jjav

There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.

#1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.

#2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.

Thus any society needs to do the utmost to prevent abuse #2 above all else.

Wait until you hear about California electricity prices...

This is from a recent PG&E bill from my house:

Peak pricing: 0.48575 delivery + 0.14920 generation = $0.635 kWh

It seems to have gone down a bit this year though. These are the numbers from 2024:

Peak pricing: 0.53 + 0.183 = $0.71 kWh

That is surprisingly bad. My substantially larger Ram 3500 dually gets 15mpg even when loaded with 4000lb of cargo in the bed. Towing a trailer I get about 14mpg, unless there is a substantial headwind (since the trailer is much taller than the truck), that is the only scenario where it drops to near 12mpg.

My primary home zfs server is from 2010, running 24x7 since then. It has a 4-way mirror zfs pool for data. Over the years I have replaced two of the four drives, so two are still original from 2010. Everything else on the machine is from 2010.

You can get unlucky and have components fail quickly, but usually if they last, they'll last for a long time.

But trying to run a server from an SD card like in the article, seems silly. False economy, just get a good SSD.

For drive health monitoring there is SMART, but IME while it does monitor drive usage and lifetime, it rarely predicts catastrophic failure since that happens suddenly. Both drives that failed in this system went from healthy (according to SMART) to unresponsive overnight.

For night owls and teenagers, who already have a hard time in society, Daylight Saving Time makes things far worse.

As a lifelong night owl, I can say you have it backwards.

The time used in the summer is ideal, as the sun sets later. I despise the winter time when it is dark at 4pm. It might be light early at dawn but as a night owl I'm asleep then so it is a waste.

The vast majority of the world uses standard time.

This doesn't make any sense, "standard" is just an arbitrary choice.

See India for example, single time zone.

Ultimately the dumbest thing is to change the clocks back and forth. Just pick one, stick with it.

An absured valuation isn't evidence of fraud.

For a public company that is certainly true. The valuation is determined by the market as a whole, so there can be no fraud.

But the fraud is in the profitability claims, such as 1T/yr in just a few years, which are clearly completely fabricated nonsense. No company officer should be allowed to make such claims without being removed from office.

Aramark is profitable and SpaceX is wildly unprofitable

Yes but TSLA will be self-driving in Mars soon and therefore.... profit!

This is shaped like more-or-less every IPO I've seen.

Not even remotely. Many startups IPO with no profit (though not all), but there is nearly always a credible business plan and a semi-rational valuation.

None of this is the case for spcx. They claim their TAM is about the size of the entire GPD of the USA and that they'll soon have 1T/yr in profits. All based on... nothing. The numbers are wildly unrealistic by a multiple never before seen. Oh and full self driving will be here before end of this year, trust them.

We can enact any law we want

And the government is free to ignore all the laws, as witnessed by 2026 in the US.

Revocation should come with full refunds.

If I buy, say, a shovel and the hardware store sends someone to break into my house and steal the shovel back, hopefully they'd get arrested for the crime.

We should not be treating digital purchases any different. If I bought it, I bought it. It's mine forever.

But the oligarchs will never let that happen. So, in practice, always buy either the physical media or at least a DRM-free digital copy in an open format that you can save in your hard drive and play forever just like you can with a physical copy.

If neither of those are available I'd recommend just not buying. Or rent it for a one-off viewing with the full understanding that it is a one-off rental, priced accordingly.

They should I agree, but consumer protection has been decimated in the US. Also the CFPB has effectively been dismantled. All is fair game as long as the oligarchs get a few more millions they don't need.

I'm thinking you missed the "/s"

self-inflicted problem

Self-inflicted would mean the person (or people) suffering from the problem is the same person causing the problem.

But the gazillionaire corrupt politicians aren't really suffering from any affordability problem personally.

They are not gunning down Brits, Germans or Australians.

I don't know their heritage, but both Renee and Alex were very white (not that it should matter) US citizens, savagely murdered by ICE.

So yes, ICE is gunning down pretty much everyone they see.

paying people

If you are not in the US, there can be a lot of surprises in these comparisons.

You might see that you make $X in tech and in Silicon Valley someone makes $3X for same job and that sounds awesome on paper.

