jacobn

It of course also creates essentially perfect competition. Amazon will even tell you the top selling products across categories, so that no seller can make excess profits for long - others will quickly jump into the fray to compete that away.

This is of course the market working as intended - the sellers compete away any and all surplus. Normally that would be a good thing for consumers! Unfortunately the search ad tax is very real, and siphons off a good chunk of the surplus as monopolist rent.

This is all structural. A marketplace like this is a natural monopoly with massive network effects. And the allure of the search ad is irresistible - they literally can't not do it, lest their shareholders rebel.

Google ads work exactly the same way.

As a seller your only options are to either have better conversion economics than the competition (so you can win the ads bidding war - guess why every successful site on the internet is gameified to all hell, and why the amazon listing titles & descriptions look like they do) or to not play.

If you can create a viral hit for a product you can probably eke out excess profits for a few months - people want precisely your branded product and not a cheap knockoff, at least for a while.

("Excess profits" = anything above what will literally make the marginal seller say "it's not worth it", which is a very low bar when competing with the entire world)

Given how tech has gone from nerdy underdog to Orwellian, Machiavellian, dopamine-peddling overlord, I’m actually a bit surprised people aren’t more angry / upset.

Over the last 40 years there has been two career paths with “disproportionate leverage”: tech and finance.

I believe in capitalism, contracts and the rule of law. A founder starting a company and attracting capital, employees and customers and generating tremendous wealth I see as an opportunity, not a bug.

But if I were in a normal career the wealth generated by tech & finance would certainly look & feel like some form of cheat code.

The last forty years have been a huge transient. Massive. AI will probably push it even further.

I hope we as a society and democracy can survive the strain.

(That can of course change very quickly, yes)

For very simple geometries it works great, but it very quickly becomes apparent that there’s a bit of a disconnect between “LLM views image” and “LLM emits scad that looks like that image” when it comes to anything non-trivial.

Still gives me a starting point I can mess with, which is great since I have zero CAD training or experience.

(I’m not the commenter you replied to)

Did end up just adding them to our WAF blocklist, which is weirdly ironic - hosting on their infra & using their services to block their AI scraper...

I love the promise of nuclear energy, and I understand that every single engineering decision has tradeoffs, but these tradeoffs just seem so bad? Are there really no better options?

I guess they get such a large input of queries that they can only realistically check and therefore use a small fraction? Though maybe they've come up with some clever trick to make use of it anyway?

The boiling / pressure water reactors all have requirements on active cooling being maintained in emergencies - I’m not familiar with this design nor to what extent the salt is intended to fulfill such a function, but it’s plausible that it could buffer things for idk 1h-3d maybe?

The holy grail is the “walk away safe” reactor, I would hope / presume all the novel / modern ones fulfill that?

(And then it can of course get derailed, but that's a separate story)

A lot of employees at successful startups & FAANG make most of their money from the stock, no? And they need to buy houses and send their kids to fancy schools too, no? So sure, we can reduce it to stock holders, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the 90% of employees who aren’t posting on hn are at least passively ok with “improving metrics”, and some ambitious ones are driving the enshittification initiatives hard.

> "What we've uncovered is that the turtles are actually swimming,"

> the trick was developing flexible solar-powered tags that could hang onto shells long enough to send back data.

> Eventually the GPS tags slough off because "the outside of a young turtle's shell sheds as they grow very quickly,"

Our intuitions, outrage, and knee-jerk reactions are being weaponized to gain clicks, votes, donations, and "action".

Many a dictatorship has fallen in the wake of social media revolutions. I wonder how long democracy can last?

In a would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-tragic ironic twist both of the two main US parties see themselves as the last guardians of democracy and frame their opponents as Evil, against which "any means necessary" is the only reasonable course of action.

(Yes, the party you disagree with is way worse and it's all their fault, this whataboutism indeed has to end, absolutely)

And here we all are.

> "She was accompanied by two friends who she paused to take selfies with on her way out. Security officials did not play any role in her departure,” the spokesperson said.

Ideally the "% Limit" column would: 1. Be right-aligned 2. Have consistent formatting (i.e. same number of digits after the dot) 3. A little bar underneath each number showing relative scale (i.e. top entry is full width, last entry is 216.7 / 32571.4 = 0.00665307601, though maybe on a log scale for confusion? ;)

??! Is converted to |

So ??!??! Becomes || i.e. “or”