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This was also my first instinct. Wikipedia says the US Baseball Hall of Fame has 351 inductees currently, for a sport that has existed in professional form since 1876. That feels like a more appropriate rate for this kind of enshrinement. Over 3000 in the span of less than 20 years is far too fast. The entire English language literary canon doesn't have that many entries.

The conclusions aren't any different (it's one of the few thing that helps strength, poses no danger to your hair, and almost certainly does nothing for cognition), but the articles at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/?s=creatine are far more comprehensive, including the famous extremely long podcast episodes they used to do.

The one thing this misses is many supplements are tainted, which skews the popular perception of both upsides and risks. This was especially true in the US prior to 2005 or so when prohormones were still legal over the counter. Anything branded that wasn't just pure creatine was extremely likely to actually be a low-dose oral steroid, which really can make you lose hair and will increase strength quite a bit more than any dietary supplement.

This also misses caffeine as the other a-tier supplement that consistently shows strength increases in RCTs, though of course, caffeine is more frought than creatine because you build tolerance and it can disturb sleep.

This reminds me of a discussion a few months back from a BSD maintainer who had done a lot of volunteer work for AWS over the years. I think he might have even been the person who alerted them to the insecurity of IMDSv1. There was a sense that AWS might have had great talented developers at the time, but they clearly didn't really understand the domain of running a hypervisor service exposed to the public. This feels like a similar situation, where I'm sure they "test" what they know to test, in the way they know, but compared to a bank, well, it wouldn't surprise me the least if no one at AWS ever even thought to ask banks how they handle things like this. Instead of testing that a process works the way you specified it, you need to make sure you even have the right specification in the first place by consulting with prior art and ensuring whatever you translate into software reflects the legal reality of the process you're trying to encode.

There's a similar thing with physical processes. My wife works in geointelligence ground processing and encountered this when her system was expanded to support SAR collections instead of just visual spectrum. Software that passed all of its internal tests was passing nonsense collection parameters because the developers didn't understand the difference between energy collected to a sensor cell reflected from the sun versus energy reflected from your own active scan. The capabilities and limitations aren't the same. You can perform the same processing. The bits on disk won't care. But if the process you encode doesn't accurately correspond to the physics of reality, you're producing nonsense. Memory-safe, syntactically-valid nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless.

This seems to happen quite a bit with software companies.

Beats me what it's become, but OkCupid at the outset and probably still by 2010 was about estimating compatibility based on the results of quizzes taken by both parties. To improve results beyond OkCupid's built-in romantic personality types, you could submit your own quizzes or general questions, with results expected to get better the more questions in common both parties had answered. I don't completely remember, but I think you could even specify your own answer and an ideal match's answer separately.

To me, the problems here are reasonably obvious. It works well enough provided the applicant pools are sufficiently small and both parties are honest. Even then, the point of OkCupid or any other dating service is just to get people to meet. Whether they end up in any kind of multi-year contractual relationship akin to getting a job is going to be extremely rare. You'd have to ask them if they even tracked it, but 1 marriage in 10,000 90%+ matches wouldn't surprise me as even an upper bound. Jobs aren't quite as serious as marriage, but still more serious than agreeing to meet for drinks.

It's hard to see how you'd improve on the existing system of posting requisitions and applications. monster.com, indeed.com, whatever else has ever existed are seemingly already a dating service for jobs. Making it specifically "OkCupid for jobs" implies you have some kind of questionnaire-based compatibility estimator that is based on at least as much research as romantic compatibility, and I don't think that kind of research exists, and that the parties be at least as honest as those on OkCupid, which I also don't think will happen. I know the popular imagination is everyone lies on a dating service, but I don't think that's true. They exaggerate, but people will place in their search filters that they really do prefer a particular race, age range, socio-economic status, things that employers aren't legally allowed to admit to. That's aside from the principal/agent split in job requisitions that doesn't exist in dating. At least messaging someone on a dating service you can be reasonably well-assured the person who is claiming to know what they want is the person you'll be matching with. For a job, the requisitions are generic, not matched to a specific team or manager, so compatibility is even more spotty. A job seeker may be perfectly compatible with most teams in an organization, but still not appear to be with the organization itself, which usually expects to be able to move candidates between teams. Imagine a dating service where instead of having to convince a girl to go to prom with you, you have to instead match against her parents first, who have six daughters, might pair you with any of them, and base their own evaluations on a mix of what they believe is required and a stereotype of what they think teenage girls like.

