kjellsbells

I wonder what it would take to be able to add a "somewhere else like this" feature that shows you other places in the world that have the same toes of rocks.

For example: maybe the granite of the Appalachian is geologically contiguous with rocks in far east Canada or even Iceland?

Or, if I was a wine guy, maybe I want to find a part of the world where the rock is flint and limestone that is like Sancerre, but isn't in France.

A very stupid thing to do, but I can't help but think that if the shoe were on the other foot, say, if an OpenAI agent had escaped its harness and hacked a speakerphone in the office of HuggingFace, they would shrug and no consequences would follow.

What I was getting at was stuff like this:

- cheap memory: code is bloated and inefficient. Why do I need 2GB to fire up a text editor? Is that cross platform runtime really the best basis to run my app on? People need to feel the sting of a malloc saying no sometimes.

- cheap storage. It's so cheap that there is zero technical brake on storing everything. With the concomitant abuses of privacy. A widget website needs name, address, CC, not 134 pieces of information about my GPU and screen resolution along with my contacts list.

- cheap compute. we've all seen the Rube Goldberg Kubernetes/ factory contraption and it's only possible when the marginal cost of spinning up a new pod, sidecar, etc is minimal. When compute is cheap people outsource their architecture thinking to someone else's decisions.

- cheap network. Nothing new here: are apps sending a ton of gunk for no real purpose eg JS. Also related to compute complexity as systems span multiple nodes

I don't think that an abundance of any computing resource is a good thing. Cloud, storage, memory: this idea that you can always get lots of it leads to all sorts of undesirable outcomes.

That's exactly the point though. Mercury is not a bank. So giving them your money and getting it back safely relies upon the partner institution.

As an example: fintech builds front end that takes deposits from user, but not much more. The deposit passes to an intermediary that pools deposits and puts them in FBO accounts at a real (FDIC) bank. Intermediary collapses. Now neither the bank nor the fintech know who had what.

This is exactly what happened when Synapse collapsed (which impacted Mercury at the time too)[0]

[0] https://www.yalejournal.org/publications/the-synapse-collaps...

be aware that Mercury is a fintech, not a bank, and doesn't participate in the FDIC insurance scheme. So there is no backstop if they fail.

To be fair to Mercury, they are quite open about this fact.

For this reader, the author undermines their own arguments by their hectoring tone. They are extremely determined to believe that collapse is imminent, but they've made earlier posts saying the same thing, yet here we are. Maybe they are right, but markets are not rational. So I'd want to see balance sheets, SEC filings, etc not Larry Is Big Bad (which may very well be 100% true).

As best as I can understand it, DC construction is handled by REITs and SPVs, who require certain guarantees from their anchor tenants and take GPUs and possibly stock in the tenant as collateral in case things go bad. Oracle is the tenant for Stargate and maybe other DCs, and OpenAI is their customer, and OpenAI would ultimately pay Oracle rent, just like any other Oracle Cloud customer. Since OpenAI doesn't have any real cash right now, Softbank and some others are fronting them some money so that Oracle can seem more "credible" to the DC builders and in doing so command a better deal from the latter.

The assertions seem to be that all this falls apart if the DC doesn't get built on time. Oracle stock takes a beating, they no longer look so attractive to the DC builder, the builder walks away, the end. Is that about it?

I'm not sure I believe that IANA's goal of reducing serving costs is met by a site where each letter is wrapped in a <span>...

separate shower thought: Microsoft have used contoso.com as the example domain in their docs for 25+ years. I bet the logs for that domain are absolutely wild.

Aha! maybe this is the time to finally resolve a question that has bugged me for years.

In Europe up to about 1983-ish I don't recall anything other than European manufacturers. For example, your commuter bike would have had a 3-speed Sturmey Archer gearbox inside the rear hub and your fancy road bike would have had Campagnolo (if you could afford it: they were infamously expensive).

And then out of (what seemed like) nowhere Shimano shows up with all these innovations. Index shifting, non-circular chainrings, cassette freewheels, 7-speed or more blocks.

Was there a reason that Shimano suddenly showed up in Europe with all these innovations?

Software quality has been miserable for decades. And more and more of daily life depends on software working well, so we all feel it much more.

This predates AI, eg recall Windows was gnarly before the third Service Pack, etc.

Personally I blame outsourcing and its cousin offshoring. Not because Indians can't code or any such racist nonsense, but because relentless pressure to be the lowest bidder, no universal measurable standard of what quality actually means, and, above all, no practical way to exercise meaningful managerial control over a team you don't control or are ten timezones away makes quality impossible.

I suspect that in the Wide World of Software, away from the 10x people here on HN who write SQLite clones for fun and send Fabrice PRs to fix his bugs, vibe coded software might actually be approaching the quality of what they get from their vendors today. That doesn't make it good, but it's at least equally meh. It's the Visual Basic era of 1994 all over again. We'd better get used to it, fast.

"Uh, I guess I'm kind of an independent", says the voter, knowing full well who they are going to pull the lever for but not wanting to share it with the pollster.

I find polls to have had very little predictive value since at least 2016. The disdain that people have for politicians is such that they can, imho, no longer be relied upon to state their preferences before or after the election to any pollster.

> Not sure if [...] works nicely.

This is the billion dollar question for corps though. Windows and MacOS are first class citizens of the corporate IT universe and all the weirdness of corporate IT works. MDM, identity/auth, Office, LOB apps, video, document signing, data labeling, everything.

Linux has taken huge, heroic strides, and has caught up to about 2005. Corporate IT simply will not sanction Linux desktops unless they are provably as well versed in the entire ecosystem as Win/Mac, barring a "political" decision made at the top to make it happen.

To change this would require a profoundly deep, expensive, and continuing investment in all aspects of the 'Modern Work' experience, plus genuine commitment from Microsoft to make it happen (which would likely require lawsuits and enforcement).

The situation today is that a few orgs are playing catchup on some features, but that will never be enough to match a platform that has been dedicated to corporate life for 40+ years, and from a company infamous for extending their advantages to extinguish the competition.

This really stood out to me:

> products like Notes, Lotus 1-2-3, they enabled the domain practitioner to potentially solve problems themselves. They’re democratized problem solving. A real estate officer or a plumber can solve their needs without having to involve third parties and explain to them the need

That may be true for people who have the freedom of action to craft and use their own solutions. It reminds me of the explosion in domain apps unleashed by Visual Basic.

It is very much not true for your average office jockey or line employee stuck using some line of business app, and where access to powerful tools is not allowed or is even banned. Billy in Accounts cant fire up Claude even if he wanted to and running Ollama on his work machine is a fireable offense. So he wont ever be able to finally fix those TPS reports even if he is the one guy with the knowledge to do so.

I'm not arguing that this isnt sound IT policy, but I do expect a fair bit of shadow IT to spring up when people internalize that keeping their job requires them to showmassive AI powered productivity gains.

Lethality doesnt mean winning, otherwise Vietnam would have been over in a month and the shock and awe of 2003 would not have been followed by ten years of battling with Iraqi militias.

As for Afghanistan, as candidate Trump said in 2012, "Afghanistan is a total disaster. We don't know what we are doing." [0] - not exactly winning. And what do you know, the Taliban are back in charge after he negotiated a settlement.

[0] https://x.com/realdonaldtrump/status/179270017064513536

One could ask similar questions about the Americans, or the Russians. America hasnt won a war since 1991. Russia hasnt won since WWII.

Winning wars, as opposed to just battles, requires such an intense emotional commitment to the state being fought for that people are willing to die for the mission. That extends not just to combatants but the citizenry and polity behind them. Few wars of the modern era meet the bar. Wars of national survival may do, so long as the (defending) political class dont screw it up, eg by internal corruption.

tl;dr is that a state should not start a war unless they are prepared --truly prepared-- to finish it. I guess that's why so many politicians shy away from the word "war" to something else.

