randusername

Genuine questions from the ground floor:

How do you spot the quality candidates in those top roles? It seems like forecasting success is exponentially harder when the skills are so qualitative and contextual.

And I have not yet witnessed an organization that is comfortable with the risk of promoting an internal "nobody" relative to someone with plausible credentials or from outside. If you're stuck with MBA-type CEOs, how do you fix them or mitigate their damage from above?

it has the electrolytes plants need

I find it hard to trust economic narratives when so many metrics cited upon further inspection do not really measure what they are implied to measure.

Or maybe we measure what is easiest to measure, not what is best.

I see this everywhere, though. Jobs data is really job openings not actual hires. Unemployment data is really paperwork filing not people out of work or retiring early. And now home ownership is really "count everyone in the home if the owner resides there".

I thought there was a lot of buzz about AI creativity after the infamous move 37 in that series?

I bet there will be a very interesting generational divide between the kids that were born before or after about 2010; old enough to have some critical thinking facilities at the dawn of ChatGPT when it was still noticeably dumb.

Well estimates claim AI may contribute 50-75% of US GDP growth. Which is confusing because we're spending 2% of US GDP on AI.

I wasted like a half hour trying to find decent sources but I guess I don't know how to search the internet anymore.

I think we're betting more than the stock market on AI, even if I can't say for sure how much.

What's the point of an IPO? Show problematic institutional investors the door and replace them with disorganized public investors? Attract talent?

Seems like if the company is really doing great you'd want to retain ownership. Raise from bonds or something. Put simply, if it's valuable why would anyone sell it?

IMO audiobooks and physical books are an identical experience for passive reading, but not for active reading.

So audiobook genre fiction is reading, but audiobook War and Peace or audiobook The C Programming Language doesn't count. Not for arbitrary gate-keeping reasons, but because reading those books implies a more active form of engagement than marching linearly through it.

And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.

Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning.

Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning.

On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning; personal satisfaction at solving a human problem awkwardly mapped to technology, at the expense of users dating, socializing, or consuming with discomfort and therefore the possibility of growth and meaning.

TFA has an odd perspective.

Views are my own. I have no history with Zig. I’ve never spoken to Andrew Kelley

There are better primary sources to explain what ZSF is trying to achieve with its AI stance. Kelley's rant [0] was a bit much but the ZSF AI Policy [1] and Kelley's interview on it [2] are interesting and informative.

[0] https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

[1] https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ

Yeah, hard to imagine opposing AI absolutists settling their differences.

IMO all the technical arguments and attacks are post-rationalization; different orgs, different contexts, different goals.

I think Kelley saw this, but couldn't resist muddying his point. I give him a pass. The rant [0] is too much, but the addendum about moving on is healthy, and I'd rather the BDFL be too spicy than not spicy enough.

[0] https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

Apple does like to market their hardware for education and small business customers, though.

I think "buy this $10,000 box and to easily grant every Macbook Neo on your team safe, private, free AI" could be a real winner.

I hope this isn't the takeaway!

Zig was the right tool to start, Rust is the right tool to finish.

Making something possible and refining something until it is high security and reliability are different problems. Zig is great, but for a JS runtime, I just don't think that's the best long-term fit.

The 36 bay was all I could find on fb marketplace.

I fell in love with the silly idea of squeezing 10G NIC + 10G writes (to a 2x12 RAID 10 HDD array) on the thunderbolt bus of my 12 year old macbook pro.

Then I got distracted with the server mb and truenas and ZFS.

I'm doing it anyway and I've found some secondhand deals. Maybe COVID homelabbers are offloading gear?

I built a 24 TB HDD NAS in a 36 bay chassis for around $1000 all-in: mb, ram, rails, chassis, rack, disks, hba, nic

Awful Watts/TB but the plan is to run it and the GPU rig on solar.

OpenWRT is very good, but the installation and upgrades are not easy.

Agreed that separate router and dumb AP is the way. Every time I updated OpenWRT there was some gotcha that created an unexpected headache where I had to rebuild my elaborate configuration from scratch.

I'm not convinced A -> G upgrade paths are tested, only A -> B -> ... -> F -> G but who manually updates with that level of discipline?

Easier said than done. Not easy to access or pay for specialists in the US and they don't always communicate with each other well to coordinate care, especially for non life-threatening issues.

I live in an area with three world-class hospitals, still had to wait 16 months to follow-up with a hematologist about bloodwork.

If we aren't going to fix overregulation, undersupply, and insurance, AI is the best the bottom 80% can do for a lot of medical queries too complex for the time and attention they are allotted with the doctor. I see that as a positive.

AI code is owned by owners and society is figuring out in real-time if code has some inherent value without humans that understand it.

I'll be really interested to follow what comes out of the Bun team.

You can at the local level.

I thought this piece was realistic and hopeful:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/ai-open-ai-anthrop...

I can't control how the world uses AI, but my family and friends have been using it to start new businesses, finally resolve some long-term medical mysteries, and plan trips they wouldn't have otherwise.

The entire framing is wrong, even if it's both understandable and a very widely held viewpoint.

Setting aside a few levels of irony in arguing with arguers on arguing, I think there are multiple framings for arguments. Things go off the rails all the time when neither party is aligned on what kind of argument the current one is.

Programmers and engineers tend to carry around this worldview that every conversation is about correct information or future decision-making, but everyone is operating on different planes. God help you if you go into an argument with the spouse implicitly about acknowledging how your actions made them feel armed with facts and logic about how this is irrelevant because the problem is solved or there is no new action to take.

There's this one unexpectedly pensive line in Indiana Jones III

We've reached the point where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away

That's how I feel about the internet. Fun while it lasted, but I think AI is going to keep diluting authenticity and intention at scale until that "why bother" feeling reaches critical mass and we try something else. Maybe it will kick more people offline into physical meet-ups and group hobbies.

We had success in our county and town canceling contracts, but that doesn't mean they are banned from private land.

I'm not totally sure, but it may even be the stupidest of all possible outcomes: they still exist, the cops can't access them, and their only value is selling private information.

Of course there is.

You can take notice of beautiful women in public. You cannot take upskirt photos.

You can eavesdrop on a conversation at the park. You cannot put mics under all the benches.

Privacy is a situational continuum of invasiveness. Just because there is no expectation of privacy from the state in using public roads does not mean we should tolerate corporations building profiles analyzing the comings and goings of citizens.

TFA gave me brain freeze.

Third, measure everything. The common view that AI is already leading to lay-offs and raising electricity bills is probably wrong. But without better statistics it is hard to be sure.

Why are they syndicating high school economics papers on AI?

Here's a description of a "real programmer" from all the way back in 1983:

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

Sadly your take doesn’t matter since the other voting bloc is parents and people concerned about their kids.

I used to think the "think of the children" voting bloc was cowardly for hoping the government will do their job for them in setting strict ground rules so they don't have to be the uncool parent.

The closer I get to having children of my own, the more I understand why it seems like the only option. Fundamentally this is delaying indoctrination in digital consumerism, which is not parents versus themselves anymore. More like parents versus the entire economy.

Government might be the only champion for that kind of fight, but what a mess it will make of everything for them to get involved.

I was doing a comparison of 10G ethernet NICs just yesterday and ChatGPT was insistent that they are scorching regardless of actual throughput. Unless you manually downshift and upshift the communication rate.

I'm having second thoughts about having one of those dongles on my desk all day for the same reason wireless charging seems wasteful.

This article encouraged me to look at the investor materials [0].

The 55th slide "key metrics" wording stood out to me:

AI: "Nameplate Compute Draw" Total number of GPUs installed in the data centers at the end of a period multiplied by the respective all-in power draw, reflecting installed capacity and not actual power consumption or utilization

Close to $15 billion in losses since 2023 and not much clarity on actual usage or impact. TIL the plan of record is AI satellites assembled on the moon.

[0] https://ir.spacex.com/investors/default.aspx

I think science is just too granular to be a reliable input into wellness decision-making. It is too easy for interested parties to enable everyday people to confirmation bias their way into defying common sense.

Of what utility is the truth in decision-making if it is such a narrow truth that it might as well be a falsehood in practice?

Alcoholics talking endlessly about flavonoids, obese people insisting in polyunsaturated fat mayo, sedentary people that don't resistance train drinking soda with protein in it.

What was the "tell" for you that makes you think this was AI-generated?