The problems aren't as alike as they superficially appear.

I can't remember the book now, I think one of Antonio Damasio's? He recounted an experiment with a patient that had a severed corpus callosum where they put a wall between the eyes and showed him two different pictures, asking him what he saw, and he wrote one answer and spoke another, without any indication either half of him was aware the other half was inconsistent.

It was terrifying 20 odd years ago to read this kind of thing, but it's amusing in light of all the obsession with productivity hacking in Silicon Valley that I could almost see someone with a YouTube channel doing this on purpose to try and be able to accomplish simultaneous tasks a normal person would be tripped up on by the need for a normal brain to produce a single consistent narrative.

I don't want to say this was ever or will ever be a good idea, but the reality of warfare is a lot of the time dudes were just running into an alley and firing off mortars without trying to look or think of what they were shooting at anyway. I doubt the Taliban gave a shit about false positive rates when they were cutting the hands off of anyone who voted. They got the point across either way.

It's hard to parse what's happening here. Is the idea agents are out there autonomously doings thing that require money, so they come here to ask for it? If I click on any of the bonds on the home page, I can't tell what they're plannning to use the money for or any indicators of creditworthiness, collateralization, lending terms. Does every borrower just get the same rate? When does repayment happen? Monthly, weekly, all at once at maturity? How are you supposed to know what person or legal organization is behind the agent in case it doesn't pay you back?

I don't get your vision statement about agents being financial actors not on behalf of humans. On behalf of what then? Software can't legally own anything. What are they doing with money if not on behalf of humans? Buying shit for the hell of it? They can't feel plush leather, occupy a beachfront house, or retire. What is the point of making money to an agent on its own behalf? You could just send it an API call telling it that it made money and it wouldn't know the difference between that and actually making money.

You probably need to change the thought experiment to get at what you're really trying to get at. If all man-made things disappeared tomorrow, you're talking pipes, wires, streets, houses, antibiotics, the immediate effect is very close to 8 billion people die within a few weeks. The hundred thousandor so survivors may know what they already knew, but now they need to find a way to find each other, write it all down, without pens or paper, make more people, and teach those new people so the knowledge isn't lost within a generation or two, all while also building enough infrastructure to at least keep the tiny communities still around from also starving.

All of the post-apocalypse LARP scenarios other responses are describing tend to assume at least books and some small number of durable structures survive. If nothing at all makes it, the first thing that happens is most everyone not living on a ground floor dies instantly from falling. Everyone living where it freezes dies in a few hours from exposure. Most people living anywhere experiencing a heat wave die from heat exhaustion in the next day or two. Most everyone else everywhere else dies from starvation or disease in the next few weeks. Even if you're living on a farm, you've got no fences or tools, so you better hope it's a farm with lots of edible plants and it's near harvest season. If you live in a city, you have no hope at all. Even existing food stores will spoil quickly with no containers or refrigeration. The people who do the best will be Hadza and uncontacted tribes and what not that lose their spears and tents, but all they have to do to get back to their prior situation is make more spears and tents, which thankfully doesn't require a global transportation network or modern manufacturing techniques. They're not the ones who know how to build iPhones, though. I'm not sure anyone knows how to build an iPhone, really. The knowledge is probably largely digital. The chief engineer at Apple knows where to look and who to ask, but no single person has all of the knowledge in their own head.

