Karrot_Kream

FWIW smartphones did massively change the economics of being a photographer. The family photographer used to be a reliable profession and now it's just a side thing that event and wedding photographers do.

Anything that tries to read a "mailbox" on a smartphone is bound to run into difficulties. Smartphones manage to keep battery life high by keeping the modem inactive most of the time. The way to implement any mailbox functionality, i.e. an incoming message that needs attention, is usually done through a centralized push notification endpoint socket. Rather than wasting battery life polling multiple sockets, the OS listens to a single endpoint and farms out pushes that way. Of course to tune this precisely for battery life and for centralization of the platform, both Apple and Android have their own push notification services. Rooted or 3rd party smartphones can change the push notification service.

Any service like Briar that wants to sit atop base smartphones will need to deal with this tension. A fallback is to poll intermittently for new messages, which when tuned correctly can indeed be fairly battery life forward. Of course then your messaging experience is lower bounded by your refresh interval. Modern smartphone OSes also will ruthlessly cut long-running connections in the face of power-save events on device.

In general I think an external radio that you connect your smartphone to via Bluetooth, like Meshcore or Meshtastic, is a better experience overall than simply using a smartphone. Dedicated radios keep smartphone batteries topped up, and having the option to setup an antenna means that if you happen to be in an area where permanent radio setup is plausible, you can lean on good site characteristics, antennas, and filters. It’s hard for a government to ban radios altogether and ISM-ish band devices have a variety of uses in pretty much any developing or developed country (often used in small things like meters or monitors.) And for folks who just some off-grid data capabilities, this approach offers high flexibility without the burden of licensing.

For folks considering going into this, I suggest joining Meshtastic or Amateur Radio communities. I find the further you get from amateur radio or networking communities (mesh* communities have a mix of folks and some can have pretty poor understanding of how radios work), the more the information becomes unreliable and more suffuse with political/social goals than matters like understanding signal propagation or congestion. If you’re in a developed country, Amazon likely has all you need to get started with the Mesh* world of LoRa UHF radios.

There's two things going on here.

On the one hand there's the Bluesky moderation service. By default if you use the official Bluesky apps/bsky.app experience (the Bluesky AppView) you are automatically subscribed to moderation decisions by the official moderation service.

On the other hand, you have user-led behavior. One of them is blocklists. There are large blocklists run by individuals or groups that try to keep track of right leaning accounts that many users subscribe to in order to shut those voices out. As is easily observed, there's lots of conflict as to why a given person ended up on the list. On top of that there's a general practice on the network where users pile onto perceived ideological opponents by hate posting at them, occasionally with death threats. This ends up pushing away most of the right oriented users and continues to enforce ideological rigidity on Blueksy.

The asymmetrical social dynamics of the network are largely what create the ideological bias you observe. From what I can tell the core team's focus has been moving away from Blueksy and more to the ATProto layer itself. My thoughts are that Bluesky itself is probably a lost cause from an ideological melting pot perspective and that you'll need a new ATProto app for that, but this raises the question you asked, why not Mastodon? (The alternative could be to have the core team bring on some celebrities and pay them to post but due to the nature of the existing community I'm not sure that'll go super well.)

? The correlation is trivially demonstrable. You can probably ask an agent to pull the relevant datasets for a state, run a linear regression, and demonstrate this. It's the entire reason traffic crash statistics in the US are normalized per mile.

Everyone is going to dislike this comment because you're cutting across two different polarized groups and comment sections rarely champion the middle ground.

This site has gotten a lot more popular and so it's a lot easier to rise up in karma these days. It's really easy to get lots of upvotes and downvotes in pretty much any of the controversial/political threads on the site because they get a lot of attention, a lot more than the more technical or sedate posts. My guess is the mods don't have the time to look at as many of the comments anymore just because there are so many.

These buildouts have been receiving scrutiny and often refusal across the US for some time now.

