mancerayder

Yeah, I don't know if they're incredibly good engineers. We know they may have gone to Ivy League schools and for sure are excellent at algorithms during job interviews.

I applied there a long time ago and they seemed more interested in my math background and schooling and coding than my work experience.

And yet Google isn't quite as rebuked. There's another thread on HN today about ads in google TV.

But from a technical perspective, Google breaks constantly. Here's one. On Pixel you could use Assistant to start a timer or open an application. For years. Then Gemini is forced (first opt in, then forced, as is the Google Way)- there's no way to turn off voice out loud response, and opening apps - the most basic thing - doesn't work.

Then you have long-standing headaches like Gmail interface, reports of people's businesses getting blocked on Google Workspace, etc.

Facebook is blamed for that data broker scandal and making us hate our families due to political arguments. Google does all the same data broker stuff, and other than not being a forever scroll social media site, it's morally and technically repugnant.

1-2 percent seems so tiny that it's incredibly low risk. Am I misreading that stat?

A short on what? The entire market? The companies we are saying would sink in value (well other than Oracle I guess) aren't public yet.

That's wild that someone who is literally 'the gentry' (as in you don't have to work for a living anymore) is blaming random homeowners for being a 'landed class.' Something is off here in how you've calibrated your political perspective.

I own real estate and none of it is anything other than a place for me to live. Nothing is an investment, only a cost. And if I lose my job I have to sell or rent something out. For a loss - interest rates are brutal. Taxes are enormous, and maintenance is through the roof. I'm luckily not in a state like Florida where insurance is the biggest eater.

Historical as in 2.5 percent interest rates are finished forever.

Summary - none of this stuff is evidence of a landed gentry image you're assuming. The alternative is renting - meaning the rent goes up every year.

I see now the issue with your perspective - you're in the privileged class punching down, somehow conflating different types of home ownership, the family wanting to own their own shelter -- and the Duke of Westminster.

I'm not a parent, but even if I were your satire wouldn't move me - I'd still want the best for my kids and my decisions would reflect that.

Theoretical social causes and activism are great for university discussions and political sloganeering, but it's a whole different pair of sleeves than what's good for your family.

Cherry-picked? Define cherry-picked. Certainly into the 2000s if you looked at, let's take NJ, and compared the school rankings to spend per pupil you'd find an absolute correlation that ties back to property values. We'd be comparing places like Camden and New Brunswick to places like Princeton, where kids have many more programs and opportunities. I'm talking published numbers of per pupil per year $ spend.

I don't understand your criticism. That 1973, the date of the case in question, is so old that we've solved school inequality?

For that matter 500K homes and 3 percent interest rates are a thing of historical fiction.

And insurance, repairs, taxes are at an all time high. One day when you get older and you and your parents purchase your first home together, it'll start to make more sense what's being said here. It's not a good investment. If you want an investment stick to your brokerage account.

>My point is that homeownership, in the US especially, is so heavily favored as an investment vehicle that you perhaps should not act as if you inherently deserve the gains for having “done something”.

By whom? Private equity buying out land in Georgia? Political pundits? Blogs you read? I've heard that too, and it's only true in specific times in history - like since the financial crisis and then covid, where prices only went up.

There's nothing today to suggest that people are eating 6.5 percent interest rates or even staying put out of any calculated investment return. People buy because they're forming a household, they are sick of rents going up, or they want stability. The rest is rhetoric.

They maintained the home and paid taxes on it. Have you ever had a failed septic system? A major water leak? A new roof? There's this whole anger around home ownership you get these days, oftentimes by people who have no experience in the matter.

Yes, mortgages are subsidized by our interest tax deduction system. That part is true. It doesn't turn home ownership into something with no risk, and it certainly doesn't turn it into this subsidized investment. It's a liability, not an investment.

No, good schools are also a function of $ spend per pupil, which is correlated with school quality and opportunities for students. A really interesting place to study this is San Antonio v Rodriguez (1973) where in my opinion they laid the groundwork for such inequality in the US. The argument being made in that case (which the Supreme Court ruled against 5 4) is that funding schools via property taxes leads to this prolonged entrenched inequality.

The actual case is about whether the poor school system was allowed to have higher prop taxes than Texas allowed. In the details are the inequality argument (hence 4th amendment being at issue).

In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).

How did you end up here, then? A rare duck around your filters to share this particular insight?

People should demand lower salaries, god damnit! What happened to the good old-fashioned Mission of the company? In fact that we ask for anything at all to get ahead on our housing and healthcare payments is morally abominable. When did HN get so... germaine. We must serve our corporate missions at any costs, and bring forth the future our Founders promise.

>On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers. I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it, but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots. Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back. Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.

I think you missed the arguments. It's not they're not 'deserving' - although you should probably say qualified as it sounds less moral in the context of job competition. No, it's that as indentured servants, they effectively allow corporations to hire cheaper, more pliant workers. H1 workers from India might be very qualified, but they keep their heads down and work long hours to avoid risking getting sent back.

We don't like that. Would you want co-workers who say yes to everything and accept long hours, all due to immigration? It's a form of labor power dilution and it hurts us all.

Google is doing the same on Android - there's no native tool to search for large images and videos by date. There's a Purchase Google Cloud Storage type of header that pops up when you start to get full, and you can delete whatever is quick to find or remember to delete, like WhatsApp media, which you find through an annoying directory structure with a broken tool. It's terrible.

I've never met anyone who's 'pro surveillance'. I've met ad tech executives and Googlers, though. Have you spoken to them about the world that's been built?

You envisage a world where drones are flying around shooting at cars and you're more scared about being targeted yourself than such a world?

If we compare California Chardonnays to the Bourgogne wines - I'm comparing price points, say, in the 20-30 range. In local wine stores and also in restaurants. They're the same price or more, unless you get something with a pirate or a dog or something on the label (although those are luxurious too oftentimes now).

I fully agree it's half the price in France. Even a 20 euro supermarket Bourgogne is worth 30-40 here.

My point is that the California ones should be much cheaper - there's no tariff.

How badly was the sleep messed up, is the trade off? Sometimes two beers is useful as a social lubricant or just a relaxing aid. Stress at work and spiraling rumination does a terrible thing to my sleep as well.

I think there's optimization culture and then there's excess. Drinking 2-3 drinks every night for 15 years probably was excessive for me. But one or two nights where sleep is affected per week is tolerable. Life is short, and deprivation might make it a little longer but life's not supposed to feel long (as in living life means doing a little bit of harm here and there).

I had a great English red at a winery, I don't remember what it was unfortunately, and I was shocked when they told me the price of the bottle. It was 35 pounds a decade ago. I think it must be due to input and manufacturing cost efficiency that English and American wines that are equivalent are so much pricier than established old world wines.

For some reason California wines are significantly more expensive than French (Bordeaux and Bourgogne regions I'm mostly interested in) and Spanish (Rioja) wines that are arguably more reputed, older and more experienced wineries, and I'd argue higher quality.

Yet California wines are VERY expensive. My uninformed hypothesis - French and Spanish winemakers make good wines with cost efficiency, whereas America's wine makers don't. So all things being equal, input costs are higher. I see the same with cider - compare Spanish cider to New York cider, the latter being 50 percent more expensive.

Could anyone corroborate or refute this?

How much of this is due to famous podcasters? There's the Huberman obsession with alcohol being poisonous, the looksmaxxing, and then you can argue, good science that shows it's bad.

It's influenced me - I was drinking probably 2-3 drinks every night for decades, and lately I've cut down by 60-80 percent weekly. That's still poisonous though, if you ask the GenZ social media world.

Is Kagi the solution?

Duckduckgo and brave search are definitely not. It's always g! after a wildly fuzzy first pass.

What do you mean? Google disabled the more complicated operators that let the user (your "normy") refine their search. They did it on purpose. And the other day I noticed the date limiter in the results (last X months/year) got buried.

Surely you're not going to defend Google for these - they've been transitioning from an engine that's a tool to an engine that uses your attention as their tool for years now.

I think they're training their models using us correcting them repeatedly. That's my tin foil hat theory and I'm sticking to it!

After all, why would Google do anything for free when it comes to AI?

If you wanted to tease customers with one AI shitty free search box in order for them to then decide to upgrade and pay for Gemini, well, this isn't the way. And so either Google are idiots, or we're helping them for free. I'm going with Occam's Razor on this one - we're the product.

It's interactive. As in, we write and talk, often about articles posted. That's completely completely different than passively absorbing content spoon fed by Silicon Valley algorithms and sweetened with graphics, attractive people and sudden music and sounds.

> “I come into the office to be on (Microsoft) Teams meetings,” Schuyler Waldeck-Myers, a fiscal analyst with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, previously said.

Sounds about right. RTO is all about control, not collaboration. RTO brings executives comfort.

How do you know these are bots and not Redditors? There's an HN sub on Reddit, and one of the hallmarks of Reddit are the 'mic drop' big pivotal one liner comments that get upvoted or cause lots of replies or engagement.

But I do feel, to reply to you, that crypto was a lot more critically received on HN than AI is right now. We're too busy debating humanity's end rather than if this crap actually works.

For those of us who actually work with technology (not product managers, executives or salespeople, this stuff doesn't work well at scale. It might in a research department at Google or a hedge fund, less so in the messy corporate world.

Maybe Gemini is loosey goosey on purpose so we angrily correct it - then feed something on the back end that trains a different model?

It's so abysmally bad on Google search... and it's free. Isn't Google the great pioneer of the product is us?