petilon
petilon on Hacker News
>
The trouble for the US is that it is now very clear that the US president can just act like a crazy dictator, and that the mechanisms which were supposed to prevent that simply don't function.This is true. A US president who has strong support from a majority of voters of his own party can act like a dictator. So if 51% of Republican voters (which may be just 25% of all voters) support him no matter what, then he can act like a dictator. This is because Republican members of Congress who are supposed to rein him in are worried that they will be voted out if they anger the 25% of voters who support the president.
The fact that 25% of voters can set the direction for the whole country is indeed a defect in the system that is not easily rectified.
But if Republicans are defeated by Democrats in the upcoming midterms then there is hope. That's how we are going to recover.
Trust won't come back immediately, but if the next 2 to 3 Presidents are "normal" then trust will come back slowly.
Trump is not emperor for life, fortunately. He'll be gone in a couple of years. With any luck the upcoming midterms will significantly limit his powers. America will recover from this dark period. Other countries have had dark periods too, like Germany, and recovered.
When Hitler was removed did another Hitler variant take control of Germany? No, Germany recovered from that dark period. The same will happen in the US. We will recover from this dark period. The comparison to Hitler is not baseless, btw. His own vice president once called Trump America's Hitler.
I think it will happen in about the same timeframe as SpaceX runs AI racks in space.
>
You don't think the human race will be extended to Mars?About the same probability as SpaceX running AI racks in space :)
That's if SpaceX AI doesn't hack into the systems that control this capability first. And this is why physical access is important, as depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The same kind of analysts are saying extending human race to Mars is a dumb idea.
And extending the human race to Mars, and Hyperloop, and frontier AI model, and DOGE cutting $2 trillion per year in government spending...
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the hero defeats the hostile onboard computer by entering its logic core and manually disconnecting its memory modules.
That's hard to do if the AI rack is in space as SpaceX is planning to do. You can't disconnect. You can't shoot it.
>
Microsoft are bundling a lot more into the platform and leaving less to the community.This is a good thing. In Java everything has multiple community offerings, so before doing anything you have to evaluate the community offerings and decide which one to go with. If you go with the wrong one you may end up having to switch at some point, and that can be painful. This happens so often that most of the time spent when using Java is doing these evaluations and comparisons. With C# you just use the one built into .NET platform. Saves a ton of time.
>
AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell adsNo, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
For CPUs, Moore's law lasted more than 50 years. We don't know how long it will last for GPUs. I think Nvidia will keep improving performance, lowering power consumption and reducing heat generation for many years to come.
>
They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customersThat's true. This lets Oracle coast for a while. But if they coast for too long SAP will overtake them.
Bloomberg and Economist seem to be doing OK, so it is possible.
NVDA P/E is 26. That's hardly overhyped. For comparison AAPL P/E is 38.
Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.
That's relative to the hype we had before. Previously any involvement in AI was rewarded heavily, but now it is being punished. Wallstreet previously punished Apple for not enough AI now they are being rewarded for not throwing 100s of billions into AI hardware.
Oracle's credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above "junk" status [1].
That means they can't borrow cheaply anymore. The only way to raise cash now is to cut payroll, and that's what they are doing. And what are they doing with the cash? Buying Nvidia hardware to rent out to OpenAI [2].
All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business, Oracle has no IP in this. To fund it they are making deep cuts to their software development business which does have proprietary IP.
That may have made sense when it was originally announced because AI hype was at its peak at the time. Indeed, Oracle's stock shot up when Stargate was announced, and Larry Ellison briefly became the world's richest person. However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price. Oracle stock has dropped more than 50%, and companies NOT investing 100s of billions in AI hardware are now being rewarded, such as Apple.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC
So kind of like how the US figured out how to test and maintain nuclear weapons without an actual explosion, then sought to ban nuclear testing by explosion.
>
The threat to mathematics isn't that suddenly the profitability of their profession (lol) is going to go away, it's that people are thinking of AI as a replacement for the human social and intellectual practices that constitute the discipline.You could say the same about software development.
Software development is a group effort, so it includes social practices, and certainly includes intellectual practices as well.
For the sake of argument, how is this different from the Luddites? The Luddites feared that machines would displace not only human labor, but also the social knowledge, skilled judgment, and craft traditions embedded in their work.
>
We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align.This is Terry Tao talking about AI's impact on Math, but this could just as well be a software engineer talking about AI's impact on software development.
Do mathematicians deserve more job security than software engineers?
If it is a tier-1 language why isn't it supported in Visual Studio?
Astra pelican looks amazing: it looks like it was made by a professional artist. All the others look like they were made by kindergartners.
I think mainly your mail won't go into the sent folder and be searchable. You can work around that by CCing your domain.
What other features will you not get? The mail composer in Gmail is pretty sucky anyway. For example when you are replying on a long thread it is very hard to see the message you are replying to.
This only impacts Gmail web interface, according to [1]. You can use a desktop email client and continue to receive and send email from your custom domain.
"Web access changes: As previously announced, you can no longer add or sync your third-party email account in Gmail on the web. Alternative access: To access your third-party email account, you can use a dedicated mail app, a desktop mail client, or the Gmail mobile app."
[1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213?sjid=9352980...
AI could discover candidate novel physics without autonomously operating new physical experiments, and humans or instruments can later independently validate the result. This is analogous to how Einstein developed theories whose predictions were confirmed by experiments and observations only years or decades later.
Solving "open problems" will push the field forward.