Ask HN: What has been bothering you lately? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What has been bothering you lately?

45 pointsjulienreszka153 comments

Vent out. Maybe one of us will find a fix.

I'm mad that economic policies in France aren't based on what models say is best next action but on elections. Democracy really sucks.

I'm also very annoyed that models are censoring stuff without even clarifying what's wrong with the prompt.

I don't like that content distribution is still mostly owned by a few platforms. Something is deeply odd with that.

View on HN

Wealth concentration beyond a point which would have resulted in widespread revolution 150 years ago, but that is now being tolerated because we've grown accustomed to a level of comfort we don't want to risk losing.

If we've got a higher level of comfort, why does it matter?

Comfort isn't a single number, nor is it the only variable.

Tell me more. What exactly would you like to redistribute that wealth to? What specific measurement is your concern?

Also, please don't use the voting buttons for things you disagree with. I'm trying to have a productive conversation here.

Equality in quality of Education

As better education/tution leads to over achievement relative to natural ability. So you end up with people in positions of power that are beyond them, and low educated voter too

Ahh. Are you aware of the argument that education shouldn't be funded with property taxes, to even it out?

No, and did you mean should be or shouldn’t be?

Shouldn't be! I recommend starting there. A lot of the problems with education funding stem from the wealthy neighborhoods getting a lot more money because their local property taxes generate more revenue. Flattening that across an entire state, in the case of the US, would likely set up incentives to force the upper middle class to push up school funding.

Because some of us think of everyone else?

Not everyone is fortunate to be born smart and able to make money. And these at the bottom struggle enormously

If we're wireheading anyone, why not start with Musk, Thiel, etc.?

I don't like how HN users downvote honest questions instead of engaging with it.

Left you an upvote because I'm interested in responses to this.

I appreciate you! My goal here is to guide people who care about things to take a little step toward working on them. :)

And I got down voted. Lol.

Yes, it's presumably a problem, but you also can't know why somebody is downvoting. They might believe a comment is dishonest or distracting or otherwise low-quality or non-curious, or breaks one of the subjective site rules.

I try not to make assumptions when I get downvoted. I think: Maybe I was a little sarcastic or aggressive or I implied something weaselly; or maybe the downvoter just disagreed with me. I don't assume either way, and I don't guess about moral high ground or whatever. All my comment's points tell me is what delta of people clicked the down arrow, not what was in their heads individually.

Oh yeah, I just try to reinforce the HN guidelines when I can!

I spend a lot of time here: https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart

Housing/medical/college etc are outpacing incomes. Loneliness has skyrocketed. People are voting for fascism and starting wars. Americans like to pretend with their big houses and fancy iphones, but things are NOT ok.

Also note on that chart: younger demographics in the US are reporting significantly lower life evaluations compared to older demographics. So if you think things right now are bad, you haven't seen anything yet.

I'm unconvinced that younger people have a harder time than the last couple of generations at the same ages, and would like to see evidence that this is not simply them overwhelming themselves with social media comparisons with others.

Yes, housing, medical, and college are outpacing incomes. Which item would you want to work on if you only got to pick ONE thing?

> Yes, housing, medical, and college are outpacing incomes. Which item would you want to work on if you only got to pick ONE thing?

Why would we intentionally narrow the discussion like this?

That's something that pretend political parties do to prop up the interests of the uniparty of capital interests while squelching actual progress for the majority.

Why? Because an individual can only positively influence one thing at a time when it's so far outside of their sphere. My goal is to help people make positive change, and the only way to do that is with focus.

> Because an individual can only positively influence one thing at a time when it's so far outside of their sphere.

Not true, but let's pretend it is: then pick the parent item that's affecting all of the child items: aforementioned faux democracy. Then everything else falls into place.

But based on your various comments here, you don't seem interested in solving the root issues.

They have social media in Finland too. Go talk it out with your favorite "pro" LLM.

You can't just pick one. The main problem is inequality is rising, which means those without serious capital (which includes the young) are much less likely to see anything from their efforts. It just pops up in different ways. All my money goes to [rent, inflation, student loans, hospital bills, .. etc].

