graybeardhacker

I have a friend who handles dispositions of equipment for a very large government contractor. You'd probably be very surprised to see some of what goes through his warehouse. He got rid of two kid's go-karts last year. Government contractors buy some weird stuff for weird reasons.

Looks like you got the Hacker News hug of death. "Oops Something went wrong

The server is under heavy load. Please try again in a moment. "

Everything is irrelevant until it isn't. Then it isn't until it is. If we all do our part, X will become irrelevant.

Came here to say exactly this. Every interaction becomes a lie. I can bullshit with the best of them but doing it every day is not a path to satisfaction for me personally. Trying to do a side hustle at the same time only makes it worse.

I use Claude Code every day and have for as long as it has been available. I use git add -p to ensure I'm only adding what is needed. I review all code changes and make sure I understand every change. I prompt Claude to never change only whitespace. I ask it to be sure to make the minimal changes to fix a bug.

Too many people are treating the tools as a complete replacement for a developer. When you are typing a text to someone and Google changes a word you misspelled to a completely different word and changes the whole meaning of the text message do you shrug and send it anyway? If so, maybe LLMs aren't for you.

Can people read that? I want to do a study to see the cognitive difference between people who can read that and those who can't.

I can't at all.

A stopped clock is right twice a day; a broken one can be wrong forever. Just saying.

AI chooses nuclear war 95% of the time.

https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/world-leader-...

If you unplug a life support system and a person dies did you kill a person or just disable their critical infrastructure?

In Maine there is a lack of public defenders and now must release those who are unable to get a trial in a reasonable time: https://observer-me.com/2025/03/12/news/maine-must-release-p...

I felt the same. But I think the reason is similar to how your fuel economy is absolutely destroyed by sitting still. When you average in a speed of zero the calculation goes haywire.

People in the US are so close to financial disaster that in order to avert disaster the US had to heavily subsidize those out of work. Many people got healthcare and unemployment benefits that would not have been otherwise available. This meant money for zero hours of work. When you average in $1/0 hours it does crazy things to the graph.

The reality is: During Covid the US rapidly adopted similar safety nets to EU countries and, in effect, aligned with their levels of poverty. Once the emergency measures ended we snapped back to our previous, precarious, poverty level.

Just my theory.

alias bones='scotty doctor'

I think this form of delusional psychosis brought on by AI is a more rapid version of the delusions formed in many of the echo chambers of the internet. It's basically a positive feedback loop created by, in this case and AI, but in other cases, people who seek uncontested agreement for their viewpoints.

If a person refuses to acknowledge any information that disagrees with their view and instead actively seeks niche groups that only support their ideas, then they are at risk of this same path of psychosis.

In real life we are forced to reconcile a variety of views that disagree with our own from people who we've come to trust through forced interaction which naturally broadens our understanding of the world.

As long as the cost of an accident is lower than the cost of fixing the system this will continue to happen.

This is one of many examples of why capitalism needs to be kept in check with democratic government oversight. Sometimes the financial incentives are not high enough to warrant changing the system.

Yet another example of this administration taking the side of companies over constituents. Now that the Consumer Protection Bureau has been dismantled, we can only expect more rulings like this.

One could pretty easily argue that free coffee, tea, energy drinks and energy bar snacks are all productivity driven perks.

Deploying nukes and "carefully" are opposite ends of the spectrum.

You just tripled my productivity!

I pay for the Ground News app. It's an aggregator that (somehow) gets me all the articles on a topic, shows me how factual each source is and which way they lean politically. It summarizes the articles so I can ignore the click-bate headline and know whether I want to read more.

I'm honestly not sure why this isn't the standard. It solved all my news problems and fills all my news needs.

I'm honestly not sure what these tiny news sites that have paywalls are thinking. The chances of me paying a monthly fee for news from a single source, let alone a tiny, local, single source, are less than zero.

The mixed use of commas and decimal points in those stock charts is warping my brain.

They want to make sure the "Freedom" consumed only contains the right kind of freedom.

It'll be the the best freedom, the greatest freedom, everyone says so. There will never have been freedom like this in the history of freedom. Everyone will be instructed to acknowledge how free this freedom is, or else.

Because: 1. One person companies are better at giving the wealth to the worker. 2. With thousands of companies the products can be more targeted and each product can serve fewer people and still be profitable

Then companies won't need to spam you to convince you that you need something you don't. Or that their product will help you in ways it can't.

Once person companies will not have a 100 person marketing team trying to inject ads into ever corner of your life.

History shows that mass internment and populous movements against a segment of society never end well for the governments that push these tactics. Unfortunately, the damage to the society is often deep and far reaching before the regimes face the consequences.

I see a lot of people saying "We never lose power, what are you talking about?"

I've lived in several places in New England, some more rural than others. Some places you lose power often, other you don't. Even within the same town. Even if you are not in a rural area. It just so happened where I lived previously, we rarely lost power while friend across town lost it all the time. Many times I loaned them my generator.

I now live in a much more rural place. We lose power more now. Not often, but it happens. Trees fall, cars skid into poles, shit happens. It's good to be prepared. Ver bad things happen to your pipes without heat.

Two major factors I see a impediment to this: 1. Most management doesn't understand it and therefore won't champion it. 2. Those few that do understand it will resist it because it reduces the need for management and process.

This is similar to the Bible being in a dead language only understood by priests.

But how amazing would it be if everything from company policy to product specifications was in a format that could be programmatically accessed and tracked? When/if you needed a document you would access it from an artifactory where it had been generated and versioned automatically?

It may very well be that LLMs will push this idea to the forefront. PDFs and Word Docs suck for AI interaction. As we incorporate LLMs into our businesses it might be a natural progression to move toward databases, LaTex, code and source control for documentation and policy.

"As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes."

Except those with ears and/or eyes.

I find it VERY likely they had a junk policy. This is one of the most important things the ACA did, it defined what could be considered health insurance. Before the ACA, a company could sell you a policy that essentially covered nothing. Usually those junk policies had cleverly worded agreements that hid the fact that nothing was covered (pre-existing conditions, restrictive networks, carve-outs for expensive treatments, etc).

Since the majority of people don't run into those issues, they are blissfully unaware that if/when they have a major medical event they are under-insured.

Once a virologist always a virologist I always say.

If I understand the graph correctly, it looks like there's maybe a three percentage point increase. But given there is a 1 percentage point delta in the pre-ban data, that would seem to indicate there is at least a 1 point variation that must be ignored as irrelevant.

I'm not sure how they generated the error bars but that, to me, would suggest the relevant error could be +/- 1 percentage point. Meaning the delta could be at little as two percentage points.

My intuition says cellphone bans would have a positive impact, but I don't think I'd call this data conclusive. I'd want to see more data from earlier and later.

Also, if these are the same students, then test scores might be reflecting increased maturity. If it's different students of the same age, it could be a shift in some extra-educational factors affecting the younger generation.

Too many unknowns and not enough signal.

I agree with you. In the industry today I feel there there are software engineers and there are programmers. The engineers design, architect, and invent. The programmers do the rote work. Of course it's not black and white, but that's at the extremes of the spectrum.

I'm hoping that AI programming pushes more people toward the engineering side and as it takes over the rote work side. There will be people far to the programmer side that might be put out of a job, but the creative, innovative, inventive engineering positions will persist.