pavlov

I made several large Cocoa (macOS AppKit, Obj-C) apps in 2004-2018 using the classic Smalltalk-inspired MVC patterns and this was never a problem. Sometimes writing the controller boilerplate was boring, but at least there were no observer loops, it was simple to debug where things happened, and undo/redo were reliable to implement through the framework.

Maybe Microsoft just never was very good at these 1990s style GUIs?

“Besides unconventional rickrolls and other trolling, this has no practical applications: there's no way to add timing information, so playback is entirely dependent on network delay.”

A progress bar for something that’s loading in parallel over the same network, to give the user an idea of how much the delay is?

There is literally nothing else of value on Truth Social except the president's posts. And those are considered official government communications. There's a legal ruling about that from the time of the first Trump administration.

So the US president has created a wrapper corporation that sells early access to official government communications. It doesn't matter if it's only milliseconds, that's enough for trading systems to make money.

How can any of this be legal in a democracy?

Perhaps his best known work is the novels that were made into movies, “Crash” and “High-Rise”, and neither is science fiction.

There’s also “Empire of the Sun” that was adapted by Steven Spielberg, but it’s autobiographical so doesn’t really count.

Windows Phone solved it by supporting only Silverlight apps... No Windows APIs.

I also loved the Windows Phone 7 UI. But the app story was always a mess, and the competitive situation with Google meant that 2012's super-important apps like YouTube would never appear on the platform, whatever they did.

still better for them than what ended up happening

Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013.

There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM.

As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones.

And Nokia the networking company remains a $70B corporation today. The cash from Microsoft enabled the investments that made them a network leader.

Maybe AI-service-blocklist-as-a-service could be a YC company.

There’s also one of A-Ha’s “Take on Me”.

“Haaaand comes out…”

I just took delivery on a new European made car (DS no 8) last week and it’s been great. The driver assist features are useful, automatic lane switching works perfectly, and the driver awareness nags are very modest.

I’d never want to go back to an old non-EV. My previous car was a Tesla, and the DS is as good or better in every respect that matters to me.

It’s a Stellantis brand on their shared platform, so I assume their other brands are similarly fine (Fiat / Opel / Citroen / Peugeot etc, also American Dodge / Chrysler use the same platforms).

So you’re saying that the war-ravaged Europe of 1946 that was split by the Iron Curtain and needed Marshall Aid was more powerful and important than today’s EU?

Insane take. But somehow people will go to any lengths to disparage the EU.

A very HN comment... At the time, almost nobody felt spending billions acquiring these companies was "elementary". Instagram was bought so early that spending a billion on a startup was unheard of. And WhatsApp was so expensive that they questioned Zuck's sanity.

You mention two strategic enablers that made these unusual acquisitions seem obvious to FB leadership. So were those two not good calls?

Windows 2000 really was the best desktop OS from release until 2002 at least.

Linux was incomplete, Sun and SGI were dead except for servers, classic Mac OS was a crashy dinosaur, and Mac OS X was a slow mess. I bought 10.0 on release day and installed it on a dual core G4, almost the top Mac you could buy. It was not usable, much as I wanted to. (The real v1 was Mac OS X 10.2.)

Windows 2000 was designed for real professional apps because late ‘90s Microsoft had a serious appetite for taking over the workstation market. Microsoft acquired companies like Softimage, the leading 3D CGI app, and rebuilt their previously Unix-based products on Windows. This pro usability focus reflected back into the OS itself.

This didn’t last because Microsoft unified the Windows 95/98 consumer lineage into NT/2000, so starting with XP there wasn’t a pro Windows anymore. They had decisively won the workstation market and saw no need to invest anything more (just as happened with browsers). So 2000 remains the last time a major tech company built a pure pro desktop OS. Mac was always a consumer/pro hybrid, and ultimately Apple did it better than Microsoft.

The contemporary right operates on a simple principle: everything they complain about is something they plan to do on a massive scale when they get power. It’s just a process of rationalization (“our enemies left us no choice but to do $bad_thing”).

I remember being shocked back in 2016 when Steve Bannon said he’s a Leninist. But it’s a clear-eyed and unusually honest example of how the far right is about becoming the thing you profess to hate.

If you mean Alexandr Wang, the number is off by an order of magnitude. Forbes estimates he made over $3 billion from selling his startup to Meta and getting hired as chief AI officer.

The overuse of blue and purple gradient fills on the landing page is a telltale sign of AI slop.

I’m sorry, maybe it’s shallow, but that makes me close the tab.

Japan had decades of deflation after 1990. There’s a generation of people who got used to prices staying flat or going down.

Think “how do I implement a search engine whose interface is visible in the browser address bar?” This was a reasonable question on the early web. And that’s why they are called query params.

The question mark indicates you’re making a query. And the ampersand is a boolean operator. You could imagine query params implementing | in addition to &.

It reads multiple times “DMCA” on that page but you’re saying it could be some unspecified other type of complaint.

If that’s really the case, isn’t Google a fraudulent party here by sending people DMCA notices that aren’t? The DMCA perjury penalty would seem to apply here as well (lying about receiving a third party notice).

Was there ever a public square where children could participate anonymously among adults? (I’m imagining three Dickensian urchins in a trench coat giving a speech in Hyde Park.)

For a UI framework landing page, this looks impressively bad on mobile.

Big Arial at random sizes. No margins, no grid, component examples scattered all over the screen.

This LLM PR description style is getting very tiresome. The obvious signs are the little lists (“not x, not y, not z”) and pompous declarations like this:

“The bring-up log at the bottom is honest about what broke and what it took.”

I guess that fits into the Musk empire because "empty shell" increasingly describes his companies.

Tesla is a car company that doesn't want to make cars. And xAI is an AI foundation model company that actually is a data center REIT...

They're getting paid in extremely overvalued stock, so maybe it balances out.

This is not really a diss on SpaceX either because a lot of IPOs go through an immediate pop and then 1-2 years of doldrums as lockouts expire and promises aren't quite delivered.

Nobody knows what 60 billion in SpaceX stock today will be worth when Cursor insiders finally get to sell (at least a year from now, after other SpaceX insiders have started selling).

Most video color spaces have black at a non-zero code value.

The most common 8-bit YUV format (e.g. in MPEG-2) uses a 16-235 range for valid luma values, so black is at 16 and white is at 235.

The reason for leaving this “headroom” and “footroom” had to do both with digitizing analog signals and avoiding clipping during processing.

English Civil War in the 1640s.

“Two generations out, people forget what the world was like. Forgetting like this on a civilizational level is probably adaptive”

We are forgetting the lessons of WWII, and the world is now stocked with thousands of nuclear weapons each hundreds of times more powerful than Hiroshima.

I don’t think we as a civilization can afford this kind of amnesiac adaptation anymore.

Based on very specific assumptions: “…the world in which AI demand is so overwhelming as to exceed the already formidable datacenter capacity additions” — but also this same world is one where GPU chip supply is abundant, there just isn’t enough data centers to put them in.

This does not seem like the likeliest scenario to me.

2-3x sounds like a very low estimate.

There’s so much data center capacity being built all over the Earth. Thousands of large projects across US / China / Europe / Middle East. It would be astonishing if something that’s never been done before could be so cost-competitive immediately.

Starlink wasn’t the first time LEO communications constellations were attempted. Multiple 1990s projects did it (Iridium, GlobalStar…) and went bankrupt.

It took 30 years to make the concept work. SpaceX investors seem to be assuming the space data center business will be immediately viable.

Thank you, appreciate the response. It’s a great part of the HN community that there’s almost always someone around with the first-hand experience and facts.

Best of luck with whatever you do next!

This is the claim in the repo readme that presumably unlocked the VC investment:

“TensorZero is used by companies ranging from frontier AI startups to the Fortune 10 and fuels ~1% of global LLM API spend today.”

One percent seems like a lot. Anyone on HN use this?