Henry George made a compelling case that land is the inherent driver of inequality issues, and I think the work being done in housing now significantly supports that theory. If you want a bunch of those choose fixed, and they all are rooted in inequality, you may want to get rid of land use restrictions on housing development.

Yeah I’d go even further. Singapore-style public housing is pretty high on my wishlist. But it’s a long wishlist.

I'm asking genuinely, is there a connection between housing, education, and healthcare becoming so much more expensive and them also being the three parts of the economy that have the most government interference (in the US)? If so is it causal?

Well yeah. Key policy choices in housing/healthcare/education/banking/etc have financialized basic human necessities, forcing the working class to give up a growing percentage of their income to the asset-holding class.

I'm not saying "all government interference is bad". For example plenty of countries prove that if you want to control healthcare costs, you need more government intervention in drug pricing, not less.

Probably reverse causal, people want interference in fucked markets

Because I believe we all deserve to have a relatively equal say in how society should function, and the existence of trillionaires is antithetical to that.

There are many more economic distortions that happen from having massive wealth inequality — too many to list in one comment — but the biggest one is that democracy isn’t possible with a certain level of wealth inequality.

In such models where individuals in a market system can influence public/private institutions for their own interest (news organizations, private think tanks, lobbyists, public/private colleges, corporations, charities, nonprofits etc etc) will be able to reroute those institutional resources to gaming elections — which is unavoidable result over the market’s long run, similar to it being impossible to defend one’s currency against speculators over the long run — thus selection pressures force politicians and political institutions to either cater to these wealthy people’s whims and the institutions they control, or to somehow (and very unlikely) bare the selection pressures that are pushing them out of office.

Given the law of large numbers, you’d presume at any point the average legislator would be captured more by these maladaptive selection pressures rather than somehow existing in spite of them.

As democracy is eaten away, we will maintain a slow decay to a Russia-like sultan oligarchic system and the comforts the majority currently maintain will slowly go with them.

I mean, this is measurable with the gini coefficient, yes. But if you generally handwave "people with lots of money", you don't have a story to tell, and then you don't convince nearly enough people of any one thing to accomplish it.

You have to pick a problem. Right now, quality of life basically keeps going up, so it's pretty hard to act on anything you might care about here.

Conjecturing standards of living is going up is overly reductive. Essential costs — housing, groceries, education, etc — have been going up for most people and hit everyday people the hardest.

Higher level of comfort in what sense?

Most people on the planet can't afford a home or start families. They can barely pay their rents to avoid ending on up the street.

Do you believe that across the planet, that is worse or better than it was 20 years ago? 40 years ago?

Do I have to believe it across the planet or just for me right now?

GP said "most people on the planet"; I'm responding to that.

Do you believe the housing crisis, living wages and affordability is better than it was 20 years ago? 40 years ago? If so, where ?

Median wages are way up. Housing affordability is down, and it's pretty easy to trace that to a single root cause.

Because we could have it so much better…

Just one example: high-speed rail in the U.S.

If you're interested, I spent over a decade as a mass transit organizer, and I think there's a pretty clear path to high-speed rail in the US. But no one likes it!

We don't. It's not about being warm in winter. That's the least important thing as long as you're not actually freezing to death. We used to look forward to the future, now we dread it, and I don't think that's just me being in an existential crisis right now, other people have said it too.

Someone else being rich doesn't make you poor.

Well if everyone was rich then prices would go up due to affordability and demand so the less rich would be poorer

That's why it's best if everyone is roughly equal. Not exactly equal, mind, I'm sure a 20:1 difference between the richest and the poorest would be much better than the present situation.

Someone else being powerful, though...

What it boils down to is that a lot of the immense freedom Elon Musk has to influence our common future, due to his wealth, comes at the expense of our ability to influence our future.

Yeah, not all games are zero sum. But "power over others" is, and it's a pretty important one, and other people are playing it whether you want to or not.

It would be bearable if they would just be rich and shut the **** up.

I’m sort of with you.

I don’t mind people succeeding at gathering wealth. Mostly the very rich stay quiet.

What annoys me is loud mouthed celebrities. For some reason, people famous for being born pretty think their opinions are all brilliant.

