nathanlied

I can live with the tears of Google and Elon, frankly.

The adtech industry has, time and again, proven they cannot self-regulate to any decent capacity. At this point, the only reasonable course of action is to shackle them down with such heavy legislative burdens they're rendered de facto extinct.

I will not mourn their loss.

China is being very careful to provide enough support not to be seen as abandoning their trading partners/allies, while keeping the support at a low enough level to not get entangled in conflict or create expectations for future conflicts. They want to be able to paint this as "just business", in spite of any rhetoric they may publicly have. In some cases they'll help more in covert ways (Russia), while others they'll do the bare minimum (Venezuela).

So yes, China did give (note: sell) Iran some hardware, but it's not the most cutting edge tech China has, and it's not in sufficient quantity to make much of a difference.

The US is still ahead of China in a lot of military tech, even if the gap keeps getting narrower.

Some laptops had them, and came with IR remotes. Some of the marketing was around using those laptops as "media centres", and you could control them from the sofa while it was plugged into a TV.

Football is extremely popular, and football clubs (and their owners) are quite influential (socially and politically). But it's a little bigger than that.

EU is pushing for measures against live-event piracy[1], because they frame this as a systemic threat to cultural/economic systems, giving national regulators broad cover to act aggressively.

While football is quite huge in Europe at large, the impact to GDP of these broadcasting rights is sub-1%; however, lobbyists have a disproportionate impact: you have the leagues themselves (LaLiga and Serie A for Spain and Italy respectively), you have the football clubs, and you've got broadcasters. Combined, they swing quite high, even if the actual capital in play is much lower than the total they represent.

Add to this politicians who can frame these measures as "protecting our culture", get kickbacks in the form of free tickets to high profile games, see rapid action because blocks are immediately felt and very visible, and incentives for increased funding from regulatory agencies because "we need the budget to create the systems to coordinate this", and you can see how the whole system can push this way, even if it is a largely blunt instrument with massive collateral damage.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=intcom%3...

Thank you for your openness here - and yes, it would be nice to see this kind of reasoning in the changelog, even if it's tucked a little out of the way! Those of us who care will read it.

Also very welcome is to separate it into a small blogpost providing details, if the situation warrants a longer, more detailed format.

Your comment highlights some tensions in deterrence theory, but it also oversimplifies over a few things.

If you notice, most countries with nuclear weapons also have published and publicized nuclear use policies. These documents usually highlight lines and conditions under which they will consider the use of nuclear weapons. This is by design. Ambiguity in nuclear policy invites miscalculation. Of course, you don't want complete certainty, lest you risk your enemy push right up to your line and no further; you want your lines defined, but a little blurry, so that the enemy is afraid to approach, much less cross. This is called strategic ambiguity. This is why Russia has been criticized a lot by policy experts for their repeated nuclear saber-rattling. They're making the line too blurry, and so Ukraine and their allies risk crossing that line accidentally, triggering something nobody truly wants to trigger.

In the case of a nuclear-armed Ukraine, given Russia's tendency to like to take over neighboring countries, they could include "threats to territorial integrity" as a threshold for going nuclear. They could also be a little more 'reasonable' and include "existential threat to the state" - which the initial 2022 invasion very much would fit.

What this looks like in practice is that Russia, in their calculations, would factor in the risk of triggering a nuclear response if they tried to take Ukrainian territory. Now, they may believe, as you seem to, that Ukraine would not risk the annihilation of its people over Crimea/Donbas. At which point, Russia would invade, and then Ukraine would have to decide. If Ukraine does not escalate, then they will lose deterrence and credibility for any future conflicts, assuming they survive as a state. If Ukraine does escalate, announces to Russia they will launch a nuclear attack to establish deterrence (reducing ambiguity that this is a full nuclear exchange), and then launches a single low-yield nuke at Russian invading troops, they place the ball back in Russia's court: Ukraine is clearly willing to employ nukes in this war - do you believe they won't escalate further, or do you believe they will launch their full arsenal if you continue?

This is essentially a simplified version of deterrence theory. The idea is to give the other side all possible opportunities to de-escalate and prevent a full nuclear exchange. If you do not back up your policy with actual teeth - by using nukes when you said you would - you're signalling something very dangerous.

This is also why nuclear-armed states do not tend to rely solely on their nuclear deterrence. They want a solid layer of conventional capabilities before they have to resort to their proverbial nuclear button. A strong conventional force keeps conflicts below the nuclear threshold, where deterrence theory tends to get very dangerous, very fast.

As someone who suffered from deep depression, but never alcoholism - the way alcoholism is described by alcoholics always rings true with how I experience (and hear described by others) depression. I am no longer suffering from depression actively; the symptoms of it are essentially gone. But there's life events, certain situations, certain moments of deeper vulnerability, that feel like I might slip back into it.

