Taikonerd

You know what surprised me about this data? They break down the % who say having a college degree is very important by different dimensions. One dimension is, people who went to college vs. not.

You would think that people who have a college degree would be much more likely to say that college is very important. But even they are pretty lukewarm: 38% of people with a college degree say that having one is very important, vs 30% of people without one. Not that big of a difference!

There also seems to be some weird hero-worship from the CEO, directed at this 27-YO engineer? Like, "he is the one who can save us."

Does this one engineer have the domain knowledge to know WHY the old code was written the way it was, and what the graybeards would have done differently if they could start again now?

Otherwise he's just going to replicate all the legacy bugs and questionable design decisions.

Yeah, that's a fair response. And most of what I don't like about Facebook can be summarized as, "they tried to turn it into TikTok."

In a weird way, I'm kind of glad that they're ruining facebook.com.

Like, even in its heyday, it was such an attention trap, and it had very negative effects on the people who got addicted (especially teens).

But the site has gotten so much worse in the past couple years, and its brand is in the garbage. Maybe that's all for the best -- it was never really worth preserving.

Yeah, it's jokey pseudo-German, like the old 1950s hacker meme about Der Blinkenlights [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights

I would settle for "not actively cutting taxes while claiming you're balancing the budget."

The DOGE cuts last year were paired with, yes, massive tax cuts for the rich: [0]

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-cal...

At some point I realized: there is no plan to fix it. Both of the parties are just hoping that the upcoming crisis happens while the other party is in power.

I really don't understand why they have virtual meetups on their platform. Their branding used to be all, "get out from behind a screen and meet people IRL!"

I totally agree. Presidential elections have 2 (viable) parties, so voters are really only able to express 1 bit of information.

Individual people may have nuanced takes on politics when you talk to them. But it all gets compressed down to 1 bit on the ballot: left or right? Red or blue?

I wish we had a system with more parties, like they do in many other countries.

When you have kids? Absolutely ;-)

> The best thing would be to ban these sites.

I think we could legislate some easy-to-understand, easy-to-enforce rules. Like, "you can't have more than N bets open at a time." (1?) Or, "you can't have more than $1,000 worth of bets open at a time."

True, addicts could skirt these rules by having different bets on different sites. But at least it would add a little friction, and it would be easy to monitor compliance.

> So many questions and so much to clean up.

Yes -- the main reason my wife and I stopped doing "Spaghetti Sundays" was because I hated cleaning up the house (for hours and hours!) before the guests showed up.

That's why we need voting reform: to make it realistic for new parties to form!

Oh, sorry! Yes, I meant Camden.

Some interesting context: the city of Camden, NJ had its (much larger) police department closed by the state in 2013. Its duties were handed over to the county police, the same as they're doing in the linked article.

The Camden County police successfully brought the crime rate way down. And in the summer of 2020, when riots rocked the US, the CCPD was held up as an example of good policing.

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...

(EDIT: corrected name of city)

> Putting this on gender is such a weird thing to do.

Yes -- this phenomenon is somewhat gendered, but not overwhelmingly so. From the article's own statistic:

A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 54 percent of women say they turn to a friend for emotional support but only 38 percent of men say they do.

So I think this is a problem that affects men somewhat more often than women, but happens plenty to both.

I feel like this article oscillates between sympathy for the lonely men, and victim-blaming that they're not trying hard enough, they're expecting their wife to manage their social life, etc.

I will say that loneliness and depression go hand-in-hand. And if someone's husband is clinically depressed, that's going to look a lot like "they're not even trying."

Do lodges generally attract an older crowd? There's a lodge near me, and I have the impression it's mostly retired-age men.

I really like this answer. I wish there were a men's group near me.

Refactoring legacy code seems like something where formal methods could help. "Prove that these 2 subroutines are equivalent, across all inputs" is exactly the kind of thing that they're good at!

The authors cite this, but just to mention it: this sounds like F*, another proof-oriented language. (https://fstar-lang.org/)

F* is in the ML family of languages, so it looks pretty different from C*.

Always happy to see D2 on here! In my last job, I had to do several architecture diagrams. Learning D2 took maybe 1 day, and saved me much more time than that.

> Really the main issue [is] ... energy production

I know that's what the rhetoric focuses on, but is it the real issue? The people I know personally who are against "data centers" are really just against AI, period. "It takes jobs from artists, it's going to take my job, it's going to enrich a handful of oligarchs," etc.

I suspect that even if some magical breakthrough meant that AI usage could grow and grow without building a single new data center, these guys would still oppose AI.

And understandably so! "I'm worried that AI will take my job" is a reasonable worry, for many jobs! But I feel like "data centers" is, for many people, a pretext.

This is like a plot point in the old sci-fi movie Colossus: the Forbin Project.[0]

In the movie, America and the Soviet Union have both developed an AI. The two AIs are linked, and they rapidly shift from speaking human languages, to speaking in sequences of numbers that the onlooking humans can't understand.

Spoiler alert: this all goes horribly wrong for humanity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus%3A_The_Forbin_Project

I find that Claude Code writes very long comments, longer than even a human trying to be helpful would write.

I figure that it's basically making notes for itself, when it has to revisit the same code in a fresh session.

IIUC, Bowling Alone pointed the finger at TV. If you looked at time-use surveys in the 50s, versus when Putnam was writing in the late 90s, it looked like TV watching had eaten much of the time that used to be spent doing IRL social activities.

I wish that weren't such a signal now. What if I really want to use "it's not X, it's Y" in my actual writing?!

On that note, I'd like to share Fix the News: https://substack.fixthenews.com/

It's a Substack that reports good things happening around the world, divided into sections like "Conservation and Restoration," "Climate and Energy," "Medicine," etc. And they also give part of their profits directly to projects in those categories.

(I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a subscriber.)

This sounds like what the company Mechanical Orchard offers: https://www.mechanical-orchard.com/

Their pitch is like, "we take your COBOL code, and all the real-world data you can give us. Then we model your COBOL program as a graph, where each node has inputs and outputs. Then we use AI to port each node, making sure that it has the same (input => output) mapping for all the test data you gave us."