Garys Economics would like to have a word with you

At the anecdata level, you are right. At the global level, let’s say it is a bit different.

That's right, causation goes the other way: many people have to be poor in order for one person to be rich. Where did Elon get his money, again? Being at the right place at the right time in PayPal and being so incompetent they paid him to leave; selling overpriced underperforming electric cybertrucks to his fanbase; billions of taxpayer dollars (which directly make us poorer) to SpaceX; and most recently tricking index fund investors to buy his IPO?

I'm not so familiar with the revolutions of 1848, but it seems like most revolutions happen when a society is suffering from severe economic crisis as well as food shortage. It seems that the 1840s was referred to as "the Hungry Forties" due to severe food shortages. I don't think many people are willing to upend their lives to change a political system that isn't failing to deliver their personal basic needs. I'm also not sure if the revolutions of 1848 were primarily about wealth concentration - weren't they rather about concentration of power?

Many successful and failed revolutions happened without an economic crisis. For example, the American Revolution was led by an oligarchical class upset about taxation. The American Civil War is another example where a portion of states felt economically threatened and initiated conflict. The Glorious Revolution was almost completely ideological in nature, revolving around royalty and religion. It simply requires some powerful fraction of the country to believe they'd be better off under another ruling party, no one needs to starve for it to happen.

People who are experiencing unrest and idleness are easy to recruit -- and if you hang out with people ages of 18-30, you'll see there's no shortage of them.

My parents are getting old (I see it when I look at them), and I feel like I'm running out of time to be financially successful so they can enjoy my success while we are all still alive. Yes, I know we can enjoy each other's company without much money, but it sucks seeing those you love struggling with something and being unable to help them financially.

Whats bothering me lately? Anxiety about my future. Not being where I want to be. Fearful that I might not get to where I want to be. But I take daily steps to ensure I come out alright since hope is not a strategy.

All I can do is be consistent and hopeful.

My life is completely meaningless, I am now 30, I lost my job, nobody is hiring (only ghost jobs), I could be deported at any moment because my visa is linked to my employment, also I am 30 and I have never had a girlfriend or sex, so is it just a slow decline from here until death or what? Also everything fun is illegal, people who make cool software inconvenient to the government (like anonymous social media) seem to always be a hair's breadth away from prison time. Cool stuff is always punished and never rewarded.

Edit: an example of everything worth doing being illegal, from another comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayTV

I don't have an easy solution to your problem, so knowing that someone might have sensible words for you, I'll be the one to suggest to do something drastic.

No, not that. If you have your back against the wall, why not completely change your life? Move to another country. Spend a month in Thailand to get over your obsession with sex. Go pick avocadoes in Australia. Take heavy psychedelics. Start smoking and drinking and read some philosophy.

None of these are gonna solve your problem, but moping isn't gonna solve them either. You are 30, you are young, and you'll get over whatever stupid choice you do today. Perhaps that's what you need, rather than hoping for society to unfuck itself or you to become someone you probably are not. The grave will always be waiting for you at the end anyway.

EDIT: Fine, I'll also give you the serious answer which will get you out of your existential dilemma. You're might be going through a midlife crisis. You are not the first. It always hits one in their 30s. Figure out what it is, what it means, what meaning is for you, what the hell you are supposed to do with your time on Earth. You have done all society told you to do, and you're at the "now what? Is that it?" phase. Start with Carl Jung. It's gonna get worse before it's gonna get better, but if you take this seriously you'll grow into a more comfortable you by the end.

I know there's a word for it and that everyone goes through it. That doesn't make it better.

By any objective standards my life isn't bad. I lost my job but I'm still financially secure for a while. But it isn't good, either. Picking avocados in Australia wouldn't be any better. I'm not even going to touch on smoking and drinking to forget the pain of the meaninglessness of existence, because I know what happens to people who do. You don't want to touch psychedelics while in a bad mental state either.

I am not young, that's the problem. When I was 15 I was young. When I was 20 I was young. When I was 25 one could argue I was young. 30 is not young any more. It's not old yet, that starts at about 45, but young is over.