Surprisingly enough, although there seem to be parallels with how people experience 'life after' both things, I find it curious that alcoholics I talk to often use the "caged animal" metaphor, whereas depressives tend to describe it more as walking "a tight rope" or "at the edge of an abyss" metaphor.

There was a lot of inter-community conflict in the years (decades) preceding the formation of Israel, so it wasn't exactly peaceful. That there were some groups (on both sides, though the Jewish ones were far more effective, well-trained, and well-funded) that exploited those conflicts for escalation does not deny that the conflict already existed.

I would also argue that imposing the jizya/dhimmi status, creating "second class citizen status" for non-Muslims was, in and of itself, a form of Muslim-supremacist society in Palestine before Israel existed. Either convert to being a Muslim, or be stuck as a second-class citizen.

When Iran directly, materially, and openly, supports groups or organizations that have as an overt stated goal to destroy Israel, and actively work towards it (both with indiscriminate attacks against civilians, and building infrastructure for future invasions/attacks), I don't think the war is necessarily 'unprovoked'.

We may say that it was unproductive, badly conducted, or a lot of other things, but saying it was unprovoked is like saying that Ukraine has no reasons to attack Iran and/or Belarus. They do have those reasons, because both of those countries directly and materially support their attackers. It just might not be productive to do so (and indeed, Ukraine seems to believe it isn't).

I'm by no means defending throwing the baby out with the bathwater - which is what's happening when someone abandons a less-aligned company for a completely unaligned one - but I have a somewhat different perspective on what, exactly, ticks these people off so much with Framework but not Dell, even though Dell is ostensibly worse (from their perspective), and it's not all that unreasonable emotionally, but it leads to bad outcomes, and it is very much not rational.

For them, it's a problem of (perceived) hypocrisy. You see, Dell never claimed to be good. Nor did HP. They're big corporations, they've got contracts with the military, IDF, what have you. Their appeal, as it were, is the product/service itself. Their only ideal is the Capital, and they never pretended otherwise.

In comes Framework; claiming to be sustainable, different from the others, caring about society/the world/etc., instead of just in it for the Capital, like all the others - regardless of whether they really claimed this or not, it is how they're perceived by these people - and then they go and "do something like that", so they go back to Dell/HP, because at least those didn't lie about who they were. This is exactly what happens with Mozilla vs Google/Microsoft.

This is very much a reflection of a fair few Leftist political spaces. Two people may agree on pretty much everything in how a society should be ran, but one of them believes that private property is inherently theft, and another one would like to maintain private property. That singular difference, one that could be set aside until all other goals are achieved - if ever - will cause endless debate, drama, and ultimately a schism which will leave both sides weaker.

This has been my experience, effectively.

Sometimes I don't care for things to be done in a very specific way. For those cases, LLMs are acceptable-to-good. Example: I had a networked device that exposes a proprietary protocol on a specific port. I needed a simple UI tool to control it; think toggles/labels/timed switches. With a couple of iterations, the LLM produced something good enough for my purposes, even if it wasn't particularly doted with the best UX practices.

Other times, I very much care for things to be done in a very specific way. Sometimes due to regulatory constraints, others because of visual/code consistency, or some other reasons. In those cases, getting the AI to produce what I need specifically feels like an exercise in herding incredibly stubborn cats. It will get done faster (and better) if I do it myself.

Just the UK? Not, say, Iran? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._White_(U.S._veteran...

Or maybe China, for a US citizen who posted while on US soil, in a US website? https://www.reuters.com/world/exclusive-american-barred-leav...

Seems a little inconsistent, this delivery of Democracy.

There are Jewish communities within Iran, yes. But peacefully?

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/2025-06-27/ty-... (archive: https://archive.is/0qEg9)

One could blame this crackdown on Israel, sure. But that absolves the countries perpetuating persecution of Jews from their own share of responsibility in it. After all, when the American Government interned all those Japanese-Americans - did we blame Japan for it, or did we rightfully blame the American government?

I do not seek to defend Israel's actions against the Palestinian people, but to say that the Jews live "peacefully and with dignity" in places where they often are scapegoated, persecuted, and killed out of hand is not the way. Look at what happened to the Jewish populations of the region between the 40s and now, and you will see a grim picture of persecution, killings, and exodus.

Frankly? I think this is a whole mix of things. There isn't a "real" reason, there's a smorgasbord of them.

Why do "FAANG"s RTO? Because they're massive people-movers, and cities that host them likely hold C-level meetings to pressure RTO so that people spend more money. More on transport, more on food, more on coffee, more consumption = more taxes = more movement = growing value to office spaces = win for the cities. Not to mention that managers at these corporations are pretty wealthy themselves, and likely hold investments that would depreciate were WFH to continue in any great scale.

