HN user
Worth remembering that many African telcos are not just mobile phone/data providers but also digital wallets (mobile money) - much of the GDP flows through them. Companies like Safaricom are the de facto financial utility of the country, so they are not going anywhere any time soon. That said Starlink is forcing the telcos to innovate and expand footprints. They’ve held very comfortable politically protected monopolies for far too long.
The open secret here is that we have a system that collects billions (~$100 billion annually[1]) in unclaimable taxes while keeping the labor force just vulnerable enough to stay cheap. That said, ICE's actions seem like self sabotage.
Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains.
At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major discoveries.
Thank you for making this whoever you are. There is a wonderful video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FT-oz9aZU4 that visualizes space travel and time dilation in Hail Mary. What I wished I had immediately after watching it was an interactive stellar chart.
The primary issue here is that CEOs and investors are particularly vulnerable to AI psychosis which is then forcibly propagated to the rest of the organization. Understandably, the perceived benefits are almost impossible to ignore, compounded by the FOMO of the AI first/AI native narrative being sold by AI influencers.
This always blows my mind. We are currently breathing in the DNA of the trees, animals, and people around us—and we’re leaving ours behind for them, too. We’re all one big genetic soup.
It seems like the whole world could massively benefit from this much like the other great innovation out of the EU -- the Common Charger Directive (aka USB-C).
I’m running local models with a maxed out M4 but I find local models only useful and reliable for trivial tasks and sensitive items like database optimization work. Local LLMs just don’t come anywhere close to Claude or Codex for heavy work.
Just when you think Egyptology can't get more interesting, it does. No wonder "just a quick search about the Pyramids" turns into a lifelong obsession for many.
I thought Grok in the car was awesome until it went off on a tangent and started praising Elon.
The average price of a new car in the US is now ~$50,000 and the average monthly payment is almost $800. All people want is an affordable car and it is clear that won’t happen any time soon. It isn’t strange at all that prisoners to this system are cheering on the Chinese disruption.
AI Slop or not, these doomer articles have more than a grain of truth and you as a knowledge worker knows “Something is happening”.
Surely what they make from these ads is negligible enough to not warrant the terrible user experience for something users pay for. The ads in Apple News are infuriating.
At 52" I now believe that there is a limit to the size of a monitor. This might have crossed it.
Preaching to the wrong choir. The HN community is reaping massive benefits from generative AI.
Interesting choice of names: "Solar Turbines" - a wholly owned Caterpillar subsidiary that designs and manufactures industrial gas turbines.
That said, it is all pretty impressive.
I had the privilege of working with a great SWE intern this year. Their fresh ideas and strong work ethic made a real impact. Experienced engineers need this kind of energy.
Yes many over-rely on LLMs, but new engineers see possibilities we've stopped noticing and ask the questions we've stopped asking. Experience is invaluable, but it can quietly calcify into 'this is just how things are done.'
I have kids and I like this but as we know, prohibition only makes the drink stronger and the thirst deeper.
This is probably one of those tickets on the backlog that is constantly kicked down the road. Always superseded by a new fire.
Besides being a meme stock, Tesla is also in the enviable position of owning its entire stack - software, hardware, chips, manufacturing etc., unlike Honda that has many critical components built by other manufacturers and not tightly integrated with the software. It is therefore well placed to make much more revenue per vehicle, if only the owner of the company can get out of its way.
For me - hands free operation. I love to use them at my kids games and events. Many times parents are trying to both watch and capture that special moment and fail at both. The LLM has so much potential but hobbled by the fact that it is supported by Llama.
Meta is onto something pretty remarkable. The only problem with their glasses is that they’re built by Meta.
Swift is actually a really good language let down by its official IDE. Slow build times, laggy autocomplete, random crashes etc. I can’t remember Xcode ever being great to use.
What a time to be alive. 3 companies competing for what might be the next trillion dollar business.
- Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much more expensive vehicles which will eat into margins.
- Tesla has the advantage of full vertical integration owns their hardware and cheaper cars but also trying to do this with vision only.
- Zoox has the advantage of building purpose-built autonomous vehicles from the ground up with Amazon's deep pockets behind them, but faces the challenge of manufacturing at scale for a novel vehicle.
There’s a wonderful science fiction book by Ray Nayler about just this - “Where The Axe Is Buried”
I thought the idea of a folding phone was just a cash grab until I saw someone on the plane across the aisle from me interacting with one. It has been a while since I saw someone get so much enjoyment out of a device. The back and forth between folded and unfolded to read messages and watch movies/read a book was mesmerizing. It made me realize that this form factor could actually enhance the user experience in a meaningful way.
This is a pretty big deal. Stripe is already processing billions of transactions. Additionally Stripe already has the relationship with merchants that other L1's lack along with the payment network expertise.
If Stripe’s closed-loop system scales, banks and card networks could lose significant transaction volume, fees and even merchant relationships. Merchants and customers win with lower transaction fees. This marks a very credible and large-scale effort yet to challenge the Visa and Mastercard duopoly.
Obviously not perfect and other questionable projects have stained blockchains reputation but it is a net win, no?
AI investment is headed toward 2% of the US GDP, getting close to the Apollo program and 10 times the manhattan project. Almost 15% of the US stock market is tied up in these investments so most of us have skin in this game whether we like it or not, for better or worse.
With unlimited resources, I’d solve the fundamental bottleneck holding back our species: getting off this single planet and establishing a true space-based civilization - colonizing our solar system.
Along the way we’ll be solving for energy, jobs, resources, environment and existential risk.
This. The meta glasses have so much potential and it is absolutely frustrating as a developer to have no way to make use of it.