When I was 20 I did make some cool software that a lot of people across the internet liked. Then I had to work harder for university and didn't have enough free time to continue it and I've never done that again since, even when I had free time again.

Possibly the worst thing is the thought that nothing matters, except maybe having children, which just kicks the can along the road and won't happen for me anyway, and shouldn't. I think it's relevant because everyone who has children finds the purpose of their life is to support their children. People who don't have a much harder time with that.

It's an emotional state. Perfectly rationally, we should all just do nothing because nothing matters in the end. But somehow we grow up with the illusion that things matter, and I want that back!

I don't think you've read my comment as deeply as I hoped, so...

> But somehow we grow up with the illusion that things matter, and I want that back!

If you're going through hell, keep going. The way out is forward, not back. There is nothing anyone can say that is going to make your moment of disillusionment easier for you.

Aside from politics, the current state of corporate paralysis is killing me.

I make my living by building solutions. Companies usually are chock full of problems that need solutions. Companies are still full of problems that need solutions but they are completely paralyzed because they think if they wait a quarter or two, a model will come along and solve all their problems.

I will be on the job market soon

I will change decade this year

I still have not found my passion nor encountered the big project if my life. I am interested by too many things and have too little agency or perseverance.

The role AIs may play in censorship in future - simply by 'not knowing' or refusing to speak of something - bothers me a lot. That aligns with your worry.

I used to think their main risk was spam or propaganda. Now I think it's curation of knowledge, history, and thought.

It's shocking to me no one is talking about how Claude Fable is essentially a confirmation of the death of intellectual capital, and that it's happening now. Not 10 years from now, not 5 years from now, but literally right now. We used to romanticize stories of people born into lower socioeconomic conditions (say in the third world) and rising out of it through their intellect. That story, that ladder of social mobility, is completely dead now.

If it was that good SpaceX ipo would have died as Fable would design a one shot super duper rocket…

A lot is hype

> That story, that ladder of social mobility, is completely dead now.

This was the whole point. A secure, politically active middle class will be too obstructive to the new aristocracy.

>>We used to romanticize stories of people born into lower socioeconomic conditions (say in the third world) and rising out of it through their intellect.

Many people think the social mobility came through intellectual feats, but when you look at it carefully, it came through agency and ownership.

Anecdotally in my org (low down biotech), the AI users are quite few.

Of those that use AI, most have finally cleared out their backlogs that were just never ending before AI. That took about 3 years to accomplish.

Now they have the time to do more ambitious projects. And many are doing just that.

I do not see AI taking jobs, I see it more as everyone got a great secretary/junior to offload 'busy' work onto.

Think of even the lower level employees now having access to some of the time saving labor that the old robber barons and fat cats had with legions of secretaries and go-get-em younguns.

Time will tell what becomes of all this, it still very early days, but I mostly see the effects of AI in my current life as like a tool. A great multi-tool, sure, but still just a tool.

> I do not see AI taking jobs, I see it more as everyone got a great secretary/junior to offload 'busy' work onto.

I’m afraid that your perspective is flawed. There are many jobs whose output can’t be enhanced by offloading certain tasks to improve productivity - the output itself is replaced by AI.

For instance, a family member who is a successful freelance illustrator and whose field has dramatically shrank with the introduction of image generation. They don’t need a secretary, they need clients. The same clients that now are happy to replace 50%-80% of their demand with AI-generated imagery.

I was talking about my org, but thanks for the insight.

The death of HTTP/1.1.

I posted a link to an article on an HTTP-only website a few days ago, and it was flagged within half an hour because browsers want HTTPS.

I know all about JS injection into unencrypted HTTP trafic, but this is beyond the point.

The point is, I can not just spawn a website and make it available to the world from anywhere having only a network connection.

Sure you can, just have to install certbot.

I would rather use acme.sh and ZeroSSL for CA, but that's exactly the problem.

Why do I have to beg someone for a proof of nothing just to share a random thought?

This isn't the thread for it. But setting up a simple protocol or using one of the free dozen CDN static hosting isn't begging.

It's not a beg. Them providing this for free is causal to it being required. No free certs would mean no warnings for not having a cert. You "beg" your domain registrar harder.

