uxcolumbo

Some quick follow up thoughts:

But all the data I could find concludes that more people have moved up than down.

I based my comment on research done by Pew, OECD, and economists like Saez/Zucman. The middle class is shrinking both upward and downward, but a significant share is moving down or stagnating, not up!

Even billionaires themselves comment on this: https://fortune.com/2026/07/17/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-artifi...

So you're right, we made great progress since WW2 and no the sky isn't falling down.

But my point is we're now going down a dangerous path that leads to authoritarianism. If the convicted felon and his gang aren't being kicked out then corruption will increase, more surveillance (i.e. Flock and Palantir), more austerity and more loss of our freedoms.

3. Democracy, imo, is quite healthy.

It's not though. Listen to historians like Snyder or Heather Cox Richardson. Or listen to financiers like Anthony Scaramucci and his guests. Our democracy is being dismantled and if we don't stop them, then we'll end up with a sham democracy like in Russia.

What do you do when the battery eventually dies.

For example the Withings Scanwatch Horizon is quite expensive but it seems it doesn't have a user replaceable battery. So what do you do when the battery can't hold a charge anymore?

Just gave you an upvote. It's a much more considered reply and you probably should have led with that instead of your original (now flagged to death) comment.

But I don't think it's about screaming the sky is falling down... anyway, more thoughts on this later.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said in 1933: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

That's why. Historically, when wealth concentrates at the top, it tends to stay there unless there’s strong counterpressure.

Wealth brings political influence and that influence is often used to preserve the status quo and not change the system so the poor would get 5x or 10x richer.

If everyone were genuinely getting better off, i.e. the necessities of life not getting more expensive or wages rising in accordance to things getting more expensive, then the rich and poor divide wouldn't matter as much.

The problem is that’s not what we’re seeing. What we get is:

Wages for many people haven’t kept up with key costs. Housing, healthcare and education have surged. Meanwhile, gains at the top have massively accelerated.

So it’s not “rich up 10x, poor up 5x.” It’s closer to gains being concentrated while a lot of people struggle to keep up.

Your previous statement that the middle class is shrinking because people are moving up is not 100% correct. Some move up, but most decline.

That’s why inequality matters. It’s not about envy. It's about preserving democracy, rule of law and not falling into a pit of corruption.

See what's happening with Mr Doge, he's happily using his platforms to meddle in foreign elections. Recently supporting Le Pen (another criminal, found guilty of embezzling European Union funds) and also supporting AFD and other extreme right wing parties. You have to ask yourself why.

These are not arbitrary things.

Based on your original post you seem to only see overall progress from a zoomed out view. Yes we've made immense progress, but my point is that in the last 10 years things have gotten way worse.

You don't seem to acknowledge that the divide between rich and poor is rising immensely (e.g. your 'disgusting BILLIONAIRE' snarky comment) and is the root of many of our problems and that voting for Billionaire backed politicians like the current President and the likes - will lead us down a path where we will lose our democracy and end up like Hungary did or god forbid Russia.

And since you're not OK with those things I mentioned this administration is doing, I hope you'll make your vote count and vote out the threat to our democracy and world order.

There seems to be little point in discussing this further, if you continue to imply that I said we've made no progress overall. Of course we did and I've already stated that in my previous comment.

To address your 'What's your point?' question - here are a few things:

- Society needs a strong middle class and social upwards mobility. The middle class is shrinking and this is by design. If we continue to vote in Billionaire backed politicians, who rig the system so it favors them and screws the rest of us over then the middle class will continue to shrink and poverty here will increase.

- Under this administration, the progress we've made to address our pressing problems (like global warming) is being rolled back. Are you OK with making it easier to destroy natural habitats and increase pollution, just so some Oil or mining companies can make more money? Are you OK with consumer protection rights being weakened?

- Mr Doge thought it was a good idea to plunch many more people into poverty or removing vital resources to the poorest of the poor and causing their death, e.g. cutting USAID because he thought it was woke. You good with that?

But hey, I'm glad you've got a better TV now.

All those things are not necessities of life. Food, shelter and energy have become more expensive and poverty rates have barely shifted and are currently getting worse.

Your response is basically 'Works on my machine!'.

And speaking of touching grass; what do you think the recent change of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) under this administration will mean to our commons?

I'll tell you, it means the new rule will make it easier to legally destroy wildlife habitats. And this on top of all the climate protection policies this administration is eagerly rolling back, because solar is woke or something. I guess you're OK with that too, since it doesn't impact you (yet).

Even though living standards have improved in the last 100 years overall, it's not a guarantee it will continue like that, if we let the Robber Barons take full control again.

Which self driving supercar is that?

But I'm not talking about luxuries like super cars that most people couldn't afford.

I'm talking about the necessities of life. Food, shelter and energy have become more expensive and under this administration's policies it's not getting any better.

Poverty rates have barely improved and under this administration desire to reduce SNAP budget heavily, what do you think this will do to child poverty rates?

Of course life now is better than 100 years ago.

But do you really think life has been getting better in the last 10 years say?

Do you think trickle down economics works?

Are you happy with the way things are going under this administration, which favours those BILLIONAIRES you mentioned, but couldn’t really give a damn about the rest of us or the commons?

Are you OK living in a future where there are zero checks and balances and the .1% fully controlling and owning the political and policy space, i.e. the return to the Robber Barons era?

So what are his actual technical accomplishments? Other than marketing and promising FSD is ready tomorrow or we'd land on Mars in 2026, or getting Billions from tax payers in subsidies that allowed him to be as successful as he is ---- what are his actual technical accomplishments?

Has he invented anything, e.g. a new space bracket, or some better radiation shielding or anything that's in heavy use now at SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, etc?

EDIT: clarity

I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments

Are these his actual accomplishments or is he just taking credit for the accomplishments of others in his companies. Just like he took credit for being a founder of Tesla and pushing aside the actual founders.

As a senior dev?

What sector?

I believe the new libs are now all in TS and not Clojure anymore.

Does that mean TS is better suited for computational art?

Or are there other reasons why this lib was moved to TS?

What makes it your favorite Clojure project?

Why are iLemmings comments dead / flagged [0] [1]?

Can't even reply inline and have to reply in the main thread.

I found them informative.

Lots of Clojure haters here I guess?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375393#48387700

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375393#48387382

A bit turned off by their 'contact us for pricing' line.

Why not show your pricing like any other provider does?

Been a bit out of the loop.

What's wrong with using very short sentences like 'That's not X. That's Y.'?

What's a good source to learn how to develop like this - to create HTML / CSS structure that's accessible?

EDIT: ignore. I can see you have some links in your profile. Will check it out.

I'm a long time Thinkpad user and the integrated trackpoint allows my hands to stay on the keyboard and also move the mouse around and click on things.

I don't get benefit of having a trackpoint detached from the keyboard.

What's the advantage over having a mouse or a trackball?

Can you share your setup how to achieve what you described? I'm curious.

Thanks for clarifying.

I did have some issues with how Clojure is managed

Yes there was some drama a few years back and then Rich wrote his post 'Opensource is not about you'. It was a good post.

Opensource is not easy and you might argue the reason why Clojure is so stable and backwards compatible is because of the way it's managed.

Luckily we didn't end up with a scenario where Rich completely stopped. I think there was a recent case of an opensource maintainer (who works in academia) stopping PRs due to an entitled user. Can't remember the project.

But equally, is the current form of stewardship fit for purpose for the next 10 years of Clojure, i.e. to increase adoption by businesses? Don't know. Maybe something can be learned from how Linux is managed. I think Linus experienced similar bottleneck issues back then.

I’m actually very interested in yank

I think you mean Jank: https://jank-lang.org/ ?

I'm quite excited about Clojure for GO projects.

EDIT: clarity.

What made you stop using Clojure? Lack of Clojure jobs? Or something else?

Thanks for that. These details are important for newcomers, because it seems the original commenter isn't happy with the core team's process and 'feels like it's falling apart' is hyperbole and subjective.

For future readers: Clojure is known to be extremely stable and backwards compatible. It doesn't suffer from the same churn, fatigue and breaking changes that the JavaScript ecosystems experiences for example. To get to that backwards compatibility it requires a different process.

Of course. But for people not in the know and looking outside in, they don't know what's going, i.e. why is someone who's been using Clojure for years and building a business with it making these points every few months as you say?

To counteract FUD it would be useful to give a few more details.

Not sure this type of response helps and referring to someone who is active in the Clojure community and tries to build some cutting edge stuff as 'this guy'. (Did some digging and hyperfiddle looks pretty cool).

I think it would help to understand why he is talking about this 'every two months' and then try to address his concerns.

Would be a shame to lose people who are active in the community but not heard.

Cognitect is a holding of NuBank (since 2020 I believe).

Doesn't that mean the core developers are now funded by NuBank?

Isn't it in their interest that 'the core language (Clojure and Clojurescript) to not feel like it is falling apart'?

And what do you mean with falling apart?

I'm new to Clojure, so the above is a genuine question.

What are your prompting and general tips for using Gemini effectively?

And what use cases do you think it’s best suited for?

What harness would you recommend for the open-weight models?

I'm curious about your Clojure setup. Same as GO, I think Clojure has very strong backwards compatibility.

If trying to avoid the cloud, like OP, which hosting option is suitable for Clojure, what do you use? I believe Clojure (JVM) has higher RAM requirements?

And GO has pocketbase.io which looks quite interesting. Do know whether something similar exists for Clojure, or maybe it's straightforward enough to compose your own by using various Clojure libs?

I don't envy you Boris. Getting flak from all sorts of places can't be easy. But thanks for keeping a direct line with us.

I wish Anthropic's leadership would understand that the dev community is such a vital community that they should appreciate a bit more (i.e. not nice sending lawyers afters various devs without asking nicely first, banning accounts without notice, etc etc). Appreciate it's not easy to scale.

OpenAI seems to be doing a much better job when it comes to developer relations, but I would like to see you guys 'win' since Anthropic shows more integrity and has clear ethical red lines they are not willing to cross unlike OpenAI's leadership.