HN user
jim dot plunkett dot 321 gmail
If seems this should make obsolete the setup of having a separate computer (e.g., old laptop) to isolate Facebook properties, or am I missing something where a separate machine would be advantageous?
(I avoid FB like the plague but may need to use it for some biz uses where they effectively host too large a share of the intended market)
Health insurers tripled their profits while covering 80,000 fewer people 2015-2025 [0]
What is the difference between the 32 developed countries who successfully deliver healthcare to all their residents, vs the wealthiest country of all of them who still fails, and yet spends twice what the rest spend?
Private Insurance runs the whole thing.
And it is a sh*tty business. Insurance company profits do not account for near the 2X difference in spending. That is in the massive waste and bureaucratic overhead of every party trying to keep their heads above water while jumping through the insurer's hoops.
Entire bureaucracies exist just to oppose the insurer's bureaucracies.
And feeding those bureaucracies consumes an insane amount of physician resources.
And exactly zero of it delivers any healthcare to patients.
[0] https://healthcareuncovered.substack.com/p/2025-big-insuranc...
And you are saying overcharging an insurance company is on the same level as an insurance company denying medical care and directly killing the patient because they don't want to pay?
And your examples justify obviously incompetent insurance people vetoing doctor's orders, exactly how?
Doctors are generally forbidden to treat patients without directly examining them and knowing their cases. How is it that insurance companies are allowed to make life-and-death decisions over medical care —with less competent bureaucrats (who may or may not have a medical license)— without ever even seeing the patient? How is this good for the patient?
Of the 33 developed countries, 32 have figured out how to deliver medical care to all of their citizens, and do so for roughly half or less of the cost in the US. Moreover, those countries are seeing continued longer lifespans, while lifespans in the US are declining, again while spending twice the money. Clearly, for-profit medicine and insurance performs worse on every metric.
NO
The insurance companies are running the system more than any of the others — it is the finance "wizards" there who put the constraints on the rest of the system. I'll agree somewhat on the pharma companies too, who are also extractive.
You even said it yourself: "Hospitals try to eke out the most out of insurance companies...". Exactly! Because the hospitals and doctors are constrained to do "WHAT IS IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE PATIENT" — that is their charter (and BTW, that is also the magic phrase to use whenever questioning what they propose to do for a patient or escalating a case). Perhaps a few hospitals or physicians occasionally overdo it, and there are some frauds, but your accusation overall is BS.
The insurance companies have no such constraint — if they do have such a mission goal, it is to OBTAIN MAXIMUM VALUE FOR THE SHAREHOLDERS. And the insurance companies are literally so amoral that they will reward agents for killing people for profit. That is not rhetoric, it is sworn testimony before congress of a person who cut off a patient's coverage, causing their death, and got promoted.
I have seen directly and personally an insurance company deny coverage for a test ordered for a close family member by the Chief Of Cardiology at Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic, and that physician are so overbooked they have ZERO motivation to order anything not necessary for the patient in front of them. It took days, and significant extra expense to get it reversed.
There is no way on the planet that anyone in an insurance industry should be able to override the doctors orders of the Director of Cardiology for Mayo Clinic. Or any physician, for that matter.
Medicine is one of the things that should never be run for a profit, and if I were on Luigi Mangione's jury I would acquit on Jury Nullification.
Right, because in an actual free market where DHI was not heavily subsidized, DJI drones would cost MUCH more, and the other drones would be competitive.
Same for BYD vs Tesla and every other car. It is easy to win in the "free market" when you give away your product.
Same for Uber and Lyft for many years — subsidized by VCs until they gained massive scale, effectively killed all the other competition, and now the prices have gone up when they have a lock on the market, a large moat, and the VCs want a return. In my area, what was a $30 ride to the airport a few years ago, far cheaper than any airport service, is now $89.
The entire concept of a "free market" is idealized to the point of fiction.
It was a person free-running in a cave. Here's one article about it [0] to get you started, and here's another [1] of multiple 9-day studies showing the fairly immediate shift to 24.5 - 25 hour cycles (we're actually Martians?).
[0] https://howandwhys.com/michel-siffre-time-experiment-body-sl...
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339110740_Living_Wi...
You are not alone.
