tbatchelli

I believe these loud people are mostly for taxes on wealth vs. direct taxes on consumption, as the latter affect lower classes more acutely.

I find it as yet another way to externalize costs: I spend 0 time thinking, I dump AI slop on you and ask you to review it or refute me with the nonsense that I just sent you.

Last time someone did this to me I sent them a few other answers by the same LLM to the same prompt, all different, with no commentary.

CamelCamelCamel records the prices over time of items in Amazon. It's helpful because they fluctuate quite a bit, so you can tell when you might be overpaying. In any case, that can be the database of record for the tariff effects if Amazon does not itemize the tariff costs.

My understanding is that Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for an agreement Wirth Russia to not be invaded? If that is the case and Russia invaded anyway, then what kind of compromise can you have with a country that breaks any agreement they sign?

I doubt many people want war, I know I don't. But once you have a warring nation going rouge, there aren't many options left on the table.

Maybe a bit of a chicken or egg problem? I don’t know enough about Joann, but I remember when borders closed and B&N went almost too. At the time, these stores had become a bore. Only peddling bill O’Reilly and Hillary Clinton’s books. But now bookstores are thriving too, and so is B&N in large part because each store is managed independently, and not driven by corporate and their large contracts with large publishers.

So maybe when you stop being customer centric and become corporate profit centric you end up losing customers first and profits later.

PE firms in these cases are just the bottom feeders that processes these corporate carcasses, not the cause of their deaths.

It’s different when PE firms go after resources that people need, like health care or elderly care. Here they are acting as sociopaths. They know people will pay as much as they have to, as the other options are death and suffering. Despicable.

A neat local RAGs for quick spinning up of new AI tooling

A key difference is that twitter has (had) users, and users can move to e.g. bluesky once twitter's CEO decides to wreck it. The US has citizens instead, not users, not customers, but citizens, and citizens can't move if they don't like what Elon is doing. There is no Bluesky equivalent of the USA, and citizenship is not a free market.

A country is not a private company in a free market. For some this is hard to understand.

Agreed, but part of the reason I think people are not aware of what’s going on is that we’re not calling things for what they are, in a weird and self-imposed Orwellian way. Like calling a rocket that blows up “unexpected rapid disassembly” or some other BS. The rocket blew up, the cars blow up, it’s a coup, they’re nazi sympathizers, etc…

I'm also not convinced this is a "security breach." They're being allowed to do it. It's more like an unforced error, if anything. Not that it changes anything material about the situation.

From the perspective of the owners of this data, the US citizens and others that live in the country, this is very much a security breach; the data that was supposed to be secure is no longer secure.

You are the only person advocating for violence here. Bringing my wife and kids here is very brave of you.

If they want to make budget cuts, they can get it approved by congress, which they control. So do that.

Don’t put words in my mouth. I am not advocating in violence. I never have.

People seem to think that:

1. Auto-coups don't exist 2. Coups require tanks on the street 3. Once a coup is started it will succeed.

This is a an auto-coup, where the president is trying to seize power that is not granted by elections, and trying to make the legal system irrelevant. All in the name of urgency and saving the country (we call them "salva patrias" in Spain for a reason). No one can vote for this. Voting a president does not make the president all powerful.

Also, this coup does not need to succeed. We saw this recently in South Korea. This will only succeed if people don't oppose it. Don't believe them when they make you feel like you already lost.

Finally, the game has changed for the supporters of democracy. This is no longer about writing stern worded letters, if you catch my drift.

(references: I was born in a dictatorship and I lived through a failed military coup)

“Run”

A military coup is a kind of coup, but not the only kind. This one, for example, is an auto-coup. Many coups don't look like one at first.

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I value the hard stance on stability and backwards compatibility over the constant churn that some JS libraries/frameworks have. I understand the need both approaches, but this is a breath of fresh air.

I also happen to think that most web apps have no business being so complex, and that too much work goes into dealing with the added complexity of running SPAs where an SPA is not needed.

This is a fair description of our future. I’m stealing it

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Manta Cares | Sr. Front End and Back End Engineers | hybrid-SF | Full time | $145-165K + equity

At Manta Cares, we're on a bold journey to demystify healthcare and transform the healthcare experience for patients and their loved ones. Our mission is much bigger than any one of us – we're here to make a real difference in people's lives.

Venture backed (pear.vc, Sozo, 1843 ventures). Come to bootstrap our SF engineering team. We are looking for senior people who like go get their product in the hands of users and also want to contribute to making people's life better when they need it the most.

