thatwasunusual

You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage [...]

This way of thinking is what's wrong with USA (among many other things).

You don't (or at least shouldn't) hire lots of people because it's cheap.

"Good artists copy; great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso, but was also used by Steve Jobs, ironically.

I've been doing the same-ish workload the past week (the graph shows the whole month), and it's been consistently on $10 USD/day.

Yesterday, however, spiked at $50 USD, and after just 2 hours of "activity" today, it's already at $10 USD.

What's going on?

I put Proxmox on it [...]

How, exactly? Doesn't it require phyiscal access to the server?

A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland.

Same in neighbouring Norway. Hi, neighbour! :)

When I was in middle school (1970s) we learned how to file a tax return. For some reason this is no longer taught today.

We have the same problem in Norway; youngsters aren't taught proper private economy at school, just the "normal maths." Which leads to people getting into financial trouble because of stupid stuff. :/

Thanks for updating me on the US tax system! Hope all is well over there! :)

If it's that simple, how come it's so complicated that the US have an entire business line profiting from tax filing?

A Norwegian "ENK" ("enkeltmannsforetak"; self-employment) deals with a more integrated state reporting environment, stricter cash-sale controls, more emphasis on formal bookkeeping and VAT/cash-register infrastructure, and a more pre-filled tax ecosystem.

You can get a long way cheating the system if you deal with cash only, as banks etc. are required to report everything about everyone to the government, but these days it can only take you so far.

My understand is that the US is much more depending on self-reporting.

But given that the US has its own industry involving tax reporting, and having lived there myself, I don't believe you when you say it's "simple." ;)

Having a proper system for handling citizens' main priorities is important. What happens in 3rd world countries is a struggle that UN++ needs to focus on.

It's completely unbelievable that so-called developed countries are struggling with this in 2026.

In Norway, we've had a more or less automated tax system for many years; every year you get a notification that the tax settlement is complete, you log in and check if everything is correct (and edit if desired) and click OK.

It shouldn't be more difficult than this.

Good for you. Not sure how your comment contribute to ... well, anything, but... Good for you!

Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but is this a fact, i.e. has it been proved?

Not related to this release, but their trade-in for old hardware is a joke to me. My 2019 MBP i9 2.4GHz w/64GB RAM and 2TB SSD is worth $200. It seems to me that they don't even want a trade-in; it makes much more sense to me to just keep the old MBP and use it as a dev server, home assistant, docker hub thing or something.

You assume that what smart people _do_ is the same as what humanity _ought to do_.

Even if every genius on Earth spent their days trying to get rich, that would show something about incentives, institutions, fear, status, and survival. It would not automatically prove that wealth is mankind's highest purpose.

Rats also optimize for calories when the maze is built that way. That does not make cheese (or whatever rats prefer) the meaning of life.

Modern capitalism often acts like the scoreboard is the game. That confusion is one of civilization's recurring clown acts.

Cost wise it does not seem very effective.

Why is this so damn important? Isn't it more important to end up with the best result?

I (in Norway) use a homelab with Ollama to generate a report every morning. It's slow, but it runs between 5-6 am, energy prices are at a low, and it doesn't matter if it takes 5 or 50 minutes.

And IMO that's what should be done.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea and all that, but this is another pgsql "solution" that is tied to the database layer, when it should be in the application layer.

I like to be database agnostic, and while I prefer PostgreSQL on production, I prefer SQLite on the dev layer. You should never have to HAVE TO use a specific database to make your APPLICATION work.

It's similar to when we wrote all our business logic in eg pl/sql [...]

What do you mean with "when"? /s

I dread companies who still have logic in their databases when it's not necessary. <insert sad face>

There's a lot that hosted services with extra features can give you.

I totally agree with that, but in my experience 99% of "application developers" don't need all these features. Of those you listed, I only see "backups" as a requirement. Everything else is just - what I said - features for when your application is successful and you want something streamlined.

Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, [...]

But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.

the pricing seems phenomenal

I'm in Norway, and I wonder if I see different prices than people from elsewhere in the world? Here it says $1.7K, and I can get the LG UltraFine 6K 32" for $2K, with the benefit of being bought from a Norwegian retailer (think guarantees and shopping security).

To be clear; I have never tried either of these monitors, so I can't tell if either is any good. :D

I am writing this comment from a 2019 i9.

Same here, but...

I have to charge it from the right hand ports. I think that is dumb, but it did solve the issue.

I _had to_ do this for a while (around 2023, I think, not that it matters), but I no longer have to. I don't know what has changed, unfortunately; I haven't reinstalled anything, and I can't say I have uninstalled anything either. It's really weird...

Nice. It would be nice to have an option to create a per month print as well.

> FYI, HTTP headers are case insensitive

Since when are they case sensitive?

[...]

Can someone do an ELI5, and why this is important?

No (human) developer would _add_ tests. ^/s

If a model draws a really good picture of a pelican riding a bicycle there's a solid chance it will be great at all sorts of other things.

Why?

If I hired a worker that was really good at drawing pelicans riding a bike, it wouldn't tell me anything about his/her other qualities?!

It's not nessessarily the best benchmark, it's a popular one, probably because it's funny.

Yes it's like the wine glass thing.

No, it's not!

That's part of my point; the wine glass scenario is a _realistic_ scenario. The pelican riding a bike is not. It's a _huge_ difference. Why should we measure intelligence (...) in regards to something that is realistic and something that is unrealistic?

I just don't get it.

We are getting to the point that its not unreasonable to think that "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" could be included in some training data.

I may be stupid, but _why_ is this prompt used as a benchmark? I mean, pelicans _can't_ ride a bicycle, so why is it important for "AI" to show that they can (at least visually)?

The "wine glass problem"[0] - and probably others - seems to me to be a lot more relevant...?

[0] https://medium.com/@joe.richardson.iii/the-curious-case-of-t...

after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped.

I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).

However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)

If a normal person did this, the SEC would almost certainly call it insider trading.