superultra

This is the kind of stuff that happens when there’s too much money

Knitting has long been a highly political activity. Knitting in public by women during the French Revolution was an audacious act of gender equality.

And tennis? Goodness surely you’re aware of the modern political ramifications of tennis that happen almost constantly. There are so many modern examples but let’s pick Wimbledon’s recent banning of Russia. Or Serena Williams; who for her part would rather prefer that there isn’t a political earthquake every time she steps on the court.

Perhaps a better, more honest, and certainly more realistic course of action is to acknowledge that anything involving human beings is intrinsically political, including and maybe even especially tennis and knitting, and secondly to admit that you personally would prefer not to think about the intrinsic politics of knitting or tennis when you exercise those hobbies.

I gave this a real shot, but I found it impossible to use the email client. There are basic things like collapsing replies (in a conversation with multiple lawyers no less, damn do they love their email signatures) are extremely important. Without them, it makes scannning and replying to email, even withe aid of AI, impossible.

Really love the whole idea and I hope it gets more usable.

Surely we’re aware of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 yes? It spells out exactly what they are doing, & where they are going.

Eliminating birthright citizenship is a key component dating back decades.

https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/feudalism-c...

I just finished Michael Christie’s Greenwood, a generational epic on family and, well, trees. Part of the book takes place in a future where the only trees left in the world are on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia where the rich go to replenish.

It’s eco-dystopian science fiction (by a Canadian no less) but I wonder if the people in that future would’ve supported something like this now. I imagine probably.

So, ends justifies the means. Got it.

I guess I’m old enough to remember when 99.9% of us on hacker news were…well, hackers. We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”

I miss those days.

How is this comment on hacker news? Do we not understand basic principles of scale?

40 billion of corruption is way more corrupt than 400k.

And what’s more is penalizing the 400k without penalizing the 400b means the people getting the 400b look better.

I have fond memories of this software as a kid. I used it on an Apple IIE at school. It felt powerful. You - a kid!! - could create a newspaper. It had a cartoon feel to it, but I never felt like the software condescended to me as a kid. It gave me real word-processing and editing and layout tools. Nothing like what's available today, but at the time, you really could work with friends and produce and print out a broadsheet/newspaper on a dot matrix printer and hand it out (or have your dad or mom photocopy it at work).

This article dives into a Newsroom mystery I had forgotten about: the Wire Service!

I try not to be too critical of things by strangers on the internet, but I feel compelled to say that as a big fan of the type of fiction this seems to be going for - a kind of Franzen/DeLillo/Ishigoro aka mystical non momentousness - I found this really dull.

In reading, which I did before reading the comments here, I wondered too if it was LLM written or assisted. It has the hallmarks of an LLM; the "this but not this" - the proclivity to be profound. In this case as if it had been told "I want to make something meaningful out of these events, but it shouldn't mean anything."

There is not about page. No links to other socials. The entire site could be LLM generated for all we can tell.

If anything at all, this "essay" and site serve as a reminder that there is an uncanny valley to LLM writing, and that real authentic human communication will likely become rarer and more valuable as this slop proliferates.

edit: from the OP's profile it looks like this is probably a well-meaining person interested in post-structuralism and meditation, but is likely using LLM to achieve that goal. Maybe they wrote in Japanese and are translating to English? Also I kind of like coming across stuff like this on HN but I feel it should still be adjacent or at least peripheral to the topics we normally discuss

I’ve taken this line - as many have and do all the time. Ride it once and you’ll realize why it’s the better way to travel in every way but cost and time - and both of those are a result of the United State unwillingness to fully fund something like Amtrak.

As the author states traveling by train just a more pleasant experience.

I should note that even though there is technically wifi on every Amtrak train, it’s cellular based. You’ll find that at least from atlanta to NY, the train somehow threads the needle between cellular ranges. Both your phone and of course the train will often be either out of range of fast cellular service or out of range altogether. Supposedly Amtrak is getting starlink but we’ll see. So, don’t expect to be getting on any video calls.

I’m glad you went through that and came out ok.

It seems though, increasingly, that the ability to avoid addiction is less about pulling one up by one’s own bootstraps, and in many ways determined more by genetics. That is to say, what might have been possible for you is much harder for others.

Look no further than GLP-1. People who have struggled for years - decades - with overeating are almost immediately able to cut back on addictive eating. It’s not that they suddenly discovered willpower. It’s a biochemical effect.

It’s no wonder then that kids are more susceptible to addictive building behaviors. Their minds are pliable and teachable.

Why would we not legislate things that take advantage of that?

I think this is where a lot of freelance contractors could pivot to - basically "last mile" coding, where the LLM does the front end work, and then high hourly pay engineers come in and fix the work. it'd still be cheaper than a lot of the industry niche software that is usually pretty bad.

thanks for the correction

I hear you but at least as my bud described it, the software that most of the timber mill industry uses is buggy as hell, crashes all the time, and makes mistakes. One would wonder if even the licensed software is hardened.

Had Waffle House with some friends who mostly work in blue collar industries. One guy who works at a timber mill used Claude code to redo their ordering system. Took him about a month to go from knowing nothing about Claude Code to finishing the system. Basically just copied a proprietary software product that costs them upward $20k a year. They’re keeping that other product to cross check but so far the Claude coded item works great, and is of course more custom to their business. The dudes a hero at work because the system is heads and tails better.

Obviously caveat emperor but there are a lot of real world scenarios like this.

I think Anthropic and OpenAi are trying to all cool and apple-y with their branding but these use cases are just tools getting work done. Most normal people don’t need or want AGI, or even AI slop videos. They just want their invoicing system to just f-ing work for a change.

Sorry, HOW?!?

It's me. I have accumulated several dozen free games over the years through the Epic Store. Sorry Tim Sweeney!

I have three teenage kids and they’ve all switched to wired. Many of their friends have as well.

It has nothing to do with fashion or retro vibes, as far as I can tell.

They’ve all lost too many AirPods through the years. AirPods just too easy to lose, and at their school, too easy to be stolen by someone else. And they’re expensive. Yes you can buy cheaper Bluetooth headsets but those often don’t sound as good and get lost just as easily.

So you’re either on a subscription basis relationship wih Bluetooth headsets, or you use wired headphones, which are actually harder to lose and less desirable to steal.

Thank you! For those of us that are reluctant to upgrade to Tahoe, I thank you!

We thought we did but we never left the Clippy era did we

I think you’re missing the point and approaching this with a myopically binary perspective.

Just because you consider AI an interface in line with, perhaps, a paintbrush, typewriter, or spell checker, doesn’t mean it automatically is. It may even be true for you, and not for others. That’s the myopic part.

The binary part is that simply because you see it as an interface, it doesn’t have effects that are different than the interface of a brush. You wouldn’t get very far arguing with a judge that 80mph over the speed limit is exactly the same as 5mph over the speed limit.

Or, where would you draw the line. Is hiring someone to write your hacker news comments still your comment? Or what about spam bots? Are they not also an “interface?” Is banning spam bots outrightly also “ableist” by you?

But also, we have plenty of both media philosophical musing and evidence based data that shows that while mediums may not BE the message, they absolutely do affect the message.

In this case HN is simply saying that the process of humans generating words that we type onto a screen is the valuable part of communicating that we want to maintain. And that using AI is a bridge too far in losing the effort and output from that process.

Tahoe only? Yikes!

You just described every human social network lol

Your username checks out!

As someone who’s played a lot of video games, very few gameshave come close to the experience that was Outer Wilds.

Textbook definition of a game I wish I could forget so I could play again for the first time.

I didn’t find the DLC quite as good as the OG however the storyline is excellent, and I actually liked most of the puzzles; I say actually because the puzzles are its most often critiqued part.