Yes but the crux of your reading of my comment is you think I'm trying to downplay the opposition to buildouts. Do you know how much opposition there actually is? Is it geographically concentrated? Is it demographically concentrated?

What I've seen is the usual tech skeptical online publications have made a big deal about this issue, the usual pro tech sources say nothing about it. Anti tech politicians have run photo ops in anti tech publications, and pro tech politicians have done the same. Big newspapers like the NYT have run the occasional article about opposition but have largely left the issue alone.

But none of that stands counter to the reality that there is currently broad community pushback across the US and that it is indeed the associated political processes that determine what is and isn't allowed. The populace is well within its rights to deny the construction of datacenters regardless of if such an outcome is a wise course of action.

Is it broad? Has anyone shown how broad it is? I sure haven't seen a march on DC about it. Before the YIMBY movement organized, this is exactly how housing issues used to be covered on progressive media btw. Protests of 30 people in a community of thousands used to get amplified to galvanize anti-housing support. To some extent this is the job of media, to give editorial voice to sympathetic concerns, but as someone now involved with housing politics I've come to realize that the truth of the scale of opposition to local builds like this can has a lot of incentives around every motivated actor to inflate their support. Community surveys are the only thing I've seen that works and even then advocates will show up to meetings and shout at the opposition claiming that the survey results are rigged.

As far as the "associated political processes" this depends heavily from state to state and county to county. Opponents to UC Berkeley's student housing tried to block housing by claiming humans are noise pollution. This only works because California has CEQA. Residents of Texas could not sue on those grounds.

If you ask me, the fact that we're playing politics to litigate building shows we're lost. We can't leave every piece of infrastructure to the vagaries of the masses. As usual the rich and politically well connected will win and the poor will lose. Building needs to be ministerial.

See this kind of response is why online discussions of the topic become so silly. What is "broad nationwide"? What is "large portion"? How large should a "large portion" be? We have a history of blocking housing because of local opposition, should we use the same model to block datacenters? How much "stake" should they have in the matter? These are all hard questions and I'm not sure a comment section and polarized social media communities are the right place to think about them.

This is a complicated issue. Datacenters don't just depend on energy, they also generate noise, use water, but also generate some jobs and have fewer of the externalities (such as big trucks that load and unload regularly, and less water usage, no chemical usage, etc) that come with the usual light industrial uses. Most of these comments are just ways for people to vent and at best confuse the issue and at worst set them back, IMO at least.

My comment in this chain was glib but it was responding to a comment whose purpose was to vent or express disapproval, so I don't think I brought the conversation down. That didn't stop me from picking up downvotes of course.

The tariffs I understand (even if they really don't make sense in this particular case) but the permitting I do not. Do you have more information or links?

Take a look at [1]. The current admin felt that NEPA reviews were taking too long for utility grade energy projects and put in a cap for NEPA review length that does not apply to wind and solar. The article goes into how long utility scale solar projects can take to go through NEPA.

In rural but populated areas wind is generally installed on someone else's grazing area for a small fee. In truly unpopulated areas (ie desert) access to land isn't usually an issue since there's approximately zero demand for it.

The challenge then is bringing the power to the datacenter, which often involves transmission lines, which goes back to permitting.

[1] https://www.resources.org/archives/delays-to-wind-and-solar-...

I don't recall seeing Columbus as being significant on any US backbone map. More likely they just want to be close to each other. Someone must have started that ball rolling.

AWS us-east-2 (2016) and GCP us-east5 (2022) are both in Ohio. Not 100% sure they're close to an IX but my guess is there's existing infra to route onto.

Building a facility that uses megawatts of energy in an old farm field in the country, and having long lead times to get it installed, isn't really indicative of "deindustrialization" is it?

Sorry I think my message might have gotten a bit conflated. I meant, in the offshoring that happened in the US in the late '90s-early '00s, the US ended up losing industrial demand. Obviously consumer demand increased in the meantime but we've been living on a mostly stagnant energy supply for a long time.

