HN user
I’m not American, nor do I own a timeshare, but weren’t timeshares scams in and of themselves? I remember reading about them about 15~20 years ago.
Targeting victims of previous scams is common in crypto and MLM circles. The trick is almost always promising them an out of their previous losses with a new venture and this venture is sold to them on the basis of them being ‘experienced’ or ‘knowledgeable’ about the previous venture.
I’d say it’s not enough to satisfy early investors, who probably want a 10~50x return before IPO. They could definitely go public if they wanted to, and do ‘well’.
I’m extrapolating but this would hardly be “misrepresenting” his position.
I also disagree with his take that the Kernel could be replicated in Rust by 6 motivated volunteers in 4 or 5 years. That could be said of many projects, you could probably reproduce AAA entertainment software with such a team in such a span of time, but the trick is getting these people to stay on track, fed, and satisfied for that time. Who's going to pay for their rent/mortgages? Are they just not going to work for the duration?
It's naive grandstanding in the best of cases, and malicious proselytizing in the worst.
We'll see Torment Inc. with a $4T valuation before Q2 2028.
Mark Andressen will be in the picture somehow, I just feel it.
I’m waiting on Panasonic (Panasonic, was it?) to act on their trademark to have interactive ads on their TVs. You have to yell a product name or marketing keyword (McDonalds! PlayStation!) out loud if you want the ad to stop. It stays if you can’t or don’t yell :)
Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist.
Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
It'd help build a case if they took measurements of noise around the property. I'm not saying it isn't true or anything like it but 'loud noise' can mean a multitude of things. I'd say my downstairs neighbors have jet engines in their house but sometimes it's just a vacuum cleaner and I'm a bit miffed that day. If they'd said that a sound level meter reported +80db at 500m or 1km away, that'd give readers and potential visitors a real measure of the problem and it's consequences.
I'd have a nephew or younger sibling with some take on his hands to make measurements around it and make a graph with the sound levels at various radii and times of day, that'd build you a strong case for the factory being hazardous to health - and hopefully give you ammo for the upcoming legal trouble there'll be over there.
You must have heard it already but you won’t turn into Arnold by doing bodyweight squats 3 days a week for a year. It will, however, shape your body and rearrange fat deposits into more conventionally attractive positions and I don’t think there’s anyone around saying that’s not attractive.
Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare?
Some of them live in such an environment already. I don't know if it's a hallucination or not, but judging from what I've read here over the years a lot of tech people seem to live in the most cutthroat of environments and see everyone as competition to be eliminated or obstacles to be cleared. Some of them live in an environment where you can rely only on yourself, requesting help is seen as weak victim-like behavior, but giving out for free is worse - detrimental because that other person might see what you're doing and take credit for or steal your work; some say helping another with your skills/time and not charging money is peak cuck behavior, and some of the more organized (I'd like to say 'coeficient-driven') members of our community really believe that money is the greatest measurement tool ever invented and we should measure everything with it, including a person's worth.
That being said, generalizing is bad and there really are some truly golden individuals here who have done humanity a net benefit while charging nothing for their work. Like Fabien Sanglard, for example (you likely will never read this but I take my hat off to you and I hope if you get the chance, you should clone yourself in the future - humanity could use at least 10 of you).
I'd find quotes for all of these but I don't think I need them, you've seen these messages if you read the HN comments enough.
Edit: In the 10 or so minutes I took to write my comment, yours went from all black to almost unreadable. It shows better than any treatise would on the opinion HN denizens have on 'free' or 'equal' anything.
Hi! Jorge Drexler is not Venezuelan but from Uruguay [1].
I should know, I'm from there as well and he is one of our few cultural exports aside from Football.
I’m a grown man and I quickly fell into a flowchart mindset when I started, where I checked if a raider: A) Had skills I needed and an appropriate personality, and B) was healthy. That decided if he was scrapped for parts, sold wholesale or recruited. There were counted instances where NPCs didn’t end up in the meat grinder, as viable members of society were few and far between, and they had to be lucky enough to be incapacitated instead of dying in a kill box.