Why do smaller companies RTO? Because what works for FAANGs surely works for them, too. Literally. I've seen multiple managers push for RTO because the big tech leaders are doing it. Add that a certain 'magical' belief that RTO means more productivity and an enriching 'office culture' where new profitable ideas brew - they're all only human, after all, and are as prone to magical thinking without any concrete evidence as we all are - and you've got perfectly good reasons. And mostly irrational from a business PoV.

Is this the case for literally everyone pushing for RTO? Of course not, I'm sure there are legitimate reasons there, but most of the justifications I've heard, as a huge advocate for WFH who always seeks to understand pro-RTO management, have little basis on evidence that it is something good for the business.

This is already the expectation from our leaders. It is the belief of a good % of EU leaders that, if Russia were to push into Poland and the Baltic states, and Article 5 was invoked, the US would not respond. Or at least not without some Versailles Treaty-level extortion, as they're trying to do with Ukraine.

Could we not - for the sake of argument here - surmise that, since these AIs need prompts, and usually a few rounds of refinement, and then a selection for uploading to (in this case) YouTube, that the -human- in charge of prompting/refinement/uploading has a point of view, an opinion, an aesthetic preference, emotions?

After all, there are artists that collate "samples" from other artists and produce music from all those different samples. They did not play any instrument, they merely arranged and modified these samples into a product that they presumably find pleasing.

I predict we’ll see other vendors removing similar bonehead “features” very very quietly over the next few months.

If indeed this happens, I'd hail this event as a victory overall; but industry experience tells me that most of those companies will say "it'd never happen with us, we're a lot more careful", and keep doing what they're doing.

the EU government, as well as our own, wants to eliminate encryption, VPNs or add back doors into systems to some degree.

This is a continuous concern - some sectors of the EU indeed want to do that. So far, they've been mostly unsuccessful in getting their agenda through, either because other politicians have more influence, or due to listening to public protest/complaints. Still, that's no different than other healthy democracies - the people must vote, both in national elections (EU heads of state propose the European Commission's president to the Parliament), and European elections (who elect said Parliament) in order to keep reasonable people at the helm as much as possible.

I believe "code" here is being used in the sense that you retrieve YouTube (the website - made of code) with the intent of watching X video. But you don't want some parts of YouTube's code (the bits that display ads) to run on your machine.

One could argue that you should, indeed, have the right to block whatever parts of YouTube's 'code' from running on your machine. Currently, this is the case.

It is an unfortunate reality of how the Internet is built.

There's quite a few people like you, that are fine with self-hosted analytics, either because you believe the principles of the websites you visit, or because you've done so-called "good" analytics, and so disable that kind of blocking, hoping your trust won't be abused.

Problem is, some of us don't believe those principles hold, and/or have seen people doing vacuum-style analytics. I've listened to conversations of otherwise well-intentioned devs who are otherwise anti-ads and anti-unnecessary data collection ask for more data to be collected in analytics because "we might need it". Leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. So I block it all - what I can, of course. If they find ways around it that I can't block, at least I've done my best.

When was it not? Telemetry - the act of collecting logs/"metrics" and reporting them back to a remote (tele) station - how could this not be considered telemetry?

You should vote to join the EU, maybe it'll work!

I'm not saying we should discount Putin's viewpoint and others like him, it is after all one of the very few tools we've got to analyse what he'll do. But just because we acknowledge Putin's viewpoint doesn't mean we agree with him, or that we should allow him to act unchallenged. It is his viewpoint that Ukraine is not a real nation without Russia, and thus has no right to making their own choices for their own country. It is our (including Ukraine's) viewpoint that Ukraine is an independent and sovereign nation with the right to enter economic and military alliances if it so desires. And what's happening in Ukraine at the moment is the result of the clash of those viewpoints. Ukrainians are dying for their nation, and the West is assisting Ukraine while hoping Putin isn't too far gone to just press the button.

Putin said that Russia does not need a world if Russia is not in it. The West is saying they're not okay with a militaristic expansionist nuclear-threatening Russia in the world. I tend to agree with the West's viewpoint, even knowing what may ultimately come from it.

But couldn’t you argue the same thing is happening to Ukraine under a US sphere of influence? Isn’t that bad too?

I fully agree with you - NATO -is- the US Sphere of Influence made manifest. The difference (in my view, anyway) is that the US is a better master than Russia or China, at least at this moment in time. The US tries to keep appearances at least by treating its partners as, well, partners. And the NATO military officials do believe we're all peers, at least all the ones I've had personal dealings with. Russia does no such thing (see Belarus).

But an even bigger difference, and the most important one, is this: Ukraine seems to want the EU and NATO. Sure, there's the oft-used argument that Euromaidan had US hand in it, but the US does not by itself mobilize nearly one million people (by Russian sources - so they'd have reason to diminish those numbers). Besides, Ukraine has been moving towards the EU as a country (even if not accompanied by Russian-aligned politicians) for years before Euromaidan. There's the more realistic complication that Eastern Ukraine is far more Euro and NATO skeptical than Western Ukraine. But those are internal Ukrainian problems, and not something neither the US, the EU, nor the Russian Federation should meddle in except for calling for peace, negotiations, and compromise.

The problem there is that you (and Putin) are viewing NATO's expansion as a curtailing of "Russia's sovereignty". Doing this probably means you take the view that the Spheres of Influence concept was correct: big blocs (Russia, China, US, EU) have an area of political/military/ideological influence that extends past their physical borders, and any other country exerting influence over the countries within those boundaries is de-facto threatening them, even if this influence is by and large the will of the people living in those regions.

The problem with this view is that you are completely alienating the sovereignty of countries within those buffer regions. As an example, take the Baltics: they were under Soviet influence (and actual control, at some points), fought it off, and never felt safe in their independence, because they were within Russia's sphere of influence, even if they weren't within Russia's borders. Within these people's minds, they weren't truly sovereign - the actions of their governments had to appease Russia, or otherwise risk military conflict with a major power, which they would very likely lose, losing what little sovereignty they had. You can certainly see why this would be undesirable for these buffer regions, I hope?

NATO (and later, to a lesser extent militarily but a larger extent economically and culturally, the EU) gave these countries a way out, a hope to get out of the "Russkiy Mir" - Russian World. While Russia was weakened and unwilling to engage in military conflict, they joined NATO, which meant that they no longer needed to pay any mind to Russian influence and sensibilities: if Russia wanted them back, they'd have a fighting chance, instead of being rolled over.

Or maybe the AI is sufficient to act as a filter, but insufficient to surpass it itself. It stagnates.

After all, an AI that can destroy a civilization isn't necessarily "intelligent" in the same way humans are. Or even capable of self-improvement. It could be sophisticated enough to (accidentally?) destroy its creators, but no more than that, and without evolutionary pressure, it may let itself die.

Or us Portuguese - up until 1974 we had PIDE (translated: International and State Defense Police); so within living memory of many in power today. They did all the things any "good" oppressive police force of a semi-fascist to fully-fascist state does: receive anonymous complaints from conspirators, arrest people and torture them for reasons ranging from the political ("being a communist") to the moral ("being homosexual"), and generally make sure everyone's lives are too miserable and filled with fear to dream of overthrowing the powers-that-be.

Our concern with privacy is so prevalent that fairly recently the collection (and subsequent usage) of metadata by police was deemed unconstitutional[1]. This was met with a lot of complaints by investigators, and while there's some sectors pushing for a constitutional revision, this seems unlikely at the moment, but not entirely off the table.

[1] https://verfassungsblog.de/how-the-data-retention-legislatio...

While that's true, and I feel you do well in calling it out, I also think it's because in my anecdotal experience HN is mostly pro-WFH.

When looking at the wider pool of people commenting on this issue outside HN, I see antagonism on both sides. I've seen pro-WFH people being called lazy, entitled, antisocial, uncaring (because they're "killing downtowns"), elitist (because not everyone can WFH, and usually those who can have higher paid jobs), among other litanies of derogatory terms.

The truth is, this is an issue that people feel threatened about; however you look at it, assuming an even split of full-remote, full in-office, and hybrid, and assuming you're only happy with one of those options, you'll find your potential work pool diminished by 2/3rds. That's not a small amount. So people will take it personally and try to fight - some with logic and studies, others with underhanded means - for their preferred choice. Of course, I don't think things will reach those equal proportions anytime soon, if ever. So people who prefer WFH are waging a battle for a small % of overall jobs. You can see how that'd feel threatening - to have gotten something you love, and now seeing your options diminish or outright vanish. It is especially pernicious when cases of people with deep commercial real estate investments clamor for a return-to-the-office with all kinds of negative things to say about those who prefer WFH.

It's always an option, I believe. You must vote, but you're not forced to vote for any candidate.

I presume from showing something they've worked hard to discover and research. Even if their work may be used maliciously, it's better to be out in the open so that our communications systems can be made more robust, than to leave it in the dark to be exploited at a later date for nefarious and/or strategic reasons.

For an example, see the bricking of Viasat's satellite internet terminals in and around Ukraine at the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as part of the greater Russo-Ukrainian war[1]. If someone had discovered that vulnerability before, and been "happy" to present it, perhaps it could have been avoided.

This kind of security research into structures and services that millions of people rely on every day is of utmost importance to keep our society safe from malicious actors.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-us-spy-agency...