(Beyond the socioeconomic topics already covered):

Why aren’t eink displays more useful? They seem like they should be. More than e-readers or a calendar.

Still waiting for an eink display on par with photos on paper. The technology still lacks good color rendition

- General lack of integrity at higher spheres (and where this can lead the world to)

- The current situation where distribution matters way more than product quality

- Lack of clear personal goals

Do you have any dreams? Things you always wanted to accomplish as a child, perhaps?

oh thanks for asking! I have never been very goal oriented, and despite how this may sound, I am quite satisfied with what I have accomplished. That's sort of the problem, I am in a too comfortable position at the moment. So for me to pull the trigger in any direction I'll need some real motivation. Most of what I am exposed to at the moment seems irrelevant or not worth my effort. I need to keep trying things and find a way to break out of my comfort zone as cliche as it sounds ;d

Of course, thanks for answering! :)

Do you have any trouble with executive function, like for things you know you should do? I certainly struggle getting started on new things, everything feels "not worth my effort", so I understand that feeling.

In what aspect of your life are you least fulfilled?

The consolidation of wealth and power to an inflection point whereafter it seems the rest of us, the majority of humans, will be left to live in some kind of post-apocalyptic feudalism. The declining standard of living, the authoritarianism, even the naked stupidity are all endurable... but that lack of hope burns like Merbromin.

The fact that anything I post online will now get slurped up by a machine and regurgitated for people who have no idea it was my work that made their prompt come to life.

Unemployment and forced downshifting. From 200k programmer to McDonald's worker and call centre worker in just 4 years...

Its brutal. Once you are out at 35+ for an even year or two - it's impossible to go back.

AI takes jobs faster than creating new ones.

ps. Just got laid off from the Temu call(chat) centre. AI IS taking our jobs.

completely devastated

And you write code? How's your product sense? Got a resume?

I designed and wrote some custom cpu(stack based RISC cpu with fixed operation/operand size) architecture simulator, with assembler and almost with forth compiler on my phone when I was homeless...

Nowadays out of tech - too tired after 11h shift to do stuff. No weekends.

Got kicked out from McDonald's for being too slow (competing with 20yr olds is HARD), gonna be kicked out from temu in 2 weeks due the AI (80% staff reduction!) despite the best CSAT...

I'm worried about having any job stability. Programmer's ship sailed away I guess. (I lost to the 40B$ AI supercomputer so it's fair :)

/venting off

I understand you're out of tech right now. I understand it's tough right now. Have you worked professionally in tech before?

Yeah, as backend programmer.

I really feel for you man. Keep trying, I know my 12k+ employee org has lifted its hiring freeze and committed to raise engineer headcount by 10% by December. I think the dark days are starting to be over for tech hiring in general, I know other orgs are hiring again too.

Strange. I took 3 years off from 2022-2025. I got a job immediately at FAANG. I did have to relocate back to Silicon Valley.

I'm from Europe and not FAANG material.

I don’t feel like I have any prospects for the future. I study a lot; I’ve read dozens of technical books, and I’ve learnt a great deal, but I depend on visa sponsorship. At the company where I work, I don’t feel valued. Internal politics are very strong, and I don’t like what I do. Even less do I feel stimulated or challenged.

I have attempted suicide once before. I wake up every day trying to improve, trying to find the strength to study even more, hoping that, somehow, I might manage to find something better. But it has been difficult.

In the news, you see plenty of people saying that people like me are ruining the country, even though I pay more tax, pay a surcharge to be able to use the NHS, and am not entitled to a billion other things.

Anyway, that’s life.

Assuming your two uses of "model" have the same meaning, I'm mad that people are seriously suggesting we scrap representative democracy in favour of government by LLM output.

I didn't mean LLM but honestly at this point why not. No way it can be worse than what we have now

The state of "Scientific AI". I know LLMs are accelerating at doing computer work, and I've experienced the acceleration of using LLMs to do science, but it's more along the lines of debugging and stitching together pipelines of classical in silico tools. I see a ton of value here along that entire pathway for LLMs, it's basically digital process development: take each step, make it better, repeat, repeat, repeat. But the ceiling are the unit operations themselves, which sure LLMs can improve the code of those tools next. But if science was held back by simply people not doing the same things faster, maybe this will really push us forward, but I have a nagging feeling of "is this it?".

I think what I'm really looking for is a model like GPT Rosalind, which has been steeped in "science" post-training, but with more randomness. Like, I think I'm looking for a GPT Mullis--Rosalind Franklin was careful, deliberate, and serious; Kary Mullis ate a bunch of acid, drove on the PCH, and invented PCR. Like, we need to invent psychedelics for LLMs. Some way to let them relax their weights, explore new pathways, and come up with some absurd ideas by connecting random ass dots from the natural world. I want the model to say, "hmm, that's weird". This isn't just changing the temperature, we're missing something deeper.

I think frontier science has always come from serendipity: a bright thinker, listening to a presentation after having stared at some small experiment, but having trained for years on "biochemistry" so the foundation and loose guardrails are there.

I don't know, I'm feeling adrift. Does this resonate with anyone else?

Brazil's national team performance not only in this World Cup, but the last 20 years. I don't even care about football, but as a kid who saw Brazil win the 2002 World Cup, it's hard to see it do so badly since.

And the future seems gloom overall. Not looking forward to it. I used to.

My finances are ruined, I can't get a job because of my past history, living in a small town with no work (but stuck with paid of house) and my age. Hoping my vehicle sells here soon. It's a bad day. I haven't been able to eat today from stress.

I went for a walk in the woods. It was beautiful and amazing. There were the last of the lupine (my daughters favorites flower). A couple deer. Talked to a friend. Many have it worse, but our struggles are the worst struggles we experience. Anyone need a cheap remote errand boy/assistant with lots of life experience/managed dev teams/managed IT? Or to finance an AI use case into a product with multiple potential available pivots?

Hi, it does sound like your are going through some tough times. I made a tool that allows to evaluate flip deals maybe that could help you get an urgent income before you find something more stable.

https://reloadium.com/reloadium-flipaudit/

Got a referral to work as a Solution Architect at a company from the Senior Sales Person who I will literally be paired up with to talk to customers. Outgoing architect also said I would be perfect for the role. Got on a call with their internal recruiter who cut me off partway through most of my answers about my background and then received and automailer rejection.

That someone who would be bearing the impact of a bad hire recommended me and some recruiter who openly admitted she didn't know much about that side of the business made the call to drop me left a pretty bad taste in my mouth about the company

Not as a way to get you back in but I believe such behavior should still be reported. To both, the person who referred you and someone who manages said internal recruiter (ideally C levels if it's a small company). It is costing the company a solid candidate and they'd prefer to know as well.

I'm trying to figure out exactly how to best use AI, but not just as a chatbot user.

How to integrate it to solve useful problems. Make delightful products.

So many things that used to be intractable now are probabilistically solvable and that needs some things to be changed fundamentally and a lot of assumptions dropped.

The randomness that AI introduces poses a plethora of challenges.

I think local models will be a big thing eventually, not everything needs a frontier model and a lot of useful work can be done with surprisingly little hardware.

I also want to get back to non-LLM models.

What bothers me is that this post is now flagged. Whatever happened to this place? I blame it on Reddit shitting the bed, and its milquetoast demographic invaded this space.

No idea why you would blame reddit…

I agree though that flagging sucks. Don't like a topic? Move on…

There seems to be no accountability to flagging anonymously.

i live in the US and cant get something sent here to save my life

i used to get weekly packages from indie european stores and samples from asia

since tarrifs, that has dropped to zero, with 90% of my shipments being returned for cryptic reasons (like 'incomplete address' when the full address is correct and visible) or outright 'No' from sellers

its starting to feel less like random failure and more like "system working as designed" :(

Profit margin of authentication providers.

They must be ridiculously high

I never really thought about this, as I work in sectors where authentication is usually selfhosted. Why is authentication out sourced so much? Is it the worry of data leaks and the administration effort that comes with it?

Because no exec gets fired if a 3rd party was the problem.

Systems down costing millions in sale? = fired

Systems down due to Azure issