trimbo

project a decade into the future can increase costs

A very good point.

I don't agree we can blame Trump for HSR though. 2/3 of the time that has passed have had Democrats in the white house. HSR is nearly all pure-California-style self-inflicted wound. And honestly it's just the most visible project California has failed with, there are many others. The one I'm personally angry about is Prop 1. We're now 12 years after, and have no additional water resources even broken ground. It's shameful.

The thing is, everyone's interpretation of "environmental impact" is different. To one person it can mean, "don't put the construction garbage in the river." To another it can mean "not one single Delta Smelt can be scared because of this construction."

And because it's so flexible, in states like California where we have aggressive environmental laws, it's leveraged as the NIMBY trump card. When it can't block a project, the process is used to make it inordinately expensive and take decades. One example would be the environmental studies for the CA High Speed Rail.[1]

[1] https://ifp.org/fast-track-democratically-approved-transit-p...

The Brick has been helping me with phone overuse. getbrick.com (I have no association with the company)

On your laptop, route those sites to localhost.

This video about Shoreham was my entry into the Proper People's channel. If you like this kind of abandoned structure exploration, I recommend checking out their other videos.

Hard disagree. When you've had to chase through a change in untold and actually unknown numbers of duplications of code in different permutations and fix them because they are all on fire simultaneously, you'd disagree too.

The other end of this spectrum is dealing with the architecture astronaut's up-front abstraction. Totally overengineered for solving the initial requirements, but then constantly needing new hacks to make it cope with new requirements as they come up in the normal course of work.

That's why there's a balance in there, it's somewhere between "always duplicate code even when you know a lot about the problem" and "always write abstractions even when you know very little about the problem."

Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.

GNU was originally developed to "clean" UNIX from the AT&T license.

So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value?

Infrastructure doesn't produce value overnight. How long did it take the Interstate System to provide measurable value? I asked Gemini. Supposedly increased national productivity by 25% over 39 years[1]. But if you drove on a newly finished interstate in 1959, you saw the same cars just moving a lot faster.

That's what we're seeing right now. People can produce an incredible amount of stuff really quickly with AI. Is it directly connected to measurable productivity across the entire economy? No, because, realizing a mass productivity increase from infrastructure takes time.

[1] https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

Yes whoever made this website apparently doesn't understand how LLMs are being used for massively profitable consumer products like Instagram.

Yup, adopting Go is exactly what I've done too.

Typed, garbage collected, fast to compile and run, stdlib that includes just enough to work out of the box. I really don't like writing it by hand but for the LLM it's perfect.

You can choose not to ship the 99.

They also included 2,000 prompts based on posts from the Reddit community r/AmITheAsshole, where the consensus of Redditors was that the poster was indeed in the wrong.

Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. This needs to be studied against people in real life who have a social contract of some sort, because that's what the LLM is imitating, and that's who most people would go to otherwise.

Obviously subservient people default to being yes-men because of the power structure. No one wants to question the boss too strongly.

Or how about the example of a close friend in a relationship or making a career choice that's terrible for them? It can be very hard to tell a friend something like this, even when asked directly if it is a bad choice. Potentially sacrificing the friendship might not seem worth trying to change their mind.

IME, LLMs will shoot holes in your ideas and it will efficiently do so. All you need to do ask it directly. I have little doubt that it outperforms most people with some sort of friendship, relationship or employment structure asked the same question. It would be nice to see that studied, not against reddit commenters who already self-selected into answering "AITA".

this is going to destroy world economy on every angle

Oil prices were around $100 for a lot of the early 2010s. It's been three weeks. Calm down.

Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.

There's absolutely no reason government couldn't pay competitive rates for software engineers. They do it for doctors and administrators of state-owned medical centers. Not to mention football coaches

https://openpayrolls.com/justin-wilcox-146812860

It was 2008; "big box" software was largely seen as obsolete to the vast majority of developers.

Well, I'm just reporting it as I understood their decision in the moment. I was working on The Sims at that time, and I assure you, retailers still mattered to us bigly.

In 2008, the app store was launching, and physical software was still sold at Targets, Walmarts and other large retailers. A 30% margin was roughly what retailers would make off of physical software sales. By setting the App Store to be the same, Apple was signaling to retailers that they were not trying to undercut their margin, and keep a healthy relationship with them.

Steak is the meat that people pay the most attention to in this regard! People will pay hundreds of dollars for a few ounces of steak solely based on how the cow was raised and fed.

For steak, I disagree with the article about stigma of eating bugs. Feeding cows bugs will save money, no doubt, and that might help cost on the low end of the beef market. Steak is a different thing though. A "bug-raised, bug-finished" steak would have to be incredible to overcome the stigma.

You should be commended for being principled and sticking with what you believe. Thanks for your candor.

Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.

Did you sell all of your stock?

I wonder what Steve would think of the time it takes to apply minor OS upgrades to iPhone and Mac!

coal is expensive and unreliable

Please elaborate. China is building an absurd amount of new power plants, and most of that has been coal, with last year hitting a new high of coal deployment[1]. Why would they do that if it's expensive and unreliable? The letter you linked is advocating for a new gas plant.

And no, I am not advocating for building more coal plants.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4658e336-930f-49db-abc9-0036ee0ea...

Which is fine as well if that's really the case (which I don't think it is, Europe apparently makes up ~1/3 of Apple's total Airpods revenue).

So your belief is that, if DMA didn't exist, Apple still would not ship this feature in the EU?

And Apple is now saying "That's fine, we'll instead adhere to the law by having our product do less. Don't buy it if you don't like the reduced featureset."

Someone at Apple did math on this and it's not worth their time to make this feature interoperable just for the EU market. That's because of this law. They wouldn't have even considered it without the law.

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

This article is lacking detail. For example, how is the data sharded, how much time between indexing and serving, and how does it handle node failure, and other distributed systems questions? How does the latency compare? Etc. etc.

Except that, unlike a human, this particular "reader" can then regurgitate millions of copies of that content and all other content it sees, in seconds.

I wish people would stop treating this topic like it's not nuanced. It clearly is not as straightforward as either side would like to think.

her legacy will forever be stained

Interesting. My hot take is 99% of the time non-founder CEOs end up on the dustbin of history, successful or unsuccessful.

Terry Semel. John Akers. John Sculley, Carly Fiorina. Except among those of us in tech, all are now long forgotten failures. Even Gil Amelio, who made one of the most genius acquisitions ever, was fired and his name lost to the sands of time. My bet is nobody's going to remember Tim Cook or Sundar or Satya in 50 years, maybe even 20.

Possibly the only non-founder CEO who has made a real legacy in the last 100 years is Elon. I would also say TJ Watson Jr. but I very much wonder if that many HN commenters know who he is!

If this were true, the market for EVs would decline in entirety

I was just reading a different article[1] that pointed out 4 of the top EV sellers in the US (Tesla, Ford, Kia and Hyundai) have announced Q2 drops in sales. BMW is the another top EV seller whose sales dropped in Q2[2]. Of major sellers, only GM has risen.

It's probably too early to say that "the market for EVs" is declining, but this doesn't seem great.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-sales-q2-2025-e2087...

[2] https://www.theautochannel.com/news/2025/07/01/1549392-bmw-r...

"Bathroom for customers only" is a completely reasonable ask from a business owner, and is what Microsoft is doing here.

Sorry yes I meant modem

I live in SF and Comcast doesn't charge me to have my own router.

I pay $130 for 1.4gbit and unlimited data. It's expensive but I also have no other choices. Sonic stops only one block over and we haven't been able to convince them to wire up my block.