You're right. Of course political approval tends to involve a few more people than a couple dissenting commenters on a ratioed HN comment thread, depending on the regime in question. Pretty sure the entities in question had business licenses as well.

Elon has mentioned this in interviews and the S-2 for SpaceX calls out permitting challenges as a reason for moving to space. Elon being Elon, I don't really believe him but this is what he claims at least.

And what happens when something you politically approve of needs power?

The reason is because permitting and building a natgas generator is the easiest among the energy production methods in the US. Datacenters need to be close-ish to Internet Exchanges to be cost competitive when lighting up network capacity. Solar cells are expensive (Chinese tariffs or domestic production) and permitting is tough. Nuclear is still a permitting and cost nightmare. Wind requires a lot of land. Hydroelectric is considered an environmental dead end after the ecological effects of the Hoover Dam. Geothermal is still unproven. Transmission lines moving power between generation and consumption is a permitting nightmare.

In that world, natural gas just makes the most sense. The US hasn't build generation capacity in any meaningful way in decades. We've deindustrialized over time so it's been relatively okay, until a new form of industry (datacenters) starts putting pressure on the whole thing.

In the past I wrote a version of HN that uses modern CSS rather than tables that populates stuff from the API. There I built a little blocklist of my own that prunes a comment tree the moment it encounters a blocked user (inspired by posts from another HN user, arjie.)

I've been thinking of making a purely algorithmic filter for myself but at that point I might just ditch the fake HN interface and make something. I've been thinking of building atop Mastodon/ActivityPub clients.

As an update to myself, the comments did eventually sort themselves out. I guess the initial "reaction" commenters and voters are just more interested in participating than in SNR. Good opportunity for me to finally start blocklisting users, and I'll probably block some of these large, reactive thread authors.

Okay (I disagree because most privacy policy discussions on HN go in the exact same direction and turn into outrage threads but this is a reasonable disagreement since not all of these discussions do), but model naming of all things? Come on. This is low level reaction slop and it's obvious.

If you have nothing valuable to say, don't say it? Not writing anything is a perfectly valid option.

Seems like Fable is doing a lot better on SWE-Bench-Pro and FrontierCode than GPT-5.5. Given how most folks I talk to and people instead online keep mentioning that GPT-5.5 was better than Opus, I'm curious what the experience now is like.

I think the community on this site these days, much like other comment sections on the web, just read the headline and make a low effort comment. Regression to the mean I guess.

That is 1000x better than griping about the privacy policy, capacity issues, token costs, and how trendy the names are for the new models (???). The bar is on the floor and I just want it at my knees.

Let me spin this a different way: Because there are no notifications, HN users need to frequently come back and check. This is "positive random reinforcement" and is one of the most powerful mechanisms known for creating and maintaining addictive behavior. It's the same principle that slot machines and loot boxes use.

I personally fall victim to this. On days I just browse the site I only refresh a few times a day or maybe just once in the afternoon. If I write a comment I constantly refresh and spend way more time reading the site. It's one of the most negative patterns for me on here.

But don't confuse "great audience" for "better social technology".

I'd go further and say that this framing itself is a bit toxic. Nothing about the interests in this site make the audience "great" simply different and more relevant to you. There's an underlying "the nerds are better than the pleb normies" that suffuses this entire discussion that I find hilarious given how low the average comment accuracy is here for non tech things.

There were many attempts at this time to figure out how to scale forums. The bottleneck on forums and chatrooms was always human moderation. But a forum could only get so many mods and mods eventually burned out because moderation just really sucks. Moreover quality between forums was quite variable. One forum on Beets might be good, but the forums on Fantasy novels was run terribly and full of flamewars. Having a large social site of good quality would be a lot easier to manage than 30 different sites of varying quality.

Gaia Online was famously a large forum with a huge moderation staff, and the sheer amount of effort that went to running Gaia Online was incredible, and despite that it was popularly thought of as being a pretty low quality forum.

