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Picking a life path that prevented me from taking more career risk. With that said, we’re always going to regret the road not taken. Find peace on the rails you’ve chosen.
And modern diesel trains just run a generator to power the electric motors.
> They do this because of the political clout they get with the control of these media properties
Bezos bought the Post for clout. Ellison (and his investors) are buying Warner Brothers first and foremost to make money.
I think all the points about IP reputation impact are well taken, but as someone who had to deal with the RIRs at an ISP before and who now works at a firm that buys blocks, I would 10x rather operate in today's environment than in the old RIR environment. It's transparent and predictable by comparison.
I never had much faith in reputation to begin with, and the residential block issue is muddied by the fact that large-scale residential proxies already make that an unreliable abuse check.
> A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.
> A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players
In my experience neither one of those are automatically a sign of impending layoffs. Rather, it's an executive doing their job (getting the organization moving in one direction) in the laziest way possible: by telling their directs to work out what that direction is amongst themselves and come back with a concrete proposal for review that they all agree on. The exec can then rubber-stamp it without seriously diving into the details, knowing that everyone relevant has had a hand in crafting the plan. And if it turns out those details are wrong, there's a ready fall guy to take the blame and save the exec's job, because they weren't the one who came up with it.
Interestingly, this is also the most efficient way for the organization to work. The executive is usually the least informed person in the organization; you most definitely do not want them coming up with a plan. Instead, you want the plan to come from the people who will be most affected, and who actually do know the details.
If the managers in question cannot agree or come up with a bad plan, then it's usually time for layoffs. A lot of this comes down to the manager having an intuitive sense of what the exec really wants, though, as well as good relationships and trust with their peers to align on a plan. The managers who usually navigate this most poorly (and get their whole team laid off in the process) are those who came from being a stellar IC and are still too thick in the details to compromise, the Clueless on the Gervais hierarchy.
Layoffs as you consolidate operations between enterprises. See Capital One laying off thousands at Discover Financial after their acquisition.
Capital One to lay off more than 1,100 in latest cuts at Discover Financial HQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270442 - March 2026
Hayden AI, former CEO Chris Carson.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/27758555-hayden-ai-v...
TSA was never necessary, it was all theater to begin with. The median number of terrorism deaths per year in the U.S. for all years between 1970-2017 was 4 [1]. You have always been about 10x more likely to die from being struck by lightning than by being killed by a terrorist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States....
Reinforced flight deck doors are sufficient. See: the rest of the world. TSA is a jobs program and to soothe the irrational and those poor at risk management.
At $10 Billion A Year, TSA Still Fails 90% Of The Time—And Covers It Up - https://viewfromthewing.com/at-10-billion-a-year-tsa-still-f... - January 27th, 2025
TSA Admits New Machines Are Slowing Security To A Crawl—And Says Screening Won’t Improve Until 2040 - https://viewfromthewing.com/tsa-admits-new-machines-are-slow... - August 10th, 2024
> But TSA itself has filed in court documents that they’ve been unaware of actual threats to aviation that they’re guarding against, and they haven’t stopped any actual terrorists (nor with past failure rates at detecting threats were they deterring any, either).
Accidentally Revealed Document Shows TSA Doesn't Think Terrorists Are Plotting To Attack Airplanes - https://www.techdirt.com/2013/10/21/accidentally-revealed-do... - October 21st, 2013
Weird to see this kind of random Substack/X content on an official company blog.
This is an incredibly ignorant comment. Iran isn’t Palestine and it’s a category error to project your feelings about Palestine into Iran. Iran’s attacks on Israel aren’t like Palestinians attacking a country that is occupying their territory. Iran is a sophisticated country that uses military action to further its own geopolitical interests. Iran has been attacking Israel—launching missiles and funding terrorists like Hezbollah—for decades.
Moreover, out of all the countries that attack Israel, Iran has the least reason to do so. Iran is a thousand miles away from Israel and has no security concerns from Israel’s existence. In fact, the two countries had peaceful relations for decades before the Islamic theocracy took over in 1979. Iran was the second Muslim majority country to recognize Israel’s sovereignty and the two countries had peaceful relations for decades.
Iran is getting attacked by Israel because it has chosen for decades to launch offensive attacks against Israel for no reason.
> They find hundreds of guns in carry on baggage every year…
They don't exactly have a great track record in that regard.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...
"In all, so-called "Red Teams" of Homeland Security agents posing as passengers were able get weapons past TSA agents in 67 out of 70 tests — a 95 percent failure rate, according to agency officials."
(Don't worry, though. They fixed it... by classifing the reports. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/noem-dhs-watchdog-feuding-over-...)
I used emojis for a while. Every text had to have an emoji. I spent a lot of time scrolling through the emoji palette looking for the perfect emoji.
Eventually, I decided that was a complete waste of time and now I use words.
BTW, one of the things that turned me off from emojis is they looked like the stickers 2nd graders would use, along with a Playmobil look.
There is proof: there is no way the US and/or Israel would have done this if they knew that Iran had nuclear weapons.
That's roughly on par with saying nobody needs the internet or a library at all.
Back the 1920s having a personal library was fairly common for people with more than two dimes, they had this thing called an 'Ex Libris' which roughly translates as 'from the books of'. This was a little piece of paper, often very nicely designed that you glued to the first page of a book and then you could borrow it freely and sooner or later it would find its way back to you.
This was the rough equivalent of wikipedia, only a lot slower and less convenient. Then encyclopedias (which existed for a long time) became larger and larger, I had one from the 18th century that got lost in a move but it was a work of art, so much effort had gone into making that. The encyclopedias of the newer ages were however far larger and covered more subjects. Ever year a new batch of pages or the occasional reprint was the norm. And then personal libraries went the way of the dodo. Every time one of my family members dies there is always the same question: what will happen to all the books. These people - and me too - spent a fortune on their books, untold tens of thousands over a lifetime. They were well read, not 'browsing' information but actually reading - and occasionally writing.
That library in the article is exceptional in one way: that it does not look like it was shared. But I can totally sympathize: some people are focused on the number of digits on their bank account, others derive their sense of wealth and accomplishment from their bookshelves. I don't own any books I have not read, but I do understand people buying books that they intend to read at some point but never get around to.
As these things go, I'd be happy have a million more book hoarders, even if they don't read them all, so they can be passed on to the next generation of booklovers, assuming they can still be found.
That matches an observation made in that report from the recent Thoughtworks retreat: https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume...
> The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.
> The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.
My phenomenal observations are that it's been getting warmer during my lifetime, but as soon as I mention this in an online conversation I get slapped down with 'the climate is always changing' and 'n=1'.
Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.
“What kind of role are you looking for?”
“Technologist flavor of NTSB investigator.”
Why would you expect anything else? It's also easier for larger people to pick up heavier weights, larger bullets to make larger holes, etc. etc. Of course larger animals are going to have larger muscles in their digestive tracts in approximate proportion to everything else about them being larger.
I noted that too.
We need some mechanism in litigation (and imho in public life in general) that requires claims to be secured in some way. That is, if you go into court and make an argument like this, you have to chain it to consequences, such as being stripped of specific legal consequences or losing 10% of your shares or whatever.
It's illegal to commit perjury, but there are no real consequences for making bous legal arguments, and lawyers are structurally incentivized to make tacit misrepresentations on behalf of their clients - that is, to make inflated or handwavey claims in the hope that they're not challenged during the fact-finding stage, or even stipulated, due to an assumption of basic good faith.
A few people have been predicting touch screen macs every year forever and they’re always wrong. Apple won’t do a touch screen mac. You can’t look cool using a touch screen on a laptop.
That is actually a point that rarely gets brought up -- we're so concerned about the dangers of AI in warfare, we don't necessarily stop to think of where they may be able to do a better job at avoiding lethal errors.
Out of interest what kind of fields are you looking at?
I expect there are going to be a bunch of people in similar situations to you over the next few years, I'm interested to know where they end up.
> People would put on the streets for free
In the US people put "Little Free Libraries" in their yards. They're all over the place in the Seattle area.
People should look into consumer market share numbers before commenting.
No we can't, because the teams are being reduced in headcount to the few lucky ones allowed to wear the AI hat.
More importantly, the US has actual bases there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Dhafra_Air_Base
And dozens of others, in Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman...
https://www.americansecurityproject.org/national-security-st...
Lately I've made making some AWS Lambda functions to do some simple things in Python and chose to use the ARM-based instances because there wasn't any reason not to.
Please consider supporting Dropbox as a target.
True, but that loss has been in for a while. Tourism began hemorrhaging a year ago from a combination of tariffs and ICE policy and Trump's bizarre obsession with Greenland (and associated alienation of former allies).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Farber
Related:
Dave Farber has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46933401 - February 2026 (46 comments)
Link?
It's interesting that people are writing tools that go inside the weights and do things. We're getting past the black box era of LLMs.
That may or may not be a good thing.
> Teaching engineers to build production AI systems | AI agents, LLMs, ML, data engineering |
> In the newsletter, I wrote the full timeline + what I changed so this doesn't happen again.
> If you found this post helpful, follow me for more content like this.
So yeah, this is standard LinkedIn/X influencer slop.
The "Our World in Data" citation cuts off right as China's emissions started to decline. More recent data [1] indicates that China's emissions have been flat or falling since the beginning of 2024, and falling fast in the last quarter of 2025 (1%, which is huge on a quarterly basis).
China's decarbonization & renewable efforts have been paying off in a big way. EVs now have a 51% market share among new vehicles [2], exceeding every single major city in the U.S [3] (though the SF Bay Area comes close). Likewise, renewables are 84.4% of its new power plants in 2025 [4].
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
[2] https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/06/climate/hybri...
[4] https://en.cnesa.org/latest-news/2025/11/4/chinas-newly-inst...
Corporate jargon is a relatively recent development in business history.[1] It wasn't seen much until the 1950s and 1960s, when "organization development" and management consulting became an industry. Peter Drucker seems to have popularized it in the 1980s.
Then came PowerPoint.
Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication. In those areas, speeches and texts designed to be popular but not commit to much dominate. Religious texts are notorious for their ambiguity.
The point seems to be to express authority without taking responsibility.
[1] https://www.rivier.edu/academics/blog-posts/circling-back-on...
I don't know why you're being downvoted, but it's exactly this.
Pre-emojis, there were so many times I misinterpreted a text, or had a text misinterpreted. Something that is obviously a joke or sarcasm or teasing with non-verbal communication, can come across as an insult without it. When somebody adds a wink emoji or similar at the end, it changes everything.
Emoji are fantastic at communicating tone and attitude alongside the text itself. They're not a 1-1 correspondence with non-verbal communication, or a perfect replacement, but they vastly improve the chances that something playful isn't misunderstood in a negative way.
I wish developers put in the faintest amount of thought into UX instead of just throwing together the first thing they came up with.
Like, literally just add a photo of the app to your landing page. It's not rocket science.
> Is the US going to invade all potential nuclear weapons developers like it did with Iran?
Invade? No. Bomb? Probably. Same if for India if e.g. Sri Lanka decides it wants nuclear weapons.
Global warming will unfortunately disproportionately hit poor, equatorial countries. (Also, starving countries can’t afford a nuclear programme. There is no breakout risk in Sudan.)
> Calling it "Iran's war effort" just feels wrong
Iran’s [war effort]. Not [Iran’s war] effort.
The interception disparity really drives home how air superiority dominates modern war planning. (That and not getting scammed on Russian kit.)
When you convert BM25 or other classical IR scores to a probability with this toolbox:
https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/calibration.html
you find a lot of things that are unsatisfying such as you never got a relevance score better than p=0.7 or so and that's very very rare. There are many specific problems in IR for which that kind of probability would be really helpful such as combining results that came from different sources or returning a stream of new documents from a collection but it was an early decision in TREC to not reward ranking functions that were good probability estimators or even that are good at the top-1 or top-3 positions but rather reward them for still being enriched in relevant results when you go deep (like 1000 results deep) into the results.
> Consumer refunds ain't gonna happen
If you actually paid the tariff you’re eligible. I got some surprise bills that I paid and didn’t sell off—I’m looking forward to being refunded.
Put another way, consumers who bought from an American retailer are being punished relative to those who paid an overseas seller.
The distinction between + and - is useful even without either of those.
Healthcare was carrying the economy. Any commentary on why that’s failing?
Are you going for a record in bad takes? Your account is a month old and yet I recognize it on sight for the bs takes. Try a bit harder please.
Unfortunately most political systems around the world reward short term results, not long term thinking.
Just look here in the USA -- the Democrats tried to do some forward thinking things like subsidizing solar and wind, and they were rewarded by losing at the ballot box (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).
There are no rewards for long term thinking, so it's hard to get anyone to do it.
> Problem #3: He approved "terraform destroy" which obviously nukes the DB! It's clear he didn't understand
The biggest danger of agents its that the agent is just as willing to take action in areas where the human supervisor is unqualified to supervise it as in those where it isn't, which is exacerbated by the fact that relying on agents to do work [0] reduces learning of new skills.
[0] "to do work" here is in large part to distinguish use that focuses on the careful, disciplined use of agents as a tool to aid learning which involves a different pattern of use. I am not sure how well anyone actually sticks to it, but at least in principal it could have the opposite effect on learning of trust-the-agent-and-go vibe engineering.
Same here in Europe. I've had people volunteer to tell me they had canceled their trips and that 'as far as they're concerned that includes the rest of the future for them'. I think a lot of people were willing to forgive the USA for 'Trump 1' even if they did not understand it. But this is different.
The GPL itself is copyrighted and the FSF expressly forbids variants.
And now that you know that it isn't, do you feel differently about the logic you used to write this comment?
"People letting an LLM agent rip on a production system get what they deserved" - I fixed the title.
> Are we assuming robots got to a level where incredible magical worlds could be built to server just a few people?
Given the other tech in the novel, that seems highly likely. It includes nanobot "assemblers".
Just this week we had yet again someone in German TV telling their pleasure to be put into jail and sent back to Germany, due to her tatoos.
Unfortunely my home country has too many fanboys of older times, aka Chega, so I hope you still manage a good time there.
What a surprise with all the wars going on, and AI depleting Earth resources, what a change from about the pandemic era when everyone was into paper straws and cups and promising to be a better person, because that is what was going to change anything.
"xyz" domain is a death sentence for your traffic.
Probably the most serious health risk of Uranium is that it is toxic in the same way as Lead and Mercury with a potency somewhere between the two.
A loss wasn't expected at all.
Every day I like Mastodon more and I don't totally understand why. I think it helped that (1) some of the most inflamed and inflammable people from Mastodon moved on to Bluesky and (2) the algorithmic feed on Bluesky actually does filter the worst content if you are consistent with the "show me less like this button".
I think the quality of engagement I get on Mastodon is better than everywhere.
I don't buy into the "you have to be on one place" story though, I post my photos to a wide range of sites because it isn't that much extra work: I mean, I post to Instagram because that's what students at my Uni use [1] and posting those to Threads is just a flip of a switch.
[1] even if Instagram mostly shows my photos to people in India
Well, yes, due to systematic propaganda efforts and the general shift from being against mass death to being in favor of it.
(the Iran collapse that led to mass protests and then mass murder of the mass protests is itself a climate driven issue https://www.unicef.org/iran/en/climate-change )
What was Anthropic's "browser that didn't work"?
No kidding. Spend more time on the code and less time fantasizing that you'll build a "Gas Town" or "Wasteland" or something.
No goverment is to be trusted if that is the main point.
If the government-approved numbers are this bad the real ones must be catastrophic.
1. Asperite is not open source.
2. It’s okay for two projects to do the same thing, even if you personally prefer one over the other.
In Germany some of the booths were converted into public libraries, those that people use to freely exchange books.
They are rare, but I have already spot some in the wild.
Incredible when you consider that the next one or two generations of the macbook neo will probably come w/ 16gb+ ram and support 5k displays.
A few more generations and we might see < 1kg, 120hz oled and multi day battery life.
But I'm most excited about the near future because if the macbook neo becomes a huge success it will hopefully encourage app devs to waste less ram.
"All I needed was patience but I didn't have time"
In the great fight between Covey (7 Habits) and Collins (Good to Great) I tend to agree with Collins that realized purpose is more important than structure, habits or technique. There are few ways I could serve you worse than to increase your patience or grit applied to the wrong task.
Back in the 90's I had an overclocked AMD486 machine which seemed OK most of the time but had segfaults compiling the Linux kernel. I sent in a bug report and Alan Cox closed it saying it was the fault of my machine being overclocked.
I dialed the machine back to the rated speed but it failed completely within 6 months.
I love the MS-DOS feel to it. Many graphical tools used to have such UI flavour.
And "taking the fun out" is one thing. Making 50% or more of coders redandunt is a whole other can of worms.
linux on this would be *soo* cool !
Indeed, without it looks like a fluffy marketing piece.
Sure, if your structure doesn't contain any pointers and you only ever want to support one endianness and you trust your compiler to fix the machine layout of the struct forever.
In the sense that it's a joke that caves in to the flimsiest pressure from a certain superpower. Although pressure is a bad choice, it's more like it's a wholy owned subsidy.
It was actually glthub/cline, as per the article, not github/cline.
Most of the pranks in Real Genius were actual pranks done at Caltech in the 1970s. The McDonald's prank, for example.
I don't recall Caltech having any ethics classes. Caltech did have an honor system, however, which was surprisingly effective.
It might be Fort Knox just fine at some point, when computers will require a cryptographically signed government certificate that you're over 18, and you can't use the computer until you provide it.
and often performance as well
BS. Nothing can be faster than a read()/write() (or even mmap()) into a struct, because everything else would need to do more work.
After delivering my thesis in LaTeX, I never bothered with it again, even at CERN back in 2003 most folks were using a mixture of Word and FrameMaker, with templates to have a TeX like paper output.
As Gen-Xer I fully agree, I don't get the way things are with obedience, the rediculous situation that American families can lose their kids by having them playing alone in the garden, how everyone sells out for money (Punk would not happen today), the always smile and say no negatives at work being rediculous false (this one really drives me crazy),....
IEC 61508 estimates a soft error rate of about 700 to 1200 FIT (Failure in Time, i.e. 1E-9 failures/hour).
That was in the 2000s though, and for embedded memory above 65nm. I would expect smaller sizes to be more error-prone.
When the competition was the state of C and C++ compilers in 1996 for portable code, even across UNIX flavours, many improvements over that made it tolerable, people were already adopting it even with a plain interpreter, JIT only landed on version 1.3, 5 years later.
Note C creators didn't kept following up on ISO, Plan 9 and Inferno lacked C++ support, and they rather came up with their Java competitor in Inferno with Limbo, and Dis eventually also supported Java.
Gen-X was making the popular new art at the time. It was a strong reflection of the feelings of our generation. We were (maybe still are?) known for not liking authority.
To the extent code is functional rather than expressive it is not speech, and when the government seeks to compel code, it generally seeks to compel function not expressive content.
(That doesn’t mean it is not a bad idea, and even perhaps unconstitutional for other reasons.)
and from all of this they got only $130B ?
I wonder if your thoughts would be any different if they managed to get enough to actually pay off the deficit?
It was instructed NOT to look at the source, with the one exception that it was told to look at this single file full of charset definitions: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/f0676c0d6a4263827924...
Proof of intelligence might be better.
the only downside to graphene is that they consider the user to be an attack vector
In other words, just like Google.
It's not like anyone with a working brain would trust AI or AI tools in particular to do anything perfectly, and things like this just further reinforce that fact.
First time I've heard of it and a quick search finds articles describing it as "OpenClaw is the viral AI agent" --- indeed.
It all reminds me of what we typically see in computers in TV shows or sci-fi films.
The general vibe I get is "script kiddies trying too hard".
> They changed the name
No, they didn't. The name of the department at issue is “the Department of Defense” and of its head the “Secretary of Defense” — these are set in statute (the latter for slightly longer time than the former) and the relevant statutes has not been changed, since the office of the Secretary of Defense was created in 1947 and the Department of Defense was created in 1949. The executive branch has just decided to use a nickname for a government department (which is the historical name for a prior department which was split to form two of what are now the three main direct subordinate elements within that department.)
The purpose of the tariffs was to appeal to the part of the domestic constituency that has belief in protectionist policies as a good in and of themselves rather than a means to an ends, not to achieve some direct material policy outcome outside of the scope of political enthusiasm.
This is common, Tesla and Electrify America use Tesla Megapacks across the US to shave peak demand for cost savings at many charger locations. BYD is simply doing it to juice the charge rate and smooth utility demand.
We need to develop some ethics, or at least, "community standards" (as they may vary significantly between different use cases) around the some of the things this essay talks about. I know I've really been pondering the mismatch between human attention and the ability of LLMs to generate things that consume human attention.
We are still mostly running on inertia where a PR required a certain amount of human attention to generate 500 lines of proposed changes, and even then, nothing stops such PR from being garbage. But at least the rate at which such garbage PRs was bounded by the rate at which you had that very specific level of developer that was A: capable of writing 500 lines of diffs in the first place but B: didn't realize these particular 500 lines is a bad idea. Certainly not an empty set, but also certainly much more restricted than "everyone with the ability to set up a code bot and type something".
Code used to be rare, and therefore, worth a lot. Now it's not rare. 1500 lines of 2026 code is not the same as 1500 lines of 2006 code. The ceiling of the value of a contribution is in how much work the user put it and how high quality the work is. If "the work the user put in" is 30 seconds typing a prompt, that's the value, no matter how many lines of code some AI expanded that into. I'd honestly rather have an Issue filed with your proposed prompt in it than the actual output of your AI, if that's all you're going to put into the PR. There's a lot of things I can do with that prompt that may make it better but it's way harder to do that with the code.
You know, stuff like that. That might actually be a useful counter to some of these slop posts, especially things that are something that may be a good idea but need someone to treat the prompt itself as a starting point rather than the code. Maybe that's a decent response that's somewhat less hostile; close out these PRs with a request to file an Issue with the prompt instead.
Armin Ronacher has a more interesting take on this than I do: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/5/theseus/
Yes, of course there are bad actors, but this is false equivalence to equate science and the scientific method with basement randos.
Most importantly, most people don't understand scientific consensus vs. individual research papers or individual scientists. A major feature of the scientific method is that when an interesting result is published, it can be independently verified by lots of other researchers, and if they come to the same conclusion, that is excellent evidence that the result accurately describes the real world.
Scientists are people, and just like people everywhere they have biases and personal motivations. But again, the scientific method is much bigger than any individual or even group of scientists. If anything, being skeptical of unexpected results is a huge pillar of the scientific method. But skepticism alone is not enough - the next step is to look for validating research, not to say "hah, science is bullshit, let's trust this YouTube rando instead." As usual, I think Jessica Knurick does a great job explaining things: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/trust-the-s...