We are looking for Sr. BE and FE engineers to join the Head of Engineering (me!) in San Francisco (hybrid, 2 office days a week). Because you'd be one of the first US-based engineers, you'll need strong Golang + Postgres or Typescript + React skills, or convince us that you can get there fast. It also helps if you have worked in healthcare environments and / or if you have a passion to help people of all walks of life go through their hardest times. We deal with non-ordinary problems and constraints, bringing simplicity and calmness into very complex and stressful situations.

Please check out more details and apply at https://mantacares.com/pages/careers or email me at (toni at mantacares dot com)

I have two data points for unschooling, my two children. After a foray in public school in SF, we decided to take one kid out at first, and the other one a year later, the older in 3rd grade, and the younger in 2nd grade. We unschooled them, which we were able to do because we had the equivalent of one full time parent available every day. It was hard work for us, mostly for my wife. It was expensive too. We hired tutors for certain things, we sent them to workshops, classes, etc… but it was always after they expressed interest (one way or another). After 3 years and one year of COVID, our kids expressed interest in going back to school to be around more kids their ages. It was weird for them (and for us!) at first, but they adapted to the schedule pretty quickly and they’re straight As kids.

It worked because in a way, they already had it in them. They both were (and still are) very curious and self-starters. They liked unschooling for a while, and to this day they still have an do-it-yourself attitude when it comes to learning things that they’re interested in —- I think most kids do, and in their case it got cemented during this period.

But they got sick of it too, they got sick of not having a clear schedule, clear goals to meet, too much uncertainty. Now they like more academic-oriented schooling, a bit of the opposite of unschooling, and they’re thriving.

We were lucky that the director of the elementary school they ended up in. She was very welcoming of our kids, and expressed that she herself had an unstructured upbringing. More interestingly, she seemed to think kids should have some unschooling period in their lives, as having free range helps them develop as people.

Anyway, as I said, 2 data points

What does "Silicon Valley" mean here? A few people who struck gold and became billionaires and they loathe the system that got them where they are? Or the general population that work in tech companies in the Bay Area?

The incentives will be largely gone when SEO-savvy AI bots will produce 10K articles in the time it takes you to write one, so your article will be mostly unfindable in search engines.

Human generated content will be outpaced by AI generated content by a large margin, so even though there'll still be human content, it'll be meaningless on aggregate.

Fair enough, I just ask for things that I can easily verify because I am already familiar with the domain. I just find I get to the answer faster.

Agreed, this is just an acceleration of an already fast process.

Combine LLMs with on-demand printing and publishing platforms like Amazon and realize that even print books can now be AI-tainted.

So google will eventually be mostly indexing the output of LLMs, and at that point they might as well skip the middleman and generate all search results by themselves, which incidentally, this is how I am using Kagi today - I basically ask questions and get the answers, and I barely click any links anymore.

But this also means that because we've exhausted the human generated content by now as means of training LLMs, new models will start getting trained with mostly the output of other LLMs, again because the web (as well as books and everything else) will be more and more LLM-generated. This will end up with very interesting results --not good, just interesting-- akin to how the message changes when kids the telephone game.

So the snapshot of the web as it was in 2023 will be the last time we had original content, as soon we will have stop producing new content and just recycling existing content.

So long, web, we hardly knew ya!

well, you usually put a load balancer and multiple instances of your service to handle individual server failures. In a basic no-lb case, your single server fails, you restart it and move on (local failure). In a load balancer case, your lb introduces its own global risks e.g. the load balancer can itself fail, which you can restart, but the load balancer can have a bug and stop handling sticky sessions when your servers are relying on it, and now you have a much harder to track brown-out event that is affecting every one of your users for a longer time, it's hard to diagnose, might end up with hard to fix data issues and transactions, and restarting the whole might not be enough.

So yeah, there is no fault tolerance if the timeframe is large enough, there are just less events, with much higher costs. It's a tradeoff.

The cynical in me thinks that the one advantage of these complex CYA systems is that when systems fail catastrophically like CrowdStrike did, we can all "outsource" the blame to them.

Do you know of any fault tolerant system? Asking because in all the cases I know, when we make a system "fault tolerant" we increase the complexity and we introduce new systemic failure modes related to our fault-tolerant-making-system, making them effectively non fault tolerant.

In all the cases I know, we traded frequent and localized failure for infrequent but globalized catastrophic failures. Like in this case.

This event is predicted in Sydney Dekker’s book “Drift into Failure”, which basically postulates that in order to prevent local failure we setup failure prevention systems that increase the complexity beyond our ability to handle, and introduce systemic failures that are global. It’s a sobering book to read if you ever thought we could make systems fault tolerant.