It took a conscious effort not to do this kind of morbid activities. I found late into my Rimworld experience that healing and releasing prisoners nets you good relations with other factions. After releasing 5 or so of them with a full belly and no injuries the tribes and cities around you decide “Hey, you’re alright, mister, we won’t raid you anymore”. Except for pirates, space pirates will never like you. So they either become chicken feed, an involuntary organ donor or a couch, maybe all three.
Time and effort and resources put into helping people that came specifically to kill you doesn’t happen spontaneously and I doubt a kid would favor that style of play. I wouldn’t want my son to tell me stories of how he turns people into a log or how his cyber super soldier can level 100s of tribesmen with a minigun by himself.
I’d rather introduce him to other war crime sims like Factorio where humans aren’t the subject of his ire.
I don’t know. It can get pretty dark really quickly and I’m not sure I’d give my kid that kinda game.
If he finds out drug trade, organ harvesting and slave trading are the easiest/most efficient methods of making money, and he will, you might expose him to something a sub-12 year old may not be ready to process yet.
That being said, I love Rimworld and have 1200 hours put into it. It really is the ‘forever game’.
Well, to steelman the ‘overpopulation on Mars’ argument a bit, feeding 4 colonists and feeding 8 is a 100% increase in food expenditure, which may or may not be possible over there. It might be courtains for a few of them if it comes to that.
That’s a good example but I think you’re describing another market condition called a captive market, not FOMO. In FOMO, buyers have no real risk in not buying, it’s artifice and theatrics that drive a sale. Your example is a market in which mission critical assets are sold by few and those few control all aspects of the sale. In your scenario, you’re less a mark for a salesman and more of a hostage.
Not exactly related to disabled people, but a though crossed my mind on how cluttered F1 pilot wheels are with buttons, I imagined some F1 Engineer already thinking on how feature dense these pads can get and how to integrate them into races.
Not related, I know.
Wow, first time I hear about it, this is an eye opening experience.
I will think twice now before saying “why couldn’t they just use USB for this?”
He reminds me of David Foster Wallace for some reason. In that sense that his writing is long-winded but full of texture and would easily be drivel if it were handled by a lesser writer.
I was familiar with his YouTube work but not his writings. Thanks for introducing me to him.
I find your site and sales pitch interesting but honestly, I can't help but feel like a schmuck for giving you 20 USD for this. It feels akin to giving money to Tai Lopez or some other guru selling a pipe dream.
No offense to you, I want to like what you're offering, but I can't excuse it. Do you have a PDF of the first chapter or the intro at least? I want to see a bit before I send you 20 bucks.
To the moon!
What versatile tools, those chopsticks, they are like extensions of your fingers. All motions are so intuitive and natural after that initial adaptation period. I have a pair of extra long wooden ones, I read they were made for cooking, they are great. Instead of having a spatula, tongs, forks and various spoons, all made with a specific motion and purpose in mind - I can just use the chopsticks.
It's so nice.
That's fine, using those tools is your prerogative and I won't deny it or besmirch you because of it. That being said, going to a project such as Gentoo's - defined by its ideals of Free/Libre software and its commitment to users of Free/Libre software - and intentionally go against the grain by using AI is what I protested against, as do the other contributors and council members.
Using AI, such as ChatGPT and Claude and such, in contributions to Free/Libre software, is not practically wrong, it's ideologically wrong. It is so, in my opinion, because the AI was produced by a company that did not ask anyone for permission when incorporating training materials (applies to all commercial AI products of today), it did not respect the liberties of its contributors nor its rights to ownership of their work (applies to all commercial AI products of today), and now asks of you to foot the bill for whatever slop it produces (applies to most commercial AI products of today, some are still free to use).
You can use your tools if you like them, that's fine, I'm not your boss. But on that last point, a large majority of users I've encountered, in this thread even, seem to agree that all AI-produced works need retouching (big or small retouching, though most often big) in order to be usable in any serious endeavor. Midjourney users need to touch up the fingers and the landscapes and look for artifacts of all kinds. Copilot users need to rewrite whole algorithms sometimes because of plagiarism and outright erroneous calculations (unless you don't care). ChatGPT needs to be fact-checked if you ask it to write anything significant.
I ask you this, if you have to oversee everything it produces, costs money, and is generally agreed to produce low-quality work, why not hire a junior employee instead? Freshers, as our fellows in India would call them. Lord knows we need more of them.
I agree with the use of such tools in our personal lives, as liability is not as big a problem and the stakes are lower generally.
I only object to the use of AI in places where I have to put my signature and will be held liable for whatever output the AI decides to give me.
Like that Lawyer that made a whole deposition with AI and got laughed out of the room, he could’ve been held liable for court fees of the other party in any other country, and lawyers aren’t cheap! I don’t imagine his employers were very happy.
I see many saying that contributors will continue using AI/ML tools clandestinely, but I’d counter that only a malicious actor would act in this manner.
The ban touches on products made specifically for Gentoo, a distribution made entirely with Free/Libre software, made (mostly) by volunteers. Why would any of these volunteers, who chose to develop for the Gentoo distribution specifically - presumably because of their commitment to Free/Libre software and its community - go along with using AI tools that: A) Were trained on the work of thousands of developers without their consent and without regard for the outcomes of said training; and B) go against the wishes of the project maintainers and by extension the community, willingly choosing to go against the mission of the distribution and its tenets of Free/Libre software?
It sounds to me that people would do this either unknowingly, by not knowing this particular piece of news, or maliciously, making a choice to say “I will do what I will do and if you don’t like it I’ll take my things and go elsewhere”. I don’t accept that any adult, let alone a professional developer would grin in the darkness of their room and say to themselves “I bet you I can sneak AI code into the Gentoo project in less than a week”. What’s the gain? Who would they be trying to impress? Let’s not even open the big vault of problems of security that an AI coder would bring. What if your mundane calculator app gets an integral solving algorithm that is the same, down to the letter, as the one used in a Microsoft product? That’s grounds for a lawsuit, if MS cared to look for it.
The former case may prompt a reconsideration from the board - If key personnel drives the hard bargain, the potential loss of significant tribal knowledge may outweigh the purity of such a blanket ban on AI. The latter case surely will bring about some though, but of staying the ship and making the ban even more stringent.
On a personal note, I use no AI products, maybe I picked them up too early but I don’t like what they produce. If I need complex structures made, I am 100% more comfortable designing them myself, as I have enough problems trying to read my own code, let alone a synthetic brain’s. If I need long, repetitive code made, I’ve had a long time to practice with VIM/Python/Bash and can reproduce hundreds of lines with tiny differences in minutes. AI Evangelists may think they found the Ark but to me, all they found was a briefcase with money in it.
TIL the PlayStation 3 is used (on a grid/cluster of 16) as a viable alternative to Supercomputers by Physics researchers, this grid calculates how black holes collapse (!). I assume this is a cost-cutting measure by the researchers, and it makes me think how much more expensive a ‘supercomputer’ is and why, if it can be suitably replaced by the console with no games.
Not even that, being a tip-enabled position is satisfactory to reduce the minimum to 2.63, so just slap a tip jar somewhere no one can reach (but still see) and call it a day.
That's one, the other starts with a 'T' and ends with 'CS'.
I know of two multinational conglomerates (one Indian, the other Argentinian) that requires all newcomers to post a GlassDoor review and a LinkedIn post praising the company, the onboarding gifts, and such things. Both are absolute hell to work for unless you're upper management, according to acquaintances that have been there and climbed outside the bog of low-level positions.
It's not a lot, but it's weird it happened twice.
Make it 4 and have a 1st gen i3 and we got a plan. Most of my family has old Toshiba Satellite laptops from the early 2010s that they don’t throw away because they cost a grand when they bought it.
My parents have a General Electric fridge from the 1970s!
Still works like a charm but the latch broke sometime in the 90s, so we have a pulpo to hold it closed.
It will outlive me, I’m sure of it.