zorpner

Humans are social animals. It's true that not all of these interactions re positive, but so much of what drives us is not even related to acclaim or flattery, but merely interaction in a general sense. In a sense this is one of the true perils of LLM-style interaction (going back to Eliza, I guess) -- that we can not only potentially satisfy that drive mechanically, but do so in a way that's structurally produced by a commercial entity. Do you think that the models talking to you have your best interests at heart? They don't have any interest in you at all.

Over 25% of the original ASCII specification is control characters.

It provides no benefit, so even the smallest amount of added complexity or additional engineering effort required isn't worthwhile.

Even given the other objections to your argument, there are an extraordinary number of examples of now-very-appreciated artists, writers, etc whose work was not valued at the time they were creating it.

Here's a good summary of some recent stuff: https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...

Corey Quinn wrote an interesting article addressing that question: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_bra...

Some good information in the comments as well.

DHH joined their board in 2024 [0], and is using this opportunity to purge people he disagrees with politically from the Ruby ecosystem. It really is as simple as that.

0: https://www.shopify.com/news/david-heinemeier-hansson-board

Specifically, it was in a meeting called by Jason Fried to address people who were concerned about the ongoing existence of an internal list of "funny customer names" (which by all accounts was extremely racist), in which Ryan Singer (who had reportedly previously posted a fair bit of politically right-wing content on internal forums -- those were all deleted when the "no politics at work" policy was rolled out) repeatedly asserted that white supremacy/privilege did not exist (he then resigned).

In the aftermath, DHH dug through old chat logs to find a time in the past when one of the people complaining about the list participated in a discussion about same without complaint, and posted it in a way that was visible to everyone saying that their prior participation meant that their current complaint was invalid.

Then they rolled out the no-politics-at-work policy in this post dated April 26 2021 -- I would encourage anyone interested in the specifics to read through the various versions and edits of this post made in the week following, all without noting that it was being actively changed: https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5

Why would we think that intelligence would increase in response to universality, rather than in response to resource constraints?

I wonder if those would be useful in identifying the potential contents of specific Marion Stokes tapes (my understanding is that they're sorted, but are only labeled with channel and date/time and are being archived slowly): https://libwww.freelibrary.org/blog/post/5393

Not of companies. Of the people who choose to work for them (or, rather, choose not to stop working for them after they build these "features").

In the spirit of HN, I guess I'll ask -- what did you think the point of the story was?

Long story short, the sword was forged during the First Age by the famed Dwarven-smith Telchar of Nogrod -- later wielded by Elendil and shattered in the Battle of Dagorlad. Once this kid's dad gets around to reforging it, it will be known as Andúril.

These jobs do not attract the best software engineers.

Copy at IA: https://web.archive.org/web/20231121210833/https://gist.gith...

Digest mirror: https://static.space/sha2-256:a53e64b47b45972c3086e0300a8bb0...

Offhand, an understanding of the assembly and internal mechanics of a product from having built it would make me feel like I would be be more likely to be able to fix it if required.

So that's a no, you have no examples. Got it.

jgc knew about it in mid-2018, at least, since I was still involved with P0 at that point and spoke with him about it. I guess he forgot.

The devil has enough advocates. Don't feel the need to throw your hat into the ring.

If one side is advocating genocide and you want to mute your criticism of politics (so that you can make money, to be clear), that's a choice available to you, but it's neither ethical nor respectable.

> How am I supposed to work?

Whatever happened to the man pages, y'know.

Audre Lorde's quote is relevant here:

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For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

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The reason these tools are used by those who use them is because they exploit existing imbalances and biases -- attempting to use the same techniques angled disfavorably against that bias will not be effective.

> I also don't think this is an example of Microsoft taking a side; rather I read it as them refusing to bat, which seems fine.

You can't be neutral on a moving train, as they say.

Wow, what a great way to kill yourself and/or your family. Thanks for the tip!

Amazon doesn't even give their drivers time to piss, they're not going to wait for signatures.

There is -- it's using words other than those, which is both easy and considerate.

Good story. What does it have to do with the linked article, which is about how women and people of color disproportionately receive personality-based feedback?

Individuals authorized to speak for companies who state these lies need to personally liable. If someone at the company lied to them to get them to say it, they should be able go after them, like a chain of stolen goods.

Permitting spokespeople to lie is not only toxic, but explicitly removes the equality of information necessary to a functioning free market. It's in everyone's interest to punish it.