Reddit tried the upvote and downvote. HN tried upvotes only. 4chan tried full anonymity (rather than the pseudonymity of forums/usenet.) Facebook tried real names. Tumblr had the reblog (which became quote tweets when Twitter took the feature and is widely thought of now as a fairly controversial feature due to toxicity it can produce.) Twitter tried hashtags for discovery. It was a period of experimenting with how to build social spaces.

I'm going to guess you're young enough that you don't remember when HN first appeared?

FWIW this site has an older demographic and I doubt that's the reason. More likely most people weren't aware of HN until recently. It only started populating in Google search results recently. My guess is most people these days stumble upon HN by seeing a search result, or a Reddit or Twitter comment mentioning HN. A lot of people only got exposed through social media with things like Facebook and Twitter and never socialized on the internet before that.

Agree with you on everything else. It was obvious at the time that HN was part of a wave of social media along with Reddit, 4chan, Digg, Kuro5hin, etc. At that time moderation was seen as a crucial bottleneck on scaling a social site and upvotes were meant to be an innovation that helped scale these sites bigger than the forums and Usenet lists of yore. Turns out that the true revolution in scale didn't come until things like Facebook and Twitter.

My guess is this type of screen addicted user is overrepresented among internet commenters as only a small fraction of the population actually comments on anonymous/pseudonymous forums. Which is why it attracts so much energetic negativity on HN.

Andy Massey writes about this stuff and is generally heavily disliked by the anti-data-center folks

* https://blog.andymasley.com/p/data-center-land-use-issues-ar...

* https://blog.andymasley.com/p/i-might-have-found-the-specifi...

The US has deindustrialized and since the rise of NIMBY politics hasn't built new industry in any scale at all. The first freeway revolts happened in 1959. In the meantime, basically everyone has agreed that industrial growth and manufacturing as an abstract concept is Good (TM) but definitely not in my backyard. For a long time these kinds of things were just being built in neighborhoods where the residents were too poor/politically disconnected to organize, but eventually that too became difficult.

Since automation became big in industrial processes, most industrial development has been labor-poor (few workers) but continues to be land intensive. That means while industry might generate tax revenue, it doesn't have a coalition of labor advocates willing to champion the capacity because not many jobs are created. So we find ourselves in 2026 with an inability to actually build new industrial capacity in any form. The anti-tech crowd is angry at the data centers, but the same exact thing is happening when it comes to permitting new power generation and transmission lines. In fact many of the concerns related to data center power usage could be allayed if we had more power generation but nobody wants power generation in their backyard.

For decades now the US has been dancing around the idea that there is no by-right way to build anything anymore, so building any new large structure becomes a collective action problem that just ends up failing. Even when things get built, costs are massive. This has even affected things that the US is ostensibly really good at making such as highways, as evident in the recent Texas highway expansions ongoing.

There was a minimum level of stability you needed in your life at that time to be able to own a computer and pay the phone bills needed back then (I came later in the mid 90s-00s but it wasn't too much different by then.) Kids needed parents who had that stability, and most of those parents probably kept a decent eye on their kids. Even then, I remember some real characters in the computing scene from when I was a kid.

Now you can have crippling health issues and still post on the internet. In fact, you're probably more inclined to spend time online if interacting with the offline world is so tough. This was much harder from '85-05.

Maybe, maybe not. South Asia has a history of very weak government and I'm not sure it will ever, culturally, be able to stomach something stronger. From a Western perspective having experienced authoritarian states, it's understandable to be more hesitant but South Asia has just historically had very few rulers that rule through heavy-handed edict.

If you want server side, as veqq says there's joy which implements its own lightweight http server. If you want a client, it's quite trivial to use the Janet C API to wrap libcurl or any other HTTP client. If you're open to LLM development have the LLM write the wrappers and write your actual logic in Janet.