This dynamic is particularly the case for the largest banks. JP Morgan, for instance, made $96 billion in net interest margin in 2025.
“Your margin is my opportunity.”
And honestly? That's rare.
Are you unable to export the post source from a browser and provide that to the LLM?
One idea I had was to count # of distinct API keys that have spent atleast $100 (number's flexible), which would be enough to provide guidance on if the traffic is from a single power-user.
In the Cursor case which is BYOK, that would count as distinct API keys.
If they’re suing, that seems to be insufficient.
Among other issues, it likely causes knock-on problems for tomorrow’s reservations.
China has already mandated an end to retractable outside door handles and electrical inside door handles. That takes effect January 1, 2027. There were two major incidents where people could not get out and could not be rescued.
The powered charger port door would make sense if there were robot chargers that used it. Tesla demoed that, but people disliked the snake robot approach. Technically, a snake robot is ideal for that, but too many people fear snakes and tentacles.
Rear view cameras are better than rear view mirrors. The field of view is better.
> First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech.
Yes. Having done everything from mainframe OS internals to proof of correctness to autonomous vehicles, video games are the most difficult.
At the beginning, game dev looks easy, because the tools are good and modern hardware is very capable. But as you approach a big, highly detailed, photorealistic world, the easy approaches hit a performance wall. Then the necessary optimizations become insanely complex. That's the tyranny of the frame rate. That's why I've complained about game engines in Rust. Everybody writes My First Game Engine, then hits the wall about two years in.
The metaverse problem is even worse. All the problems of game dev, plus the problems of user-created content and large scale. With all the effort and money put into metaverses, none emerged that worked as well and looked as good as an AAA game title from the GTA V era. Roblox, Improbable, and Second Life are as good as it got. You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small user bases, but there are not. There are a whole range of problems only metaverses have, and some of them are unsolved. For commercial games, much of the work takes place during level building and optimization. Unreal Engine Editor does much of the heavy lifting. Metaverses don't have that option.
The total failure of the metaverse industry comes partly from this. It's hard to do, and the problem was underestimated. Mostly by the people who really just wanted to sell their crap NFTs and coins.
The people and wage problem comes from too many people wanting to make games. It's like Hollywood. If you've spend any time around there, you've met the actress/model/waitress types. The male version has stand up comedy levels of ego. That pushes wages down.
The more recent report says corporate AI adoption has found several issues with AI, with human workers turning to automating dreary and mundane tasks they don't like doing, rather than valuable or meaningful work.
Isn't dreary and mundane stuff exactly the sort of stuff that should be automated, so people can concentrate on the interesting/exciting aspects of their job? Some (not all) kinds of AI boosters seem to have this idea that AI's optimal use is to replace all the high value jobs for cheap, leaving humans with the 'low value' drudgery for which they can be paid less.
I co-founded a startup. Trite, I know, but the skills I learnt going from zero to one, talking to customers, relying on no-one else and owning all the tech decisions (I had a non-technical co-founder), and the community it forced me to build--those were all priceless.
Unions are the only legal way for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions. Support for them is at a historical high, especially amongst younger cohorts.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-rel...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/27/majoritie...
https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-b...
Here's a brief summary from Sears' archives.[1] I read a much better description in a business book once, but it's not online.
Here's the concept. The simple way to fulfill orders is Doordash Shopping. One person goes to a store and picks the entire order. Performance degrades with the size of the store. This takes O(orders * inventory size) effort. If too many shoppers are trying to fill orders, they get in each other's way and the building traffic starts to choke. This is why Doordash Shopping has a big markup vs. Amazon.
The classic Sears schedule system takes the incoming order and breaks it down by department and picker. Pick slips are generated, originally by hand, and sent to the various pickers, originally by pneumatic tube. Pick slips have a 45 minute time window and a destination bin number. Pickers get pick slips, all of which are for items in their area, grab the item, and put it on a conveyor with the pick slip attached. The conveyor leads to the destination bin area, where orders are assembled in the bins. At the end of a 45 minute cycle, all bins are sent to order checking and outprocessing, and new empty bins are placed for the next fill cycle.
The order paperwork is already attached to the bin, so the checker checks off the items in the bin vs. the items on the order. Excess items from picker errors become go-backs; missing items are not charged to the customer. The total is computed and billed. The bin and paperwork go off to packing and shipping.
Each picker moves only short distances. No running around the giant warehouse. That gets the overhead down to O(orders * log(inventory size)). Pneumatic tubes carry the data that drives the pickers, and conveyors do most of the carrying. The system can develop a backlog in the incoming order area, where it's obvious and can be managed. The picking areas don't usually choke, because their load is bounded by the number of bins per cycle.
It was all done with paper, forms, carbon paper, clipboards attached to totes, cash registers, conveyors, and pneumatic tubes. Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932) designed the original system and became quite wealthy.
Sears should have become Amazon. They had the fulfillment system. They had catalog ordering working well. They never got the online front end right.
[1] https://www.searsarchives.claeys.co/history/history1900s.htm...
I am retiring from tech to live offline - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323683 - May 2026
This always felt like a giant ADA lawsuit waiting to happen.
India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing. Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.
The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.
Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%942025_Indian_farme...
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We have electric vehicles, batteries, solar, wind, etc, but the US gave up on those because there is no grift to be had via a capital market bubble manufacturing and deploying those techs at scale.
The US puts on a theater performance of “innovation” via AI while China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity.