What are the most upvoted users of Hacker News commenting on? Powered by the /leaders top 50 and updated every thirty minutes. Made by @jamespotterdev.
It's not the only thing they're doing with it. I mean, the logic is sound - $180 goes into automating bunch of manual processes in personal life, one of which is getting movies, which in some cases involves going out on the high seas.
You can't really attribute to someone something they did unintentionally while trying to do the opposite.
There appears to be zero advantage to having the datacenter actually in your country apart from minor local property tax, in exchange for which it will put up the electricity bills of every single citizen, who already hate how much they're paying.
No better time than now to get into suborbital cargo freight business.
Which are also interesting when you get certified in a trade school in one canton and then move into another one.
I remember when I used to live there, early 2000's, this was a problem, having to get an additional permit.
I don't worry about such things, because I have never been in error yet.
Hunt for Postmortens at GDC magazine or GDC Vault.
So Microsoft 365, Windows, and Azure most likely.
I bet they haven't thought about Typescript, VSCode, Github, Linkedin, .NET, npm/node, or the contributions done to Linux kernel, Rust and Python that probably would also require security reviews.
Also most of the key contributors to FOSS alternatives are sponsored by US companies as well.
Which is the problem this ongoing geopolitics crysis. Decision makers only think about the superficial parts and not the whole extent of the dependency problem.
My vibe coded one-off app projects have are all, by default, "self-contained single file static client side webapp, no build step, no React or other webshit nonsense" in their prompt. For more complex cases, I drop the "single file". Works like a charm.
From the title, I thought this was going to be about customer support, or non-support.
A good article about the costs of not listening to your customers would be useful.
I'm surprised they didn't call it Run-AsAdministrator or some other awkward Microsoft-ism.
Tons of ten-hour-long typing sound videos on YouTube.
Yeah that should work - it looks like the same pixel dimension image at smaller sizes has about the same token cost for 4.6 and 4.7, so the image cost increase only kicks in if you use larger images that 4.6 would have presumably resized before inspecting.
Yes, in fact it has an entirely different system prompt from the ones that Anthropic publish on https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-pro...
The Claude Code one isn't published anywhere but it's very easy to get hold of. One way to do that is to run Claude Code through a logging proxy - I was using a project called claude-trace for this last year but I'm not sure if it still works, I've not tried it in a while: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/2/claude-trace/
I thought that would happen after the first Trump term. It did not.
The second one has made an even stronger case for doing so though.
The public was much more likely to say AI would harm them than benefit them.
There are so many things called "AI" these days, that studies like this are basically meaningless. I think (hope) most people's views can't be reduced to a single binary question.
The fact that students are scammed in one area isn't a compelling argument for them to get scammed in others.
Its midwesterners. There’s a fish tradition in most other parts of the country.
The economy is shit. They make the layoffs but instead of saying we're scaling down, they present it as AI related productivity gains.
Just spin for not exactly bright small time stock holders.
So, I asked Cursor to make for me a Python script to turn those .wpost files into Markdown files. And... it did. In the first pass.
Probably because the source code of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Live_Writer at https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter was in its training data.
One way or another, they've been lying to us for decades now. It pretty much breaks down into, either they know about aliens and they've been aggressively lying about it for decades, or there is no evidence of aliens, in which case they have almost certainly had a hand in creating the news and foisting it on the world. Somebody is making all those faked videos and photos.
One can try to craft scenarios that try to split between those two branches, but I haven't come up with anything very credible. For instance, it is just faintly possible that this whole thing is one gigantic ten-thousand-way misunderstanding, but even then I find it hard to believe nobody in any position to get to the bottom of such a thing did and then did something sensible with the result.
At this point I pretty much won't believe anything they say, in any direction. No matter what the truth may be, "they", for all suitable values of "they", have burnt all their credibility already. No matter what the truth is, "they" have clearly been throwing up vast quantities of smoke for decades now.
I say this without much opinion on what the truth is, because this is independent of any particular person's beliefs on the matter. Nor do I have strong opinions on who "they" is; yes, I'm using it as a pronoun without a referent, but at least I'm doing so knowingly. I don't know who exactly is doing this and "they" is just the grammatically-correct way to express that in English. No matter what you believe and no matter what the truth actually is, I think this is a fair assessment.
It wouldn't surprise me if they started using that site for information about terrestrial aliens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(law)
I don't know, this sounds like your subjective experience, I have no reason to disbelieve it. If you had said that your experience showed you the future, and X Y and Z were going to happen, then I might not believe that, but why wouldn't I believe you experienced what you say you did? Why would you lie?
The first computer mag I encountered was Creative Computing. I've always had a soft spot for that friendly, easy going magazine. I corresponded with David Ahl (founder of the magazine) and he sent me a mint box of the first year run.
This may be very helpful or very unhelpful, but a $4 RFID reader board and an Arduino clone will do this beautifully with a minimal amount of code and connections.
Actually it's only the eMail handling which is probably the easiest one to replace.
Because now you know their company exists!
> Are you aware of the crashing population of Europe though?
The EU's population grew in 2024 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_U...
Once Elon showed how to do it, and how cost-efficient it was, a rocket company that doesn't do it is not viable.
AMD's Hawaii architecture had 320GB/s on a 512b GDDR5 bus in 2013.
The Fiji XT architecture after it had 512GB/S on a 4096b HBM bus in 2015.
The Vega architecture did have 400GB/s or so in 2017, which was a bit of a downgrade.
Expect shortages across the board. RAM? That's the tip of the iceberg, think food and gas.
Don't therians have some rights? (I only gekker when I am taking photographs of people and they aren't smiling and boy does it work!)
Am I correct in interpreting the title to mean that visiting the page will result in a 3.1GB download?
No, there isn't likely to be a bromine shortage.
The US is a major producer of bromine.[1] It's not at all rare. It's just that the cheapest source is the Dead Sea, because that's concentrated brine. There are bromine wells in Arkansas. It's a by-product from some oil wells. It's in seawater. In California alone, the Salton Sea and the SF salt evaporator ponds are potential sources.
If the price goes up, the use of bromine for pool chemicals and fracking fluids will be affected long before the semiconductor industry.
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-bromine.pd...
When I saw the device, my instinct immediately said "likely to be GeneralPlus". They were the biggest "company you've never heard of making chips in things everyone has" of that era.
Not only would I have to solder all 48 tiny pins onto the PCB, I would also have to do it quickly enough to avoid melting the plastic on the sockets. I had neither the tools nor the skill to deal with that
Put some solder paste on the pads, line up the socket and reflow with that hot air gun you just bought. Preheating the underside of the board helps. The plastic is designed to withstand the brief exposure and you shouldn't be aiming the hot air at it directly, but instead at the pads and contacts.
What kind of consumer electronics can you build with HBM? That's the startup you should be founding...
Your point is good but the example is not great. The damage from those Japanese bombs was minimal; one of them killed a few people in Oregon. Even if the Japanese had had reports on every incident they would likely have decided it was not worth it.
That's the first thing that happens.
The next thing that happens is a befuddled "Ask HN: Why Do All The Daisy Wheel Printers On Ebay Suddenly Cost Thousands Of Dollars?".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
You can sometimes locally win an arms race by doing something really exotic that isn't worth the work to defeat, but this is definitely not a strategy that works if everyone adopts it.
Does it matter?
> In the past, Europe has relied on the Middle East for about 75% of its jet fuel imports, the IEA noted.
Just-in-time logistics are great, until you can't get things in-time.
> Is the charge, which I think kind of speaks for itself. Full on: "You embarrassed us, straight to jail."
That's exactly it, and the UAE admits it. The Atlantic covered this last month.[1] Dubai uses influencers as part of their strategy to market Dubai as a safe place for rich people. There's an influencer visa. There's a government Creators HQ office to help with relocation and permits. Dubai requires an “Advertiser Permit”, which include a ban on publishing anything that “might harm the national currency or the economic situation in the State.”
The BBC showed several influencer videos side by side, all with the same message: "Are you scared? No, because we know who protects us."[1] They're as on-message as Sinclair in the US.
So is AlJazeera, now. Earlier in the war, attacks on Dubai were reported. Now, they don't seem to be, although coverage on hits outside the UAE is good. AlJazeera is run by the UAE government.
The UAE has been cracking down on this for a while, according to Bellingcat.[3] "Think before you share. Spreading rumors is a crime."
The hits on the Burj Al Arab hotel, the Fairmont hotel, and Dubai's airport were too big to hide completely, but UAE authorities did take action against people who posted videos. That was back in late February - early March. News of later hits appears to have been successfully censored.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-giBHZ31RMU
[3] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/04/02/war-uae-iran-infu...
Sun was the first UNIX vendor to introduce the idea to split UNIX into user and developer SKUs, now Sun eventually also had an Ada compiler.
When the companies bought the Solaris Developer tools, that did not include the Ada compiler, that was extra, and wasn't cheap.
Having already paid for C, C++, Assembly, why would anyone pay extra for Ada if not obliged to do so?
Since Python introduced new style classes, it also became a pure OOP language, even though it might not look like it at "Hello World" level, all primitive types have become objects as well.
I love to point this out to OOP haters,
>>> type(42)
<class 'int'>
>>> dir(42)
['__abs__', '__add__', '__and__', '__bool__', '__ceil__', '__class__', '__delattr__', '__dir__', '__divmod__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__float__', '__floor__', '__floordiv__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getnewargs__', '__getstate__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__index__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__int__', '__invert__', '__le__', '__lshift__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__neg__', '__new__', '__or__', '__pos__', '__pow__', '__radd__', '__rand__', '__rdivmod__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rfloordiv__', '__rlshift__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__ror__', '__round__', '__rpow__', '__rrshift__', '__rshift__', '__rsub__', '__rtruediv__', '__rxor__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__sub__', '__subclasshook__', '__truediv__', '__trunc__', '__xor__', 'as_integer_ratio', 'bit_count', 'bit_length', 'conjugate', 'denominator', 'from_bytes', 'imag', 'is_integer', 'numerator', 'real', 'to_bytes']Oh yeah, I remember when they abandoned it for years, third party servers revived it, Blizzard realized they can make money off it and shut the third party servers down.
But how can they improve if they don't let the slaves criticise the state?!
This is a blog post, not journalism as such. It's someone humorously recounting their own personal experience. They have no responsibility to contextualize anything for you.
It's about trying and breaking things to find out what's working, instead of casually tip-toeing lest you break something, and wasting your time.
It does make the implicit explicit though, right? Each of these folks have a personal viewpoint but also represent a corporate viewpoint.
You do things slowly, intentionally, again and again and again, that it becomes almost muscle memory that when the times comes for you to do it again in future, it happens smooth and is thus fast eventually.
>Well at a minimum it bought him a new printer so it’s not all wasted
It got him way fewer new printers and more work compared to working at McDonalds and buying the printer with the salary. Opportunity cost.
Back in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days, or game consoles for that matter it was popular enough already.
And yes things like the Amiga Blitter, arcade or console graphics units were already baby GPUs.
Now we just have to improve its ergonomics, while supporting all existing operating systems in production.
(1) there is the need to switch to entirely ‘green’ systems based on atmospheric CO2, renewable energy, and maybe synthetic biology in the long term, …
(2) but also some improvements to fossil-based situations such as capturing CO2 generates by a petrochemical factory or oil refinery and pumping it underground or using it to make more products and also ideas like
https://www.ansys.com/blog/future-of-energy-is-turquoise
where you might electrically heat methane and cause it to decompose into hydrogen and solid carbon products which might even be valuable.
