psadauskas
psadauskas on Hacker News
In my almost 20 years on HN, for a long time the groupthink was basically standard libertarian-capitalism, worshipping billionaires and big tech companies, and skeptical of anything that could be construed as "socialism".
The last few years, though, while anything "anti-capitalist" or overly critical of some big tech companies that hits the front page gets flagged by bots pretty quickly, the overall feeling I get from the comments is much more skeptical of big tech and is pro-socialism.
Speaking for myself, I think we've become jaded after the constant barrage of big companies spying on us, charging more for less, enshitifying their products, and so on. I used to be optimistic about the future and my prospects, now I'm just hoping I can hold on and keep my health insurance until I retire. I worry about what my school-age kids are going to have to deal with in 5-10 years.
He's worth like $3 billion. From a global allocation perspective, it's quite terrible he has a bunch of the world's limited supply of money in his own possession and only using 5% of it to live off of.
The part I find grating is the attempts to punch everything up. ("It's not X. It's Y"). Like, its a react badge component, it doesn't need punching up. You didn't find the smoking gun in a murder mystery, just a misplaced CSS rule.
Undocumented immigrants are a useful scapegoat politically, because it allows those in power to point the finger at them for all the country's problems, but those immigrants have no political power themselves since they can't vote.
Additionally, it gives business owners a bunch of workers they can exploit, since those workers can't go to the police or report them to the labor board.
> A computer can never be held accountable
> Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
I'm the same. They don't even have to "support" it, just stop doing everything they can to prevent it. Volunteers will support it for them.
I once had it "fix" a failing test by changing it from (in Ruby pseudocode):
assert_eq foo, bar
to:
assert_eq foo, bar if foo == bar
Or, legalize it, so there's no incentive for anyone to drive 90 kilos of meth across the country. People don't do meth because they want to, they do it because they feel like there's no other options. If we as a society spent half as much money helping people as we do punishing them, then everyone would be much better off.
As a programmer, I've been telling people who ask:
> AI has taken away almost all the tedious parts of my job, which is nice. It's also taken away almost all the fun parts of my job, too, though.
Half of all dentists graduated in the bottom half of their class.
Even Candy Crush, a huge part of what made it successful, was the tiny details. The bright colors, the art, the subtle and not-so-subtle animations... An LLM can technically do all that, if you keep reminding it, and have strong rules, and constantly keep it in check, but there's no way it would do it on its own and keep it consistent and coherent.
Eg, if the tall green pill candy and the red round one both scale by exactly 3px when you drag them, it might still "look" wrong, and get into uncanney valley territory. And that's even assuming the LLM picked the same value to scale when you prompted it to "add a red candy", or it picked a different one arbitrarily.
I've tried making games a few times, or even CSS animations, and I can tell that they don't "feel" right, even if I have no idea why, or what to change. I have mad respect for artists and animators that can manage that, and I have no idea how you tell an LLM "It doesn't feel right when I drag the candies", and have it be able to figure out that a tall vertical candy needs to scale differently on the X and Y axis than a round one.
The advantage I see for MCP over CLIs or APIs, is that once you release the CLI/API and people start coding scripts against it, your interface is set it stone, you're never allowed to change it again, or you break everyone's scripts.
With an MCP, agents are very tolerant of changes, since each usage is fresh with no prior knowledge, so nothing to break. This allows you to experiment and iterate on the MCP, see how people use it and what gaps you still need to cover. Once it stabilizes, you can lock it down into and API/CLI interface.
Yes. They decided that it was more valuable spending a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world (and enriching weapons companies in the process) than it would be to spend a few billion advancing science.
And even if you do manage to find such a place, there is exactly zero guarantee that they won't hire someone above that _does_ ruin the better conditions you've enjoyed since you started. A successful company is persuaded by the board to grow the leadership team, and the number of sociopaths at that level means anyone that joins has a decent chance of being one.
My current pet peeve is when it said like that, but the "yes but" its contradicting is from its own talking-to-itself phase, not anything I ever said or implied.
I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.
During the industrial revolution, people thought that all these new machines and factories and electricity meant that everyone would only have to work 4 hours a week since it made everyone so much more productive.
That's not what happened, though. Everyone worked the same amount for the same pay, just in more miserable repetitive working conditions, while the factory owners kept all profits from the gains in productivity.
One "side" is actively and intentionally destroying the country, the other is letting them. It's not that both sides are bad, it's that both sides are the same side, working for the same people.
The first one passed with a lot of regular people losing their homes, their jobs, and even their lives. I wish just for once we could have the wealthy elites get their comeuppance without it also screwing over everyone else.
If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing.
The problem is, if the government is small, then corporations are more powerful and can run over it and do whatever they want. If government is large, then its a much juicier target for corporations to lobby and bribe to get what they want.
It comes down to culture and society. A democratically elected government should ideally be there to represent the interests of the masses as a way to counteract the inevitable power of the wealthy elite. But when those same wealthy elite spend decades and billions of dollars to brainwash the masses by owning all the media companies and influencing school curriculums and so on, I don't see how the masses stand a chance over the long term.
If that's all it was ever used for, then nobody would give a shit. Instead those examples you gave just end up being an _excuse_, so that you as a business owner can fire or deny a promotion to someone you don't like because you can now prove they stopped at the 7/11 for 5 minutes to pee.
If this country had good unions and real worker protection laws, like you can't punish drivers for taking a break, then we wouldn't feel as much a need for broader sledgehammer laws banning GPS tracking. (that, lets be honest, will never happen anyways)
And that hasn't changed at all:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
> Higher concentration of wealth is not new, it's happened many times and dissipated many times.
That's a very clinical way to put it. Usually when its "dissipated", its through war or economic depression or both, and a great many people who never had any wealth suffer needlessly, while the wealthy rarely do.
It would be nice if we could like, _not_ do that, and try something different for once, instead of throwing up our hands and saying "well that's just how its always been!"
Sure, so have them take a week-long course and register with the county and get a license. 160 hours of class and 2 years of apprenticeship means you have to find someone to apprentice _to_, so the incumbents get to gatekeep how many competitors they're willing to have, and limit it to only the people they like.
Protection racket. They guys doing the installs now would make much less money if just anyone with some tools could start competing with them.
The clerics and politicians in Iran use the US as a great big boogeyman to drum up political support, but until recently most of the regular people just didn't care about the regular people in the US. Same with the people in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or ... If they do have an opinion about the US, its probably that they mostly wish we'd stop bombing their homes and just leave them alone.
But, it makes the defense industry a whole lot a money, and its good for getting Republicans elected. But helping US citizens, some of which might have gasp brown skin, that doesn't make any defense contractors any money at all! /s
We'll spend a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world that never meant us any harm, but paying a custodian to clean a public toilet (and providing help for those that might misuse it) is a bridge too far.
My general rule of thumb is "Use Postgres until you've discovered why you can't use Postgres."
Anything you introduce is another moving part you have to operate and maintain, and in the beginning, Postgres can probably handle it. Wait for load, see where its failing, and then you'll have a better idea if adding another tool is worth the cost.
But, what about Hunter Biden's laptop!? /s