janpeuker

WIP drifts more and more towards 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible'. Apart from 1 word in the intro 'parasitically' and not a single mention of slavery, child labour (but boarding schools), women (but very consistent use of 'men') or colonialism (apart from it being used as a _credential_) the entire article literally argues that 'Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg' should run a techno-oligarchy of the absolute worst people? On the other hand the article seems to be unaware the Victorian empire went down and bankrupt because of its decadency, not being able to foresee let alone counter events such as the Indian independence, Japanese offensive and end of slavery alongside its change in economic primitives (see e.g. 'Capitalism and Slavery'). In that sense the article is maybe spot on, showing how completely disconnected the elites are?

I dislike a badly designed mall like everyone else, but is it already sealioning if an article ends on a leading question to hide its far-right liberal conservative agenda?

The National Civic Art Society is designing the White House State Ballroom [1] and Create Streets is a conservative influence group that likes speaking at Reform UK events [2]. As many others here have pointed out, visual preference, especially in such a binary choice between obviously cheap and ugly vs expensive and generous, is of course highly biased - pseudo greek style doesn't fly in Asia, even in Australia minimalist styles are much more en vogue.

The most important claims like "exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles" are completely unsupported - especially when a few lines down they literally use their own review of an architect's design, but then call it "in a style drawing on Victorian commercial architecture and Art Deco", again unsubstantiated - it has pretty "modern" clear lines, probably due to sustainability [3], and brick facades themselves have been around for long. In the report they praise the 2010 (!) London city building design guide recommending exactly this brick design. "hardly a single public commission" and "we commissioning styles"?

Where is the line between justifying dictator-style grandiose architecture and the actual empathy needed for simply good design?

I'm just asking questions.

1) https://www.dezeen.com/2025/01/29/justin-shubow-trump-archit... 2) https://www.building.co.uk/focus/reform-uk-conference-fundin... 3) https://www.archpaper.com/2025/10/biennale-architettura-carl...

I used to be extremely into Dataflow/Apache Beam and literally had the paper printed on my desk AND the book. I agree they got Event time versus processing time and Never rely on completeness right, and I love they go deeper into why that was just a hard thing to accept. My head still hurts thinking about unbounded stream triggers and I'm happy we got around to a table-centric model. I still think taking some ideas from Spanner, databases as message bus or consistency information per row, basically in-database CQRS would have been nice, though. Great paper.

I like the idea of simulations - maybe not in the flight simulator sense of a fixed rhythm, but more in the training in using the tools quickly sense, like a chaos monkey in your log search. My most memorable exam was Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), the hands-on simulation part was exhilarating.

I'm not sure if it's just the new prompt - this has happened to a comical degree for me since a long time. For example it even refuses to translate even just single verses of old songs, I asked for a translation of Tu vuò fà l'americano once. Niente.

To be fair not predicting accurately doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong - Michael Burry is the perfect example here, a market may actually just be so fraudulent (AI companies being funded by AI companies etc) that it can defy common economics for a while.

My guess would be it's to build up reputation of the sending accounts, by being "connected" to trusted, aged, accounts? However, the combination of garbled text + number @ large provider on its own should be pretty suspicious by now. Another idea is some kind of affiliate marketing / pumping attack, but I don't see ads.

European Commission has designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE), as well as Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), under the Digital Services Act (DSA)

Yep mentioned in the original thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727144

I agree quality blindness is curable. Many communities (e.g. Japanese, Swiss, Yemeni, Peruvian etc) have shown attention to detail is just a learning and, most importantly, social status process. Bugs are just the opposite of caring, and caring is at odds with hustle culture. I think Apple is a great example here - used to be meticulous and now every day the amount of tiny defects is just infuriating (just now I realised, for example, that Photos can't scroll with a mouse).

A long time ago I walked into a public library to get a library card, already my ID in hand. Staff looked at me aghast "why would we need an ID for a card, that'd be ridiculous!". I feel Brits take privacy quite seriously.