But how much is health care coverage, both insurance and out of pocket after insurance? In SV I pay over $20K in insurance and the additional out of pocket depends on what happens but can be $10K-$20K. But if you have some catastrophic health problem, can be in the millions of dollars. Compare this with health expenses outside of the US.

How much is daycare, school and university for the kids? The costs in the US are mind-blowing, vs. either free or cheap in other countries. Here in SV I pay ~$45K/year just for high school, university will probably be a lot more.

Home insurance? If you can even get it, will be outrageous. Car insurance, think 4K-10K year depending on details.

And so on.

Don't compare gross salary, compare net leftover salary after ALL required expenses.

There might be a correlation with mainstreaming, but that's not the root cause. I'm happy to use a mainstream OS if it is awesome.

A full honest answer is too long for a HN comment, could write a long article about it but won't do that.

I need an OS which is fully comprehensible and fully configurable to my exact taste and fully diagnosable at all levels. So basically the exact opposite of windows which is a massive blob of obscurity. Mac OS has been great for a couple decades, but the enshittification accelerates. As a tiny example, dtruss doesn't even work on newer Mac OS. That kind of nonsense is unacceptable.

An OS is supposed to be a platform & toolkit to enable me to use and diagnose the computer any way I need. Linux is still that, sure, but enshittification is creeping in. Wayland/systemd/gnome/etc is all movement in the wrong direction.

FreeBSD and OpenBSD are a breath of fresh air.

Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.

Intriguing, thanks, will need to check it out.

God I miss the 2000s.

Exactly! Having to check 27 different places for messages (also add individual sites like linkedin, etc, where people message), it is completely ridiculous.

Just send me email. It's universal, standard, no corporation owns it (thus no corportation can shut me out unlike facebook or all the proprietary solutions).

Why not group emails?

Yes, email is the absolute best for opimal reach. All the proprietary platforms are inherently fragmented and gatekeeped by their corporations. Trying to find a common denominator is hard. Email is standard, not owned by anyone and thus universal.

This boat isn't your regular kayak, it is larger than a great white shark (although certainly not heavier).

Ocean swell height doesn't matter much, the period does.

A 10ft swell on a 30 second period is nothing, a 10ft swell on a 5 second period you're going to have a bad day.

If bankrupcy is allowed some reasonable number of years later (not sure if that is 7 or 10, but some reasonable time) then if your education worked out and you're in a good career path and maybe close to buying a home, etc, declaring bankrupcy would probably hurt more than help.

OTOH if you're still poor after those years and don't care about consequences of bankrupcy then maybe that's fair enough to wipe out the debt since the education clearly didn't provide value.

Do you have kids? Are you telling me that you and the other parent spend (or spent) 100% of your time with your 5 year old?

Yes and yes. Always personal interaction (one of us parents, or babysitter or teachers, or friends). This is probably easier to accomplish here in Silicon Valley because most parents are in tech and thus aware of the evils involved. So none of the kids en elementary school ever had phones or tablets, so no peer pressure to have one.

tinkered with DOS when I was a young kid and learned a lot, which led to my current career

Me too. But the key word is tinker. In those times computers required tinkering and learning if you wanted to accomplish anything with it.

Today they are just passive entertainment and advertising machines.

A subtle reminder how inconsequential our actions are on this planet in the grand, unplanned scheme.

I don't find that to be useful at all.

Yes of course, all the suffering on Earth is nothing but a footnote in 0.000000001 font size as far as the universe is concerned.

But that's irrelevant. We live on Earth, so what happens here is actually 100% of what matters. Everything else is inconsequential.

This is very sad. Just spend the time in person with the 5 year old, no screens, no AI, nothing impersonal. A 5 year old just wants mommy and daddy in person playing with them. No 5 year old (or any age in that neighborhood) should be exposed to screens.

I'm fine with that. The company doesn't have infinite people so as long as someone spends 3 hours generating and I spend 5-15 minutes reviewing, that's fine.

Problem with AI is that generation is so many orders of magnitude faster than reviewing so it's basically infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters.

It is not the government’s job to “take care of” anybody.

That is actually the only legitimate function of government.

Yes. Run away if you can, run far away.