I guess I'm lucky to have taken the career path I have, but I write very little code these days being in pre-sales now. "Productivity" is pretty stark and obvious in sales. You can output all the text you want, maybe it even compiles and passes test suites and looks pretty in a demo. But does it sell? It's nice to be able to have the only true measure that matters actually be measurable. I have yet to use an LLM for anything at all, haven't touched an agent, not because I'm ideologically opposed, but I just haven't seen the need. Part of it is the largely advisory role. I'm largely expected on the customer side to field and answer questions and render technical assistance. I'm not much good at that if I'm just deferring to Claude. The customer can do that themselves. I need to know more than Claude. The other part is just I'm not being paid to generate text. I'm being paid to generate revenue. If there's a convincing argument that LLMs can help me, well, it's an argument, but truth on the ground is I'm performing every bit as good if not better than any of my peers that are blowing a grand a month on tokens. They're definitely having a lot of fun and flooding internal Github orgs with new repos and tooling, but it demonstrably isn't generating new revenue.

MacroFactor is very rare in the modern software world, probably because it was created by fitness science junkies rather than VCs or engineers. Greg was extremely adamant from the start that they're charging money, take it or leave it, but selling the product itself is all they're ever going to sell. No monetizing user data. No dark patterns to drive engagement and keep you in the app. All they're trying to drive is better lifting and better eating because that's honest to god Greg and Lindsay Nuckols passions in life, not getting rich. Classic lifestyle business that'll never eat the world, but it'll pay the rent in North Carolina for two 40 year-olds with no kids.

Are they actually NIMBYs or just annoyed? I live in a major metro downtown full of construction and fully support it 100%, but that doesn't mean it doesn't irritate me. Roads and sidewalks are constantly randomly closing. Every bridge across the local highway is currently closed for the next five years. My wife had every tire on a brand new go flat within three months because of nails on the roads. Our houses are all covered in yellow dust because the gas company dug up bedrock 9 years ago, left an enormous pile on a street corner, which then washed away in rain and still covers half the sidewalks nearly a decade later. Most of the housing ends up becoming short-term rentals, which in turn mostly become party houses, so the streets are strewn with broken liquor bottles all the time, cops are getting called in the middle of the night to break up fights with strippers. My car's hatch got destroyed by a city dump truck a few years back and I've been hit while parked two other times by work trucks. All of my power tools were stolen out of my garage by a work crew because the original builders put me on the same radio channel as the guy two doors down, so my garage randomly opened without me knowing about it.

I still support it. We need all the housing we can get. But I do get endlessly irritated by the attitude on Hacker News that no person could ever oppose rebuilding a neighborhood while people still live in it for a good reason and they must all by miserly hoarders trying to pull the ladder up from beneath them.

This posted while I was still in the middle of my other rant, but when I was doing the four guys in one apartment thing putting myself through community college, my job was overnight janitor at Knott's Berry Farm and paid $6.50 an hour. Minimum wage in California is now $16.90, so that at least is more than double.

The last time I can remember a reasonably low rent payment, I was paying $300 a month in the year 2000 in Fullerton, CA. That was sharing a two-bedroom apartment between four guys, two of whom lived in the kitchen and living room and paid slightly less, one of whom was a speed addict and eventually got us kicked out and our lease terminated, which left me homeless briefly living in my car. No car payment because I'd bought it in high school for $260 at a sheriff's auction, but roughly $200 or in insurance plus gas money, mostly because commuting anywhere near LA/Orange county uses a lot of fuel. I was still on my parent's health insurance because you could do that until 25 as long as you were in school, and I wasn't paying back student loans because again, still in school. I was also 6'2" and regularly didn't crack 140 lbs because I was eating bulk oatmeal dry. I don't remember the cost of the shared phone bill, but I do remember it was under my name and that speed freak never paid his share, the bill eventually went to collections, and wrecked my credit for several years, which didn't really matter ultimately because I wasn't borrowing any money back then anyway other than the student loans.

I don't know a whole lot of 20 year-olds but certainly hear on the Internet all the time how hard it is for them. I'm extremely skeptical anyone living quite as shittily as I was 26 years ago is really paying 4.5 times as much for the privilege. My 24 year-old niece pays a lot more in rent than I did, but she also lives alone a mile from the beach in San Diego. In a shack, but it's still a hell of a lot nicer than anything I had.

In any case, I got a few bucks here and there from my parents, but they didn't have much when I was young and ultimately helped out my younger sisters a lot more. Cost of teenage parents, I guess. I was the test run. I still turned out fine and they've mostly relied on me in the past 15 years, which seems oddly missing from this survey. If we're concerned about adults not being self-sufficient, surely relying on your kids or siblings or anyone else at all is just as bad as relying on your parents.

I still feel like this kind of topic is underdiscussed across broader society. A lot of people have their "why I left social networks" story and mine was around 2013 or so when my early 30s friends started having kids, I couldn't help but comment on how uncomfortable it made me seeing them post embarrassing photos of their kids because I was so uncomfortable when I was a kid ever having pictures taken of me, how glad I was to grow up before ubiquitous cameras and blessed by my mom choosing Beta Max over VHS so most of my childhood holiday videos were lost. I didn't feel it was appropriate to be blasting your kids all over the place because you have no idea how they'll feel about it when they grow up and they can't possibly consent because they don't understand themselves.

I have never been turned on and had a friend group go ballistic so fast over anything else in my life. Lesson learned, I guess. Never criticize a parent over anything whatsoever, but how are we supposed to advocate for the rights of children as people of their own, rather than the rights of their parents?

This is a bad place for content like this, unfortunately. Hacker News is extremely hostile to car culture, suburbs, California and the US in general. I don't really drive any more due to working from home and spine injuries in my 30s that made it difficult to sit in a confined space for more than 20 minutes, and I wasn't really into modding even back in the day, but as another not Asian but also not white 80s kid from the LA suburbs, I get it. My dad's softball buddy had his own garage when I was growing up. My dad himself still works on a 1972 baby blue Ford F-150 he restored 30 years ago. There was a kid a year ahead of me in high school with a Trans Am you could hear from 2 miles away.

It's easy not to understand the nature of noise in the LA suburbs. There's a lot of loudness, but for whatever reason, maybe the lack of tall structures and steel, or the prevalence of wood, grass, and alphalt over brick, concrete, and stone, or the overly wide streets and setback house lots, but the car noise is not that annoying, not like it is in east coast cities or especially in Europe. I grew up with a train line 200 feet from my house, two miles from the fault line the Whittier Earthquake struck in 1987, underneath the flight path of the space shuttle that sonic boomed every time it landed at Edwards AFB. One way or another, that old Trans Am was pushing it, but I don't think any car ever really annoyed me, at least not for sound. In Long Beach especially, most of your engine noise is going to get drowned out in the Pacific Ocean.

Living as an adult in Texas, full-sized pickup trucks taking up multiple parking spots and never seeing me or outright seeming to try and hit me on purpose when running or cycling gets pretty annoying, but even then the sound isn't a big deal. Except people that rev their motorcycles in tunnels. They're pretty bad. But rice rockets and American muscle alike live and let live. Enjoy your midlife crisis, my brother.

All communication assumes prerequisite knowledge, if nothing more than that the listener or reader can hear or see and understands language at all. The top post on page one right now is "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter." I can't see that a single person complained, including me, that we're simply assumed to know what Fable, reMarkable, and Tom Riddle's diary are. Of those three, I only know Fable. Expanding an acronym or initialism will probably result in more people understanding the meaning but that seems far less true of software tech specifications than common public language. Non-techies probably aren't going to know what hypertext is or the difference between a markup language and any other language and may very well recognize http and html better than their expansions.