A few years into my career I realized that I was not cut out to code. Luckily I worked for a good employer and they told me that code was 5% of the business regardless of what the sign over the door said. Over the next 20 years I spent time doing QA, tech support, product management, professional services, and sales engineering.

Rightly or wrongly there is a hierarchy of job roles and QA and tech support are low down on that list. But if you want to stay in the industry that your org serves (eg healthcare, energy, telecom etc) they are good ways to gather real industry experience.

Product is hard but devs do appreciate someone who can clearly tell them what is needed without micromanaging them (and tell the customer what is possible and what is not).

Pro services is great if you have good human skills but it can be a tough sell (some orgs treat it like a body shop, some customers think they dont need it, some sales orgs throw it in for free meaning you are underwater immediately).

Sales Engineering can be lucrative and fun, but only if you are paired up with a good sales team that doesnt treat you like a demo and slideware robot.

LLMs reflect the data in the corpus, and that corpus is essentially in American Business English, which has long been the lingua franca of the Internet.

I bet a large %age of the HN readership are consuming the tech stack in their second or third language. Germans blogging in English or Indians commenting in English. We even have a broadly shared tech culture with norms, in-jokes, taboos, etc. LLMs reflect that.

If we want AI to do better, we should pay attention to making sure the non-English (and non-US English) internet thrives. Personally I´d love to see LLMs doing the needful and writing in Indian English, or dinner-party-argument French, instead of the sanitized corporate pablum tone it uses in English.

Or perhaps more controversially, we let LLMs chew up the English internet and deliberately build an offline culture in local languages. Keep your AI slop and your em-dashes, I'm gonna publish a zine in Italian.

Discussed in a 2017 National Geographic article[0], archived here[1]. Notice the article text's description of the honey being sold on the black market. Seems that now everyone is shopping there.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/honey-hu...

[1] https://archive.is/Xdd01

That said, clinicians have been writing about this for some time, eg [2] from 2007:

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17540490/

Parse the question more closely:

Has [early] Scratch [experience] [led to] [fulfilling] [careers]?

All those modifiers create so much leeway that answering the question can be no more than a parlor game. How early? What kind of experience? By led, do we mean direct causality? What is fulfilling? Is a job a career?

Teaching is lighting tinder in various stages of dryness and hoping that it smolders for long enough that you can add fuel to the fire and get something going. In the right environment, it doesn't matter how you light it. Scratch, card games, helping grandma with recipes, does it really matter?

Enough of it happened that people felt it personally. Disney being a notorious example[0]. ConEd[1], AT&T[2], there are others. I generally discount the stories from anti-immigration sources like CIS because they dislike all immigration on principle[3], but even the AFL-CIO cover these cases.[4]

However, you raise a second point, about locals being outcompeted by immigrants already on staff for new positions, promos, etc which is slightly different. It's quite possible that an H1-B holder could (legitimately) outcompete a native citizen. It's also quite possible that a native citizen who got the job that the H1-B got instead could have learned enough on the job to outcompete the other citizen. Hard to tell. Again, none of this is the fault of the immigrant - the engine of these issues is (imho) is the relentless drive by corporations to lower the costs of labor.

UC San Francisco[5] shows what the logical conclusion of this drive would be, even in light of the today's Administration's extremely anti-immigration stance. UCSF brought in H1-B labor to learn the tasks and then offshored the labor.

To me this is the obvious issue that must be solved: if there is no source of cheap immigrant labor, corporations will not say, "oh ok, we'll go back to hiring local citizens at $150K/year with healthcare and a 401k". They will simply automate what they can and offshore the rest.

[0] https://labor411.org/411-blog/disney-fired-employees-after-m...

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1628728/southern-calif...

[2] https://www.axios.com/2019/12/29/trump-att-outsourcing-h1b-v...

[3] https://cis.org/Report/Untold-Stories-American-Workers-Repla...

[4] https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/guest-worker-visas-the-...

[5] https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/03/after-pink-slips-ucsf...

Two things can be true at once, though. For every 10 diamonds, there are a hundred pebbles.

Current administration policy thinks to shut the whole pipeline down. Missing diamonds? Tough.

Previous US policy was to let in the whole set, hoping to capture all the diamonds, and ignoring the negative impacts of the duds.

Corporate America cared more about slashing labor costs than whether the new hires were duds or diamonds . They played, and largely continue to play, the narrative that they whole set are diamonds.

Voters' lived experience is not this at all. They see their jobs being done rather badly by people and their bosses replacing them with cheaper talent. Into this stew rides the racist demagogue, the natalist, the culture warrior, etc, looking to score points.

Right now the nativist wing is in the ascendant. One day they'll be gone. But it doesn't follow that immigration policy should return to the status quo ante.

Isn't "everything in a database" what AS/400 and PICK operating systems do?

Then there was Microsoft WinFS, which promised much but got killed in ~2003. A shame.

Having WiFi 8 (or even 7) on your access point is only really useful if you have a population of clients that can use the features it offers. I regularly sample the devices attached to residential wifi routers and the facts are grim: in a house of 40+ devices, two can do wifi 7, about 10% can do 6Ghz, 50 to 60% can do 5GHz but not 6GHz, and a core rump of 50% of the devices are stuck on 2.4GHz. I suspect this is because all those cheap smart home things like roku sticks and pet feeders and so on are built for cost and a decent 5Ghz chip is just too much to ask.

It doesnt help that PowerPoint itself has a truly horrible templating system. Try building a template from scratch and you'll see the ur-template has about 8 styles which are themselves very fragile and whose objects carry different degrees of semantic meaning. This is why, for example, it's stupidly difficult to take a deck produced in one template, paste it into another, and have the new template take effect across the copied slides.

PowerPoint has quite a lot of deep features, and you'll prise it out of my cold dead hands, but the template system is a horror show.

I sometimes wonder if the weird vibe (and magic) of New Orleans has something to do with the absolutely swampy conditions. NOLA is fungus central just because of the heat and moisture. Growth on every building, every tree, wall, etc.

Can mental illnesses be caused by fungal infections? I wonder.

If Alice and Bob strike a deal then Alice must be confident that an acceptable subset of her interests are met and that Bob will stick to the deal.

If Bob shows evidence of not sticking to deals, there's little point in Alice striking any deal.

That's an uncharitable take. Blog posts can and should exist at every level of expertise and depth. What's trivially easy and hardly worth blogging about to you might be the gateway/lightbulb moment to someone else, no?

If your enterprise is one of those corporate fortune 500 types that has Salesforce, you basically have to have Slack as it's the easiest, fastest, or at least the least miserable way of interacting with Salesforce.

My friends in knowledge-worker America tell me that they are stuck between two megacorp visions of the workplace: 365/Teams/Copilot and Salesforce/Slack. Each wants to own the whole stack, but cannot. Workers are stuck with two systems that dont want to talk to one another.

latexr below makes a good point why:

> without breaking conversation I can figure out what day of the week it’ll be

Being able to maintain the flow of a conversation because you are able to do things in your head is incredibly useful social skill.

It's like when you are talking at dinner with friends: the conversation goes back and forth and sideways, but as soon as someone pulls ouf a phone, the conversational dynamic changes.

I don't love it immediately, and yes, in fiberglass this chair doesnt sound too comfortable. But if it were made in leather, I could see it becoming very comfortable indeed, and the keather would also nod to the very obvious saddle shape.

(Always good to see common objects reimagined, even if they might not seem "right", they get a conversation started.)