Agree, I know nothing about their system but in terms of clear auditability and accountability of systems I agree it's great. Every subsystem failure or inconsistency can be clearly attributed to one or the other site/stack, and the stand-in could for example apply other rules (e.g. approve only smaller transaction amounts that are accepted by an incident-only set of risk rules).

Minor thing but I do like they use the word "Stand In" here in the payments / financial sense of Stand-in processing (STIP), which is usually used when a bank is offline to keep essential services such as public transport working.

I do get the anxiety about new bugs but to be honest I fear more that in a few years it's so cheap to fix medium to high security bugs that lowkey hacking and finding worrying privacy violations becomes prohibitively expensive for citizens.

That article is a bit old but I loved this one (a bit more arty) from 2023: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/137/544999/extracting-soverei...

I didn't even necessarily mean diverting from the mission, just that optimising for network storage now reads like a feature maybe prioritised in anticipation of a stronger cloud user base

I was a real fan from the very beginning, but now DuckDB 2.0 "as a server" and 5. asynchronous I/O [1] looks aimed at something very different from what I thought first.

1) https://duckdb.org/2026/08/17/duckdb-20-highlights

As others have mentioned this is particularly prevalent in the US. I always liked that Australia's vision for a peer-to-peer payment system (note cards are mainly for merchants, hence the rewards) has inclusivity [1] as one of its core tenets "continue to transact ... without disproportionate burden or risk ... those experiencing financial hardship". They also just stopped surcharging [2] and have capped interchange fees since a long time.

1) https://a2apaymentsaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/...

2) https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/review-of...

Big +1. Uncertainty is where we learn, and where non-zero-sum games are, but most western AI labs right now operate firmly in zero-sum game territory.

Nice formatting - None of the book seems to be about "Thinking" though. It's basically an annotated syntax guide for readers from a C++ background?

$35M in credits (!) for the Defender Advantage Fund (0xDAF) doesn't sound that much given that e.g. the HAWK attack [1] cost $100k for 1 (albeit very advanced) vulnerability.

As a side note, that Golden Eagle wording "bringing a wartime footing to the cyber domain to relentlessly patch vulnerabilities" sounds so AI-written maybe that's what the credits are needed for.

(1) https://www.anthropic.com/research/discovering-cryptographic...

The irony of countries blocking Anna's Archive (UK, Italy, Netherlands etc) but then it's the hackers who conserve and steward the books. Because governments can't stop AI companies from shredding history like they did with Google Books _because_ they actually tried to do it _by the book_.

Major advantage of OpenCode adopted by Claude Code, now when I hit a usage limit it will automatically retry later - huge

I think Opus 5 is the best example of this - "relentlessly proactive" agent, therefore reducing hallucinations, but at the expense of fast, factual answers and direct logical paths. Everything becomes a pamphlet compiled from first principles.

For all of my love for open weight models, them being not fully multi-modal or just plain bad at visual understanding like this is my major reasons for not using them more

It's interesting that 5Rights focus shifted completely from rights to surveillance and control. Back in 2017 they still thought about a rights framework [1], the website has since been taken down.

1) https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-society-politics/news/article/3...

I'm surprised there is no breakdown of "with skills" (framework) and without. In my experience, apart from human readability, the ability of a model to follow strict skill rules is the important. For example I see a lot less waste of tokens and reasoning retry loops of obvious errors when using Python with uv+ruff than without.

If extremely privileged people use a lot of big words to basically say phones should be taken away by their children so _they_ can control their opinions, it always reminds me of https://heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/the-kids-with-phones-ar...:

> the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves, which is why the notion of blanket bans come so easily to them.

Linking Graeber's Bullshift Jobs to Workism via his concept of "spiritual violence" would have been a nice touch because it explains the drain despite the performativity (or what Baudrillard would call reproduction)