zer00eyz

To this articles credit, it does start out with normalization and design!

There needs to be more emphasis how important this is! I cant tell you how often I see it done "badly" (we let our ORM build the db for us). The best text I have ever found on this is "Database Design for Mere Mortals", over the years I have bought more that a few copies and I always end up giving them away to those in need (and there are always people around in pretty dire need).

The one thing I would say is missing from this article is to not be afraid of using postgres for "stupid" things. Cache, queue's, and so on, especially on the road to launch.

One should also not be afraid of having more than one Postgres instance, especially if you're using it as a work queue.

Lastly there is a stupid amount of power in Postgres roles (its "user" system). The manual here is somewhat OK, but really undersells richness that it makes available to you.

Compute Is Becoming a Competitive Moat

No, it is not a moat.

The story here changes dramatically when you start to look at the facets of the industry that the poster is skipping over.

At the semiconductor level, TSMC’s advanced-node capacity—particularly N3, which underpins much of the AI accelerator ecosystem—is approaching full utilization through at least 2027.

MS bought more GPU's than they had rack space for: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-has-ai-...

Open AI bought out the memory: https://x.com/kwharrison13/status/2029248559388746168 but they have no means to consume anywhere close to their order.

Meanwhile both google and amazon are consuming a bunch of TSMC capacity to build their own ai chips, bypassing NVIDIA ... And as for them, they seem to be addicted to burning power to keep scaling, and that is a massive problem - if the next gen chips burn more watts for the same amount of work that is only going to exacerbate the power issues were having not help them.

Tokens are just Gacha for business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game - It is software you dont control and you are going to pay for a cache miss. That isnt a model that is sustainable (even more so in the authors multi agent flows).

At the point that prices come down, (and they will) you're going to see a lot of corporations move from the cloud to on premise or back into colocation.

https://tornyol.com - A ycombinator company just killed its first bug: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/drones/autonomous...

Ukraine admits to making autonomous kills on people 2 years ago: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou...

Slaughterbots Sci Fi short was 6 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

Today this is buildable, many models will happily help you glue everything you need together to make swapping in a new version of YOLO to track humans viable.

AI researches are out there worrying about the paper clip problem, about the singularity, about cyber security, about bio weapons, and drug manufacturing.

None of them are thinking about forward looking threat actor models.

You miss spelled the word stupidity.

Anthropic is, in particular, bent about safety. The problem is they are concerned about yesterday's threats.

The models that are out, and can be run locally, already open a pandoras box of concerns that we will never be able to put back.

but most of the AI investment is in compute

Some people thought that it was misguided when they extended the depreciation cycle of the current AI build out year(s).

In terms of raw performance, there is still some headroom (maybe) but those gains are going to be marginal when you look at the amount of compute per watt (if its more than 5 percent I will be shocked). And that push is going to create a whole other set of problems (cooling is going to be an issue, it already is).

It is fairly likely that this hardware buildout has more legs than one might suspect based on history.

The lack of critical thinking I'm seeing in some of these projects is horrific.

Yesterday I noted in another comment that I am having lots of Lawyers and Writers ask me pointed questions about "docker" and "agents" that make them sound more like JR engineers.

It's two groups of people who, as a profession, spend a large amount of time reviewing their own work and the work of others with a critical eye. Writers edit, Lawyers review evidence and every bit of content that their oppositions produces. Both groups (when doing their job well) aren't just critically thinking, they are being diligent and dedicated.

Lots of people are treating LLM's like an oracle (technical ones as well). Because our culture values moving bricks faster, with out taking into account if they are going to the right place, or even if they are the right bricks. (See: https://www.business.com/articles/management-theory-of-frank... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study for why "bricks" matter).

This is already going on.

When lawyers and writers are talking to me about "docker containers" and "agents" I assure you that the amount of code out there is going to grow.

I tell people this, a lot.

Its now a polite way of saying "I dont want to work on this project" without having to go through the effort of thinking hard enough about the problem to put the "go away" price on it (or even worse having to DO the work I dont want to do).

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...

Except the Ukraine kind of went out and built it.

People in this thread keep talking about DJI, and off the shelf US drones.

Ukraine has move so far beyond commercial products (but still in use) that it's laughable.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/ukraines-drones-can-n...

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/60152

A drone isnt terribly hard, or costly. It is a solved problem. The interesting bits are the software and even those are "easy" -- more so with "ai" in the aid of development. Ukraine isn't paying for "testing" either, they just send things to the front and try them against Russians.

Hiring and firing is hard. Creating a strong and healthy culture is hard. Defining success, and steering the ship to it is hard.

A big subset of these issues are American business culture.

Public companies basically cannot evolve their form, because boards and shareholders will rarely agree to leave money on the table for an opaque long view that prioritizes culture over profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. makes a lot of this possible.

Other corporate structures are possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Never going to happen in your lifetime.

Salt water, is nasty, it gets everywhere, the environment on boats is damp. Ships are complicated and require constant effort to keep running.

Any sort of "automation" you build in is subject to those same environmental conditions, and wont last long.

And you can not add memory after purchase because it’s integrated/soldered on.

For as much as I dont like this aspect of modern computing, I understand why it is done from a technical perspective. Power, heat, and performance are all "better" when ram is on the motherboard vs in a "stick".

I do consulting, I see lots of teams using LLM's to "speed run to a legacy code base".

Much of what goes on in corporate America is not blindness its accretion. They simply dont have the culture to evolve. The devotion to next quarters numbers and share holder value play a massive part in this.

As a late Gen X I grew up when the "it's 10pm do you know where your kids are" ad's ran. When "just say no" was all I heard for a decade. When sex ed was marginally controversial. Honestly, I remain shocked that I never got arrested for some of my shenanigans. The rest of it was drinking, drugs and partying.

I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.

Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.

As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -

The "high level waste" is the stuff that takes 10k years to decay.

The big things that you get out of reprocessing nuclear fuel (other than usable uranium) are plutonium, Strontium, cesium ... the rest of the material left over (4%) gets embedded in glass and dumped in a deep pit and forgotten about.

The things we might use (plutonium, strontium) have some rather "questionable" applications:

https://thedefensepost.com/2026/07/08/darpa-nuclear-waste-dr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India–United_States_espionage_...

However, the most fun I had was joining 100+ ship bomber fleets

Bombers Bar!

In a twist of fate, my corp found one of their fleets sitting in wh space waiting on their scouts...

We did the only appropriate thing and bombed them.

I think I giggled for about 3 hours after that, and recalling the story brought a smile to my face.

is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal

And here lies the problem that ever one wants to burry their head in the sand about.

Can one, in theory, make safe nuclear reactors. You bet you can.

The thing is that you cant leave a bunch of "we will deal with that later" problems laying around. In the case of the US thats spent fuel rods. Should one worry about these, no, but you also don't want them as the slats on your kids mattress frame. They are fine where they are.

The French, because of fuel constraints, built fuel reprocessing into their nuclear "system" (and it is that, a whole system). We just leave spent fuel sitting around as a "later problem", because for us, its just much cheaper to mine and refine more uranium than it is to clean up the "spent" fuel we have.

The moment that you need to build in reprocessing (and solve that pesky later problem) the economics of nuclear stop making sense.

When you install Go, it does just that, to some approximation; it will try to fetch from the module proxy first and fall back after that fails.

Go is telling you that your VCS has a deficiency, without saying it out loud.

That proxy should be your own repo... but git sub modules, sub trees, sub directories are non starters for 99 percent of cases...

Git is an amazing tool, and if you want to manage your development like the linux kernel its dam near perfect. Most orgs dont work that way, and the tools and machinations that we have built around these shortcomings are rather burdensome.

I long for google to productize piper for the rest of us.

Good call out, and an interesting case I was unaware of.

It looks like this is another facet of the "bitter medicine" that we're seeing around housing in general.

The first article that I saw pointed out that there is a correlation between productivity and regulation (of construction permitting etc). I would believe that because it has a corollary with "housing starts" (a measure of new construction) and its regional strength in the red/south portion of the country.

And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

I hated Gleba at first. I have come to love it, and it might be my favorite part of space age. Embrace its organic nature, stop trying to centralize an focus on "flow"...

Nauvis is a monolith, then gleba is micro services...

Look at the stress hormones people live with.

https://research.senedd.wales/research-articles/poverty-and-...

Does being poor cause mental health issues, or are mental heath issues a cause of poverty... The answer here clearly better access (read free) to mental heath care, and it wont have the impact one would think (see the UK data).

Look at other stats like rising infant mortality

You mean the attributions tied directly to maternal complications: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr033.pdf

The thing is we changed how we collect this data, to something that would be considered bad: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/13/maternal-mo... - There are tons of criticism on how we collect this data, they are valid, if you dont like this source, find another its a mess of our own creation.

dropping IQ etc.

The largest root cause is that people spend too much time on their cell phone dumbing themselves down. Think about that one... no one feels the need to elevate themselves, they are happy to spend time on what amounts to leisure. Would you have sympathy for the person who gets fired cause they chose to play 18 holes of golf 5 days a week rather than do their job?

The chart you're showing, absolutely reflects the reality of some of the most productive segments of our economy.

Ford now makes more cars, with fewer people. Sears used to have people who took photos, laid out catalogs, opened envelopes (with checks in them).... Amazon has none of that. We replaced switch board operators, with mechanical, then digital switching. More calls routed, fewer people required. go back 45 years and "draftsmen" was a job - replaced by auto cad.

All these industries have seen massive productivity.

Are the people flipping burgers more productive? Plumbers? Welders? Teachers? Nurses? -- to some extent yes, because of technology but not to the same extent as the previous businesses. Anything that qualifies as "service economy" work has not seen the same gains as Ford (see: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/phenomenal-gains-in-manufactu... )

purchase a house.

This is a functionaly unmovable number. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

you can't afford rent

Because we as a society have drastically changed how we use housing: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... -- Multi generational housing was a thing. Having roommates was a thing... the premise of "golden girls" would be lost to a modern audience, because cohabitation is dead. The premise of "bosom buddies" would get canceled for its insensitivity, but no one would understand because boarding houses are all but gone.

Building every one in the world an American style house, would cripple the globe. Concrete, Sand, Copper, Wood are going to become massive problems long before we get close to getting the job done.

Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket.

You think that vacation homes are causing the housing crisis? Are eroding wages elsewhere? The industry of these locations is TOURISM, and a fair bit of it is international. (Not Nantucket).

It's not like whaling is going to make a comeback to make Nantucket a viable place to live again.

Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"

Plenty of Americans look at musk and say "lets eat the rich" ... the problem is that the rest of the world has those same hungry eyes for us.

half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing.

The 350 million Americans looking at the top of the US economy and crying need to turn around and take a look at what's behind them.

There are something like 7 billion people behind them, worse off.

"I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful." ― Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House

Do you know what's the count?

No one does. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno... and we did not take advantage of the event to get better data.

And were not done at that site. It looks like they are going to have to replace the whole New Safe Containment structure. https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protective...

No one is in a rush to do that.

Chernobyl is going to be a problem on a time scale that most people can not comprehend. It already requires a "atomic priesthood" kind of outlook... https://www.zygonjournal.org/article/id/14327/

Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history...

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/inadequate-con...

Some of the more notable such accidents include:

In China in 1992, a cobalt-60 source was lost and picked up by an unsuspecting individual. Three persons in the family died of resulting overexposure;

In Georgia in 1997, a group of border frontier guards became ill and showed signs of radiation-induced skin disease. Eleven servicemen had to be transferred to specialized hospitals in France and Germany. The cause of the exposures was found to be several abandoned caesium-37 and a cobalt-60 sources of varying activities, abandoned in a former military barracks that had been under the control of the former Soviet Union;

In Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, two cobalt-60 sources in their shipping containers were sold as scrap metal and ten persons were inadvertently exposed to radiation and had to be treated for acute radiation syndrome;

In Peru in 1999, a worker put an iridium-192 industrial source in his pocket and suffered severe radiation burns;

The most serious of these accidents occurred in the south-central Brazilian city of Goiânia in September of 1987. he Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission sent in a team and they discovered that over 240 persons were contaminated with caesium-137, four of whom later died.

These things should be somewhat easy to keep under control, yet we cant. There are currently 90,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA. We keep hearing that the cost of nuclear is cheaper than gas... because we just leave the problem sitting on site. The moment that you either dig the massive hole in the ground to dump this, or build a fuel reprocessing site(s) that economic value pretty much disappears. And fule reprocessing doesn't get rid of the problematic parts, only concentrates them, you still need a hole.

We're talking about Brown students here.

Im going to guess that it is a safe bet that the 50 cheaters are all legacy enrollments.

1/2 of the graduating class is there for the education, the other half is there because the parents are keeping up the network.

I had first heard of the concept of doing this to trees as it related to the production of arrows...

printed menu was a middle/upper class

Distinctly and many of the menu's I looked at were from private events.

But mutton was fairly common then and has fallen out of fashion in the US.

Venison went from "common" (1800) to rare (by 1900 we at all of them). Early restrictions on hunting were around deer.

The same with Turtle soup and mock turtle soup. Interestingly the mock version was made with calf's head. Apparently this was a texture thing (Im guessing high gelatin content in the head).

The interface into the data is, well, shameful. It would be nice if one could pull up hotel menus (rather than private events) by year. From browsing Boston menus it was interesting to see the early ones (for dining not event) be limited and the later ones (1907) look more like a cheese cake factory or diner (a bit of everything). Im guessing this has to do with the availability of industiral refrigeration (made not harvested ice) coming into use.