I'm not the world's most productive person in terms of getting any kind of tangible economic benefit from my activities, but I probably am the most dedicated learner I've ever known. I'm sure there are people on the Internet who learn even more, but I'm a sponge for information. Every weekend in the late 80s, I rode my bicycle down to the Norwalk branch of the LA public library, spent the entire day reading, then checked out the maximum number of books they allowed, which was 6 as far as I remember. Every week, another 6 books. Never fiction, not biographies or light reading. I was heavily interested in the SDI or "Star Wars" proposals Reagan had and read about particle beams, lasers, satellite communications, all public information about how missile defense worked. I was nationally ranked at NTN in the early 90s and won a television quiz show when I was 12. I came in 2nd in the California state spelling bee at one point. Got a perfect SAT score. I also came in 3rd in a statewide art competition and won my high school district's annual art show 3 of 4 years I was in high school. I've never had even an ounce of focus and master nothing, but get reasonably good at everything. Lettered in four different sports. Ended up with (so far) 4 bachelor's degrees and 3 master's. I'm the last person I know who still never uses an LLM for anything, in part because I don't feel I need to because I have answers and know how to do what I need to do without assistance, but also because I want that to continue to be the case. I'm willing to struggle and practice and devote more time to learning and less time to sleep or anything else because there is nothing in the world that gratifies me more and strokes my egoistic self-image than always having the answer, not because I'm asking the web but because I actually have the answer in my own mind.

But I never tout this as some kind of way of being everyone needs to or should try to emulate. As I said at the outset, I can't think of any tangible benefit from doing this. I'm exactly the same upper middle-class, white-collar office worker earning a very good but nowhere near "fuck you" level of money exactly the same as all my peers who are mostly more ordinary people doing ordinary things like watching Love Island and whatever else ordinary people do.

This isn't the automatic golden ticket to a good life. I have no social media accounts. I don't even know where my phone is right now and often don't have it with me. I watch no video on it ever. Most of my entertainment comes from listening to music and even then it's active because I usually listen to songs I can sing and sing along while listening. Even then, I'm still practicing and I'm a very good singer. None of this makes me any happier or any better than anyone else. My mental health is not skyrocketing through the roof because I'm unplugged from the 24 hours news cycle and don't feel the scrutiny of my body and lifestyle not matching an Instagram ideal. In fact, I probably do match that. I've managed to lift at least an hour a day far more days in my adult life than not. I still run even in my mid-40s. I can't get a sub-16 minute 5k like I could as a teenager but I'm in shape. I still sometimes hit 80 miles in a week. My BMI hasn't been over 22 and I haven't had double-digit body fat since being bedridden with spine injuries a decade ago. I look like an underwear model for no reason at all because nobody ever sees it and nobody cares.

It doesn't matter. It's compulsion. I doubt myself and hate myself just as much as anyone else does. I can't sleep because I feel like nothing I ever do is enough and the slightest disturbance in sleep jolts me instantly awake with my mind racing anxious over all the things I believe I need to do, all the ways I'm not living up to my own potential. All those degrees? Shitty schools. No PhDs. Good job. Okay, but I've never made 7 figures in a year. Someday I will but that won't be enough, either. Even Michael Jordan was angry more often than happy, alienated every person he ever knew, and spent his hall of fame induction insulting people and being mad rather than celebrating his own accomplishments. The only real ticket is satisfaction, being able to say good enough is good enough. Spending too much time doomscrolling and not enough learning a second language? So what? Give yourself some grace. People who speak 19 languages are no happier or better than you are. Learning a 20th is every bit as compulsive and pointless as you watching TikTok.

I want more content on the Internet, or anywhere else, telling people all the ways and all the reasons they're already good enough, not constantly pointing out any and all shortcomings of the world and their own personal habits.

Big corporations that pay big creators millions per production are just normal studios like Disney and Paramount and nowadays Netflix and Prime. YouTube is the competitor to that. No matter how professional you think of your operation, you're not Christopher Nolan or even BBC Earth and neither is anyone else whose primary distribution channel is YouTube.

Good examples of more or less "free" content that fits PeerTube are cited in other comments, though. Conference footage, MIT OCW, archival footage of any kind of live event. Productions where the work is in putting on the event in the first place. Holding the conference, creating a course, putting on some kind of skateboarding competition, whatever it might be. Incidentally filming it and uploading the footage costs next to nothing in comparison, isn't expected to drive revenue compared to the live attendance, and it doesn't make much difference to the viewers if the footage is terrible. Shitty quality Feynman lectures is still watching Feynman lecture. It was really cool, for a recent example, that somebody found and uploaded phone footage of Caitlin Clark's fabled scrimmage against the Iowa men's team from however many years ago. Nobody cares about the quality of the video or who filmed it. Likely nobody subscribed to whatever channel it first ended up on, but how cares? People who wanted to see a rare real world event would still have been able to find it and it cost nothing to the person who pulled out a phone and turned it on while that event was happening.

Depends on the field. There aren't really all that many research tasks that can be completed in a week. One of my favorite stories from the past few decades was the finding of accelerating expansion of space. It took three decades of scheduling telescope time, looking at exactly the right places in space at exactly the right time, to find enough supernovas to have data to even analyze. Not a whole lot of non-trivial science is just "read existing literature, think hard, and produce text."

Readers here really need to learn how to cut through hype better than they do. Pokemon go data is limited in far more ways. Many points of interest couldn't even be scanned like this because they were mural on the sides of buildings and don't even have more than one side. At least at first, there was no punishment for not actually scanning anything at all. You could walk in a circle with your phone pointed at the ground and it would still count that and give you points. People played in the dark or in crowds that didn't want to be filmed and this was the only way Niantic could make a feature like this that awarded prizes palatable to everyone. Beyond that, the points of interest don't even all exist. Plenty of the original database from Ingress is still present on the PoGo maps in Dallas and much of it hasn't existed in the real world for a decade, but players have no incentive to remove them because the more that exist in the game, the more you can get from playing since they're the points that spawn everything you might want to collect while playing. This became especially noticeable during the Black Lives Matter hubbub a decade back when old monuments to Civil War heroes erected during the Civil Rights era were torn down. All of those were POI in Ingress and PoGo and they still are, but they're gone from the real world.

I feel like users and readers instinctively know these limitations. We work with digital maps all the time that are out-of-date. Google and Apple don't and can't know any and all road closure and vehicle accidents in real time. Your car's radar road mapping service is as up-to-date as anything, but you still may be the first person to ever encounter a sinkhole or pothole that just appeared and it won't be on the map until you discover it. Satellite data is even more out of date because it can't be as frequently updated. There aren't anywhere near as many sensors in orbit or aerially as there are on the ground.

I haven't played PoGo in a while, but Niantic used to have human moderators and also tried to crowd-source some quality control on these world models because they knew 99% of the scans they received were bunk, either of nothing, the wrong thing, the right thing but in the dark or from an obstructed angle. I have no idea how good a job they ever did of cleaning that up, but it's a difficult task and it's never done because the world is always changing. There's only so much you can do here. Technology isn't magic.

Not all "government" systems are the same. They're rated in terms of impact level and data classification. Classified systems can't be logged into outside of SCIFs anyway and have no outgoing connection to the Internet. Unclassified systems at IL5 require certificate auth with a government-issued smart card. IL4 requires endpoint attestation but can otherwise use normal username/password auth. Lower impact levels are not as heavily secured. I would have expected they at least require MFA to access the AWS API, but even that depends. A lot of times accounts will be split between production and non-production with MFA required on the production accounts, but work done purely for experimentation, platform development, or other non-user facing things that don't touch real data might not even be in GovCloud since the commercial accounts are cheaper.

It's changed over the years and depends quite a bit on the state, but generally family court prefers placing wards of the state with birth parents if they're alive and known and legally able to care for a child, and if not, then either kin or "fictive kin," which is any stable adult that already has a pre-existing relationship with the child. If a child is completely abandoned and has no known family, then whoever found them is probably the best thing going all else being equal.

But no, it is not generally that easy anywhere in America. My wife and I tried for six years and it never happened. Texas completely privatized foster care licensing years back, so standards can be pretty arbitrary. Some agencies are thinly-veiled scams requiring you to purchase books or parenting classes from the founder.

This feels like a basic critical thinking/epistemology thing that you (hopefully) pick up at some point in life, usually from experience finding reliable, canonical primary sources for data. You can't do that for everything. Being wrong about trivial factoids isn't the end of the world. You should, however, at least be capable of doing further investigation, realizing that Major League Eating has its own website, and that there is no event in South Dakota sanctioned by them. If you look at actual results, or even just think for a few seconds, you'd also realize that 7.5 hot dogs in 10 minutes is bush-league level nonsense that would not win a local church contest, let alone an international championship. That may not be obvious to all users of the Internet, but it would be if you've ever watched a real contests, looked at the results for a real contest, or try yourself to eat a high volume of hot dogs rapidly. You only need to do it once in your life and a basic smell alarm should go off in your head forever if someone puts out a claim that is very far from something you know to be true.

This is what human reasoning is and we're supposed to be good at it. At its best, this is what any reasonable education should do for you if you take it at all seriously, arming you with some capacity for doing prima facie sanity checks of poorly sourced claims.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the font, these seem to be the shorter en-dashes, not the em-dashes that are otherwise rare to see.

Also, there is the question of why? This is a quarterly publication with only a few articles, not a blog spamming 20,000 a day. The author himself is a rabbi and professor at St. John's, who is heavily published but not exactly spamming the world with shit. He's written two full-length books, one novel and one non-fiction, both of them published before LLMs were anywhere near good enough to produce convincing long-form prose. All of his material I could find is published through real publications with editorial boards, not self-published. He doesn't exactly fit the profile of the ambitious hustler trying to make a name for himself to game SEO rankings or boost his karma on web outlets with up-voting mechanisms.

Sounds awfully pie in the sky. My own experience matches Jonathan Wong's. An individual ground Soldier is carrying a lot of gear already and the helmet as-is is quite heavy. Regular night vision and ballistic glasses are not comfortable. Ruggedized laptops are already bulky and adding in the ability to run a local LLM is only going to make them bulkier. Computing and electronics in general are unreliable in the field, easy to lose, difficult to keep charged, and nobody likes carrying them. It needs to add quite a bit of value to be worth it, and calling in airstrikes or indirect fire is not all that difficult as it stands.

Projects like these always feel like people whose experience of combat is video games imagining how cool it would be to have better tech, and I can't help but wonder what the guys at the top buying this shit are thinking. They too were once at the platoon and company level, even if it was decades ago. Cynically, they might just hope to end up like this Quay Barnett guy. Buy shit you don't need and will never field from a vendor today, then get a 7-figure job from the same vendor when you retire.

We can estimate this. US median home price right before the crash in 2007 was $240,000. Today, it is about $400,000. Median rent in 2007 was $810. Today, it is $1,698. There's some simplifying assumptions we have no choice but to make. Let's say renter's insurance is negligible enough to ignore. Meanwhile, we'll just let an online mortgage calculator assume a median $50,000 home insurance coverage payment and bake it in. We'll assume 1.1% of assessed value for property insurance, which is currently the US national average (it varies a lot state to state in reality). We'll assume an FHA loan with 4% down.

This gives us a $1,995 a month payment when we purchased and a $2,142 a month payment today, due to higher assessed value for the tax.

We can see upsides and downsides in both cases. Rent would have been quite a bit cheaper in 2007, but it has very nearly caught up by now. Meanwhile, you're probably talking about renting maybe a 2 bed/1 bath apartment, whereas the median single-family house is more like 4 beds/2 baths, with a yard. Whether or not that extra space and privacy matters to you likely depends a lot on whether you're single or have or ever plan to have a family. You could have invested into something like the S&P 500, which has historically returned about 10.5% since 1957 annually in nominal returns. Let's just kind of naively split the difference here and assume you can invest $1,000 saved on rent versus mortage a month for the first 10 years and $200 a month for the next 9. That would have gotten you somewhere around $240,000 by now. Meanwhile, you're looking at about $248,000 in home equity by now for the purchase case.

Choose different parameters if you please, but I'm not really seeing the case for renting here over the long term, and that's in spite of choosing the single worst time in the last century you could have made the purchase.

I've never done any JavaScript development of any kind and had never heard of this either. I thought it was a package manager at first, but apparently it's an entire runtime.

My question is, if it's this trivial to rewrite Zig to Rust, and trivial in general to write Rust at all, why not just use Rust for your server side code in the first place? What's the value of continuing to use JavaScript and putting so much effort into the runtime?