The gist is to mine your network, and the best is when you can have contacts as champions in your clients’ companies. Here are a few good readings;
- [20 Lessons for Attracting, Signing, and Retaining Great Clients](https://www.theforcingfunction.com/blog/service-business)([archive](https://archive.is/B0bWG))
- [How to be a Consultant, a Freelancer, or an Independent Contractor](https://jacquesmattheij.com/be-consultant/) ([archive](https://archive.is/iun16))
- [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...) ([archive](https://archive.is/STvcv))
- [The Strategic Independent](https://tomcritchlow.com/strategy/) ([archive](https://archive.is/O5OKC))
- [A retiring consultant’s advice on consultants](https://www.economist.com/business/2023/08/17/a-retiring-con...) ([archive](https://archive.is/Slqwj))
- [How to Find Consulting Clients](https://chrisachard.com/how-to-find-consulting-clients)([archive](https://archive.ph/kBPDL))
Ceterum censeo Palantir esse delendam
Looking at it today what I notice is that the ads and the content were disjoint. The ads were heavily for high-end microcomputers often running CP/M and the S-100 bus often in multiprocessor and multiuser configurations often with exotic graphic systems for the time, like you see these guys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco [1]
prominently. That stuff was barely talked about in the editorial which was much more about ‘home computers’ like Apple and TRS-80 and Atari and TI up to 1983 or so. Up until then there were a few good ‘computer magazines’ like Creative Computing [2] that were platform agnostic but around that time they started to become more specific to platforms like I was subscribing to Rainbow for my color computer and there were a lot of mags for the C-64 [3] and emerging for the IBM PC and clones. Byte got more focused on the PC and low end CP/M machines with a little interest in high-end workstations and also 68k computers like Mac an Amiga… but just a little.
By the late 1980s the cool kids (some of those “kids” were adults) were already online on BBSes and you didn’t need magazines to keep up with free and ‘free’ (pirate) software. I think computer magazines were struggling, the PC kept growing. Computer Shopper became dominant because boy you could find good deals in it. Then the WWW came along and computer magazines were obsolete overnight.
[1] I saw plenty of PDP-11s and other minicomputers but never saw a high end microcomputer of that era outside the pages of Byte…. But somebody bought them.
[2] loved it at the time but it doesn’t have the staying power of Byte, there is a lab in the EE building next door donated by David Ahl who founded Creative Computing, some issues of CC in the 1978-1979 period are wild.
[3] the c-64 was a huge hit in terms of third party software and having friends who had them, but I don’t think it was talked about in Byte like other home computers because Byte was going upmarket then.
Anyone that downplays unsafe code blocks as it was a Rust invention, available nowhere else.
Then uses it as argument, that since Rust has unsafe, there is no benefit over using C or C++ with a plain static analysis tool, but a basic one, because they are unwilling to actually use the ones people pay for on high integrity computing certifications.
Your comment to me seemed a bit going towards that direction.
I'd offer an alternative take, though it's not completely incompatible with the article: They are an example of the fact that you can buy putting your product on front of lots of people, but you can't buy keeping it there. It has to be good on its own merit to survive. Or at least, it gets more and more expensive to hold it in front of people.
It was, in a lot of ways, too early. I never had one, and I never missed having one. I had other solutions to the problems when they happened. By the time I had the problem, it was not a cost-effective solution.
I know people can pop up and say that it solved some problems for them, but I think the people who it solved problems for, in proportion to the price, weren't enough of a market. By the time they were, CD burners were a much cheaper solution.
If they were 1/4 the price, it might have been a different story... but the price was pretty fundamental to the tech.
You can't buy success. You can buy initial success, but not long term success. By the standards of such products, Zip was relatively successful, because it did have some people it solved a problem for. It was just a minority of their customer base. Enough to hang on for a while, but not to take over the world.
>Eiffel’s contract dictated that the structure would stay up for only 20 years.
> edit: to be fair Anthropic should be giving money back for sessions terminated this way.
I asked it for one and it told me to file a Github issue.
Which I interpreted as "fuck off".
> National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
Per Shrek: "Some of you will die, but that's a risk I'm willing to take."
Yeah, I don't think passwords are ever going away (and said it on this podcast[0]).
But for the large group of people in group 2, I'm a big fan of unphishable credentials. If we can figure out the account recovery problem. (Big if!)
Link to full paper: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=LERTAF&proxyId=&u=https%3A%2...
Not all speakers work well as dynamic mics; and in fact turning on mic mode may enable the bias voltage, which could either burn out the voice coil or hold the diaphragm against the stop, making it even less likely to pick up any sound.
Jack retasking, although documented in applicable technical specifications, is not well-known, as was mentioned by the Linux audio developer
This could be a "bubble effect"; the Realtek codecs mentioned have a Windows utility to configure the jacks, which countless otherwise non-technical users would've seen and interacted with, so awareness of this feature is probably higher than they think. Fun fact: the "ALC" prefix in their codec names stands for Avance Logic, which was acquired by Realtek and they just kept that prefix well into the HD Audio era.
Postal savings at 2% interest. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/08/how-did-japan-s-...
There's quite a lot of machinery from that era (and older) still functioning today, so it's not that surprising to see the same of this probe that was specifically designed for space travel.
I don't understand how that argument could even work. Since the dawn of recorded history there has been (1) wildly varying levels of civilizational achievement depending on the era and (2) not nearly enough time for meaningful selection effects to be the cause of those variations.
We could get into the reasons why physiological differences ("height") behave differently in genetics than behavioral differences ("cognition"), but we don't even reach that --- first you have to explain to me how genetic advantages are the reason European-extracted people are so successful now, but weren't in play when we were getting our asses handed to us by the Abbasids and Tang Dynasty Chinese.
> Anyone got something helpful to share in that regard?
If you can afford it, go work in a non-software domain for a while (maybe a year or two). You'll see all kinds of problems wherever you are, and you'll learn about the domain and other solutions.
Make a note of the ones connected to revenue.
Leave and go start your own thing, selling it back to wherever you worked (first customer problem solved).
Of course, it's not that easy, but I think digging in deep to a non-software domain is a great way to learn how to build a solo business.
It continues to irritate me that There aren't any other functioning deep space probes besides New Horizons (launched in 2006, and which flies at a slower speed than Voyagers). One new operating deep space probe in nearly 50 years is just embarrassing. I mean yay space telescopes and everything, but we seem to have given up anything that isn't a state-of-the-art prestige project. I was hopeful about projects like Breakthrough starshot but that seems to have stalled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
I wonder if photonic computing with variable wavelengths essentially gives you a float type in silico.
That was my first thought, but it's also possible that diplomatic partners like Pakistan (and through them, the US) get notification of impending announcements. idk if Iranian government insiders/diplomats are legally able to trade futures due to sanctions.
That's basically any editor with multi-cursor capability.
Homogenous might be awesome. I miss predictable UIs.
>The “1% problem” with AI is that you can spend a couple of minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour and get something interesting and passable. But in order for you to really share it with other people in your organization and for you to be able to guarantee the quality of the experience, the accuracy of the data and so on, you have to put in orders of magnitude more work, 10x or 100x, than it took to get the first draft out.
This is crazy talk.
Imagine deploying your bug fix and having to wait two days to find out if it worked!
I'm fascinated by this idea of not reviewing AI generated code. On the surface it sounds absurd - we know these machines make mistakes all the time, so how could we ever responsibly move ahead with code they have written without closely reviewing every detail?
Then I remembered the times I've worked at large companies and depended on code written by other teams. I didn't review every line of code they had written - I'd trust that they had done a competent job, integrate with that code myself, and only dig into the details of their code if I run into bugs or performance issues or other smells that something was wrong.
Trusting humans is obviously different from trusting AI - humans have reputations, and social contracts, and actual intelligence as opposed to multiplying matrices and rolling a dice. But... I do think an AI model can still earn trust over time. I've spent enough time with Opus 4.5 and 4.6 that I trust them not to make dumb mistakes with the common categories of code that I use them for. Of course now I need to rebuild that trust with 4.7!
I think the most interesting challenge here is to figure out how to have coding agents demonstrate that the code works without actually reading every line of it yourself - in the same way that I might ask an engineering team I haven't worked with before for a demo and then interrogate them about their testing strategy before relying on their work.
Slipping further into irrelevance.
Probably because the costly operation is loading it onto the GPU, doesn't matter if it's from disk or from your request.
Because there are many things where insurance doesn't exist.
Huh. Anywhere you'd suggest I can read more about this?
You have to copy data across, and confirm that everything worked correctly, and if you're being fancy about it you need to freeze writes to the old server while you are migrating and then unfreeze after you've directed traffic to the new server. It's not trivial.
Does it raise that question? Or is it rather a hopelessly ambiguous and undecidable question that's really more of a racialist rhetorical argument? The state of Israel was not formed based on a calculation of whether the Ottomans were better sovereigns to serve under than the French, German, or Russians.
I hope I'm communicating well where I'm coming from, which is not that you're wrong (or right) but rather how unproductive this particular species of reasoning is in modern geopolitical discussions.
For clarity and accuracy, in the hopes that the person reading it interprets in good faith.
I don't like or valorize billionaires, I guess (I mostly don't care about them), but I don't understand what's "inhumane" here. There aren't very many billionaires. Billion dollar companies are far more salient to ordinary people than billionaires are. And, obviously, you can't fund universal health care by liquidating the billionaires!
I've never really understood why people are so het up about billionaires. The distinction between them and decimillionaires seems mostly like comic book lifestyle stuff; like, OK, they fly their pets private for visitation with their ex-spouses or whatever, I guess that's offensive aesthetically?
Far, far more damaging to ordinary people is the Faustian bargain struck between the upper middle class and the (much smaller) upper class, which redistributes vast sums of many away from working class people into the bank accounts of suburban homeowners.
(Because fundamental attribution error guarantees threads like this will devolve into abstract left vs. right valence arguments, a policy stake in the ground: I broadly favor significantly higher and more progressive taxes, starting with a reconsideration of the degree to which we favor cap gains.)
Leaving aside that you applied the word "easy" to DNSSEC, how do you mean? How does DNSSEC solve the problem being discussed?
> especially in a multipolar world where American sanctions increasingly fail
You're claiming the U.S. government is impotent against holding Polymarket to account?
> These markets are global
The trades in question are bets on Polymarket and Intercontinental Exchange Brent oil futures. These are well within the remit of American law enforcement.
This is from the era of devices where the I/O was entirely electrical but the computation was mechanical. Most of this stuff came from naval gunnery. The naval "fire control tables" started out as mechanical computers where a rather large number of people were inputting different sensor readings via cranks and dials.[1] Gradually, more of the inputs came in directly from the sensors, and more of the outputs went directly to the gun turrets. The final form of this technology was units the size of a footlocker full of gears, cams, and resolvers, with all-electric inputs and outputs. Such things used to show up in surplus stores.
I've seen the restored guidance computer for the Nike missile, at the site in Marin County.[2] That's similar, although ground-based. Analog data came in from radars, was processed with mechanical computation, and control signals went out to the missile.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_Fire_Control_Table
There are plenty of things AI can do that students still benefit from learning.
the thing about hacking is... it's not that hard Look at the trope of the "high school hacker"
This isn't correct when you look at the numbers. You can try it yourself at https://us.abalancingact.com/federal-budget-simulator.
The thing is, in isolation, balancing the budget looks pretty easy. It's only because you have to deal with particular interest groups and a populace who has come to believe that any tax increase means they're getting shafted. I was able to balance that budget with the following changes:
1. Top one percent effective tax rate goes from 24 to 30 percent.
2. Higher income goes from 12.26 to 14.26.
3. Upper middle income goes from 7.7 to 8.7.
4. Middle income goes from 4.8 to 5.8.
5. Lower middle income goes from .1 to 1.1
6. Lower income goes from -4.1 to -3.1
7. Social payroll taxable maximum goes to 90% of taxable income.
Those changes alone, with absolutely no spending changes, balance the budget. Now, I'm not proposing that those changes are politically viable, and you can certainly fiddle with my distribution if you think something else would be fairer (I think it's fair because the rich have done much better than everyone else over the past 40 years so I think they can afford to pay more, but I also think that everyone should have to contribute something more or else you get the current problematic belief that the issue can be solved just by taxing somebody else), but I would strongly disagree if you wanted to argue that those changes would result in any substantial change in standard of living for anyone.
I think, numerically, the problem can pretty easily be solved just by taxation alone (though I think it would make sense to add some spending cuts), just not politically.
I think a lot of the reason for the war on taxes is the exorbitant privilege [1] of owning the world reserve currency. It lets America print as many dollars as it wants, and borrow in a currency it controls entirely. In a normal country this would result in severe inflation, but because America borrows and prints a currency that is necessary abroad to conduct international trade, it is able to "export" a large part of its inflation.
In such a system, it is rational to cut taxes as much as possible and instead rely on borrowing and monetization of debt. It allows America to limit the load on its own citizens, who in turn enjoy "exorbitant privilege" in the colloquial rather than economic sense, and then have the costs spread amongst the billions of people who don't live here. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.
The flip side is that if the U.S. dollar ever loses its reserve currency status, that is literally the end of the United States. It will no longer have the ability to fund the government, which is fed by debt that is largely snapped up by foreigners who need a place to park the dollars that move abroad from the persistent trade deficits needed to sustain reserve currency status. It will also no longer have a citizenry or economy capable of doing anything other than moving capital (finance) and jobs (tech) around in the global economy, since in the current reserve currency economy, those are the only sectors that are profitable to go into. If it happens, expect basically a collapse of society and multi-sided civil war.
How do you know they didn't? When was the last time you just let bugs spend time on you?
They didn't really found a successful business. They founded a middling business that didn't do much but license a patent until Security Dynamics, a smart card company, bought them and took over the name.
AI will vibecode it to Windows Vista quality!
This, the push towards per-token API charging, and the rest are just a sign of things to come when they finally establish a moat and full monoply/duopoly, which is also what all the specialized tools like Designer and integrations are about.
It's going to be a very expensive game, and the masses will be left with subpar local versions. It would be like if we reversed the democratization of compilers and coding tooling, done in the 90s and 00s, and the polished more capable tools are again all proprietary.
Because humans are tribal they will also go on to attack and prey on those who are outside their tribe, making diversity more dangerous. Especially when diversity is not merely some people of different ethnic/racial backgrounds living and working together, but a population split into isolated cultures with different circumstances.
Unless there's a big strict enforcer to keep everyone in line of course.
Style guides always implicitly carry context for what they are the style guides for. Most of them are for journalism in one way or another. Passive voice is clearly wrong in journalism. All actions were taken by someone. All results stem from someone's actions.
It is an error to apply those style guides blindly to mismatched contexts. Other than as an exercize in following a style guide, it is not great to teach students that they should always write in a journalistic style, because it is simply untrue. There is nothing wrong with writing "A program will be written" when it is unknown who will write a program, and it is an error to avoid the passive voice by adding incorrect details.
$ uname -a Linux MYPC 6.6.87.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Jun 5 18:30:46 UTC 2025 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Dunno, looks pretty Linux to me.
(WSL1 did suck badly because it combined the limitations of NT - slow file ops and process spawn - with the limitations of a compatibility layer. WSL2 is good enough for compatibility testing work on e.g. dotnet)