Do it! You’ll likely thank us later.

The controls are wonky but it’s not a AAA title, so there are things about it that are a little rough for sure.

This is a case where it may be that people are outsourcing shitty user experiences to an AI.

I’m not a huge ebayer but I’m usually watching one or two auctions at a time. The problem is that you can’t disallow marketing notifications. So, if I want to be usefully alerted for a new item in a search, or that I’ve been outbid, or the imminent end of an auction, I’ll also be getting notifications and emails about all kinds of shit I don’t care about. $5 off coupons (that only apply to 8 items that I don’t want). “You might like this!” notifications (spoiler: I never do). Group buying times (who cares?).

So I either disable ALL notifications (and have an LLM write a script that crawls searches manually and much more appropriately notifies me on its own), or I enable notifications and get a bunch of trash spam.

As it relates to specifically to buying, we’ve known for a long time that we’re all up against some kind of bot that’s timed the exact last moment and amount to outbid us. It’s no fun.

I’ve been an eBay user since 1998 and it’s been on a very slow roll of enshittification since then.

Make your experience better for humans and maybe we’d be less inclined to outsource negative experiences to AI.

I think a better or at least adjacent question might be: do consumers want to pay full price for an object that isn’t subsidized by services? Do we actually want physical objects?

Even the things that aren’t technically subscription feel like they are. I have a Kenmore fridge I bought in 2020. The extended warranty just ran out and the thing died. I called a tech. $400 to replace a series of motors. I looked into doing it myself and it’s outside of my time or ability. I have a basement beer fridge that is admittedly less efficient but it’s still kicking and it’s from the mid 80s. I realized I’m effectively ON a subscription plan for a fridge. $900-$1,200 for five years.

How much is a smartphone that lasts (do they even) and is NOT subsidized by cloud services? I have a 128gb iPhone and though I barely use any apps I’m constantly maxing my space because I take a lot of photos.

I hate to sound like a graduate student writing a thesis on capitalism but like water flow, it just feels like companies will always default to maximum profits. Didn’t instant pot and tupper ware just go out of business because they made a product everyone needed but only once? There’s no long term profit growth in any model where we’re not sucking off the teet of some company.

I oversee pressing for over 150k+ records a year. We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low. I wouldn’t doubt if the number of buyers who don’t own a record player is even higher tha 50%, and that the percentage of people who actually play the records is actually 10-20%. I don’t have data on that, it’s just a hunch.

Many of us in the indie music industry (hip hop sustained record plants for many years, arguably until independent music started pressing in the 2000s) have mixed feelings about records. It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. And they’re cubersome to bring on tour.

But there isn’t another physical medium that sells at all as well as vinyl. Soft apparel always does well. But people want vinyl.

I don’t love the Gen Z framing of this though. Vinyl purchasing at this point is multi generational.

I don’t think it’s some mysterious Gen Z love of physical. I think we all know that Spotify doesn’t pay artists appropriately and we want to help sustain the music we love. Buying digitally is just isn’t the same for a lot of people (even though it arguably is the best and easiest income generator for artists).

I live in an Atlanta neighborhood where one of the founders lived. A prototype for Flock Camera was designed by three Georgia Tech grads because someone kept breaking into their car (not uncommon in our neighborhood tbh).

The trick is that the camera was pointed towards a middle school. Which means they were constantly recording kids without adult consent.

Now, years later, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in North America and one of the most in the world. Flock cameras are everywhere. There are 124 cameras for every 1,000 people. Just last week, a ex-urb police chef was arrested for using the Flock network to stalk and harass citizens.

I know a lot of people who work at Flock. I’m shocked that they do though.

I don’t know when it stops.

I don’t need everyone seeing the dirty laundry of my first draft and edits. I too work in a working doc and then when completed I drop it at once into the final google doc.

But can it really clean clothes if it doesn’t have 802.11ac with AI spot cleaning and a 750mv iOS app??? /s