Recalling from college neuroscience classes and subsequent reading of research, the studies show the ordinary human sleep cycle when unrestrained adds about a half hour per day, so 24.5 hours is 'natural'. Long-term studies with all time cues carefully removed ended up with subjects on a ~50 hour sleep schedule, as in awake 36-38 hours and sleeping 12-14hrs.
This is also why it is easier to travel across time zones to the west than to the east.
How huge is it on a continuous basis? Ii's low earth orbit, so only available for a few hours after sunset, AND requires a new satellite in position every 15 min. So for two hours extra illumination you need to support a couple DOZEN satellites, costs of build, launch, control, and maintenance. Even with 100% bookings —every night— it is dubious finances. Seems much more like a scheme to generate a money flow from meme-investors they can siphon off into their pockets then oops, it fails.
If this is somehow an actual problem, it is far more solvable with tethered blimps or drones, battery pack in a container on a truck, a spool of wire, and light banks as big as you want. AND that isn't subject to clouds (but would be subject to high winds, which would also be more likely to cancel/postpone the event than clouds).
Meanwhile, they go beyond the already massive disturbance of existing terrestrial lighting and overwhelmingly screw up the biologically critical light signals used by every plant, insect, animal, and human in the zone, and do it at multi-kilometer scale.
Edit: Even if the revenue potential is actually huge, it is no justification. For any intelligent person, the actual sponsorship message will be "Tonight's lighting brought to you by [Insert_Company_From_Which_I_Will_Never_Buy_Anything_Again]
This level of stupidity is beyond evil — the kind of lunacy to make a good argument that humans should not exist.
>Driving alone kills far more people every year than disease spread by anti-vaxxers
That is a seriously dubious claim. Just for COVID, or Influenza, deaths from nonvaccination are well into six figures per year in heavy years. While most of those can be attributed to the non-vaxxed person themselves dying of their own ignorance or obstinance, they also more widely spread the disease and many of those deaths are innocent bustanders, either those who can not get vaccinations for actual medical reasons, or for whom it doesn't provide full immunity. Even at the 10% level, the deaths from each are comparable.
The solution for non-vaccination is also a LOT easier than the solution for not driving — implementing full vaccination protocol is a LOT easier and faster to do than building full public transport system covering the entire continent.
Moreover, even if it existing stats show driving with higher deaths, it is irrelevant — two things can be bad and we should fix both, not just dismiss one because there is another evil. Most critically, that is also PAST data, so using it is driving in the rear-view mirror. The effects of growing non-vaccination compound and grow exponentially. When the numbers cross, it is already too late.
No, those three things are NOT the same.
Exactly zero of those things you list also spread disease throughout the population, and are aggressively anti-science. They only arguably affect the person themselves and the overall HC costs.
Moreover, for the active items you listed: driving, contact sports, skydiving, rock climbing, etc., nearly everyone doing them takes real precautions to minimize the health risks — their motivation is to continue doing the event, not to get injuries which would prevent them enjoying their activity.
In the passive harms you mentioned, the people are passive, not active. No one intentionally becomes obese or sedentary or ruins their diet; they simply fail to have the motivation or to learn the knowledge required to do better (or they have actual conditions that prevent them from doing so). There is nothing intentional about it.
In contrast, the anti-science anti-vaxxers willfully maintain and aggressively spread their ignorance and impose their ignorant bad decisions as costs on society and increased health risks for everyone.
The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of taking safety-measures to improve health and safety of their activities — instead, they actively evade free, safe, and effective health and public health measures.
The anti-vaxxers are doing the opposite of passively failing to maintain their health — instead they actively deny science, medicine, and public health issues, and actively evade recommendations or mandates.
As the study illustrated, they are literally more stupid and anti-society than ants. They freeload off the health care system and herd immunity built and maintained by their smarter peers.
Exactly THIS!
I found an excellent way to avoid premature abstraction and optimization and to write better software in general was to explicitly consider v1.x a throw-away.
Build something expedient that works well enough to deploy in the field, get actual user feedback and system metrics (e.g., where are the actual bottlenecks). Do a few iterations on user feedback and system metrics. NOW, you are much further down the road to a true final spec, and you can use that real information to design the real system to scale up on.
One Test Is Worth A Thousand Opinions.
This plan first tests your ideas against the real world of users, hardware, and data flows, and keeps a lot of technical debt out of the scaling system.
I discovered it a bit by accident, having previously been really big on early abstraction and planning, but sort of having to do this in one startup, and it was a real eye-opener how well it worked.
Yup, did some digging on Tylenol/acetaminophen before I had some surgery, and it's a real danger. Oddly enough, it seems downing a whole bottle won't (usually) end your life as it gets mostly directly eliminated rather than metabolized, but taking just around 2-3X the high-strength dose sustained over 3-4 days can destroy your liver — at that point, you have about six weeks unless they find a new liver for you (obviously, there's wide variance in actual dosages and reactions, but that was the general median). For someone with serious acute pain, who doesn't know this hazard, it'd be pretty easy to self-medicate and load up and lose track...
OTOH Ibuprofein, doesn't have anything like that deadly profile, but enough gut and other issues.
>Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs?
Hell NO!!
Ubiquitous on-the-ground lighting is already disrupting plant, animal, and insect life cycles.
Adding a blanketing sun reflector illuminating five-plus square kilometers at a time will obliterate critical signals to everything living there, and won't do any good for the humans.
And nevrermind the astronomy.
It is an abomination and nothing but a scheme by amoral people to separate other fools from their money.
Same here; it's expensive to not be a crook at heart (at least short-run expensive. I think it is far better long-run) .
Yup. All it will take is one juror who understands Jury Nullification [0,1], and they've got at best a hung jury mistrial...
Hence, the alleged action of Luigi Mangione.
If the law of the government doesn't catch up, eventually the law of the jungle will. But maybe not in their lifetimes.
As President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."
I used to make similar arguments.
But I also now look at actual results, and they are not merely late, they are far less than promised.
Globally competitive EV? Not against the Chinese competitors (Hint: it's why he plans to merge Tesla into SpaceX). Self-driving so good cars would be assets you could run your own self-driving Uber-like service (and customers paid a $10K upcharge for the ticket to do it next year)? NOPE, Tesla can't even do their own self-driving reliably. And whatever happened to the Tesla solar roofs? Can't get one.
Making a car company profitable enough to justify the insane multiples? NOPE, will never happen. But he's selling Tesla now on the Humanoid Robot "vision".
SpaceX did better on self-landing boosters, but they still have serious issues with scaling it up, and competitors are catching up.
But the physics of orbiting data centers make them not absolutely impossible, but very uneconomical. Every problem supposedly solved in space is easier and orders of magnitude cheaper to solve on the ground.
If you haven't yet noticed the pattern, Elon is always selling the next big hype wave. It is always the NEXT thing that will justify the insane multiples. If you want to buy and hype meme stocks on the next-greater-fool theory, good luck; you will do well for a while as there are many fools around.
>money and venture capital
Yes, this.
I used to think AI news summaries would kill it, but having tried Kagi news (first impressions as a daily driver for a week), I no longer think so, particularly because Kagi are doing everything right.
Nearly everything I could think of is in there, yet it still feels unsatisfying and oddly less informative (perhaps because I'm less engaged?). Kagi builds a summary from multiple sources, cites the sources, and extracts various impacts/angles (business, technical, industry, historical, etc.) and different party reactions, etc., and more. Yet...
I really don't know what it is and I'll have to use it more to try to identify it. My current conjecture is that it is still more satisfying and informative to read a reporter's view of the event, even if I disagree with it, than a homogenized summary.
I'm also finding similar reactions to articles where I can tell parts are just lifted from the AI — it breaks my engagement with the story/report (kind of like a badly done cinema film breaks my suspension of disbelief and disengages my attention from the story).
All true, but anyone putting up a site would need the bankroll to handle such a lawsuit through to winning, and then be able to collect on the SLAPP judgement (which the non-paying employer would likely have put up obstacles to collection). That's the big problem with lawsuits — you start out in a losing position just because of the cost to defend.
So a random individual without the bankroll to defend is likely vulnerable, and this is a libel suit, so unlike a copyright suit, you can't solve it just by taking it down. You posted the allegation, now you must defend it. Yes, the truth is an absolute defense against libel, but you still need to defend it that far (through pretrial motions, discovery, etc.). Even getting to file for a dismissal is likely to be $five-figures with a good attorney, and you NEED a good attny. OFC, if you have a good case, a good firm may take it on spec, but....
And of course, how do you know all the postings on your site are actually fully factual and not exaggerated in any way?
Because, any honest employer falsely accused would be rightly very pissed off.
Tough problem.
Externally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market — precisely because it sells things at below market rates.
Free markets are where players compete on quality, efficiency, and supply. Prices are a result of cost and supply and provide real information on these factors. Competition for customers selects the most effective and efficient producer.
Sustained efforts of selling at a loss to gain market share is the exact opposite. The entire purpose is to corrupt the free market by sending false price signals which SUPPRESS free market competition and push market share to whoever can burn the most capital (whilst providing an actual service/product), not whoever is most efficient or highest quality or lowest actual price provider.
Uber and AirBnB are better examples of your "selling at a loss to gain market share", where they burned capital to undercut prices for close to a decade on falsely low pricing to destroy incumbents.
Spending on R&D while developing expensive technology is different and arguably very much a part of a free market, and is not what I was talking about.
Spending capital to steal your competitors' technology, and then spending more of it to make it available at below-market rates, is absolutely not a free-market activity.
Just because it is not stopped by someone enforcing a free market, does not make it a free market.
Externally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market.
Nevermind government edicts & bans -- this seems like reason enough for them to require Know Their Customers, require ID, and shut of certain nations.
Failing to have done so seems to have allowed 25000 fake Chinese accounts to walk off with their product...
OFC I wouldn't trust the Chinese enough to ack their models the time of day, but Anthropic seems to have allowed far more ... yikes
Thanks for checking in, Captain Obvious! OF COURSE there are other sources of funding.
The point is if you have access to far greater scales of VC funds than most of us do, then build hard tech companies, not software, so you build a moat. You might note his company is named "Gigascale Capital"
So, sure, if YOU or I can access that capital, fine — availability is still scarce compared to access to AI to develop software, and you should build hard tech not software.
Yup, seems to be exactly the point.
Hard tech requires a lot of capital — money. He has the money. You and I don't have the money. So he won't find you or I competing with him. There's his moat.
If it just required clever use of AI to make a great company, that'd work. But you or I can also access the AI. And, just maybe, one of us finds a way to be a bit more clever than he is. Oops, there goes his moat...
The Stack Exchange poster seems to be confusing "State Of The Art" with "Best Practices".
Meanwhile, Wikipedia specifically calls out "Cutting Edge" as specifically synonymous with "SOTA" [0], Cambridge defines it as "the best and most modern of its type" with zero reference to general vs limited availability in the definition or any of it's numerous examples [1], and the same from Merriam-Webster [2].
Having studied and worked in multiple technology fields ranging from software to mechanical & aero engineering for four+ decades, your post is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone even try to make such a distinction between SOTA vs CE. I think it could be a very useful distinction if it were to get into common usage, but IME it is far closer to unique than common. The sibling comments to your assertions show pretty much the same thing - it would be useful, but it isn't common.
Promote it as common and you'll find pushback. Promote it as novel and useful, and it'll likely spread.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_the_art
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/state-of...
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/state%20of%20the%...
A fine example of Goodhart's law: "When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement."
Measuring open source contributions as a way to judge prospective employees used to be a good measurement.
Of course, prospective employees started to not only contribute to OS projects because it was good, but to make sure their contributions were high and noticeable — contributing not for the good of the project but for their own good, and now with amplification of AI 'contributions'.
So, measuring contributions to open source projects is now approximately worthless for evaluating prospective employees.
It is not merely showing proof of age
It is using the proof of age requirement to require a much larger ask -- full proof of identity
Age verification could be done with any of a variety of mathematical systems showing you have a proven age-valid ID but not revealing your identity. But no one is suggesting they build and use such a system.
That's an interesting and possibly useful distinction , but it seems unique to you. Spreading it as "We should categorize the AIs this way" would be a good argument.
But the way SOTA is generally understood by other users of the language, it refers to exactly the team, technology, & techniques defining the cutting edge in any field, regardless of the whether the technology & techniques are available outside of that team...
Indeed most of them wont do it without threat
OTOH, there are those, particularly those who actually get training and practice in the high-performance zone, who realize the physics of the situation, and feel positively naked driving out without a seatbelt/harness, or helmet where appropriate.
Yup, but I'd bet the number who complained approached 1800 and the number of complaints that verbally threatened, or alluded to "having to reconsider whether we run it" vs making a specific written threat was much higher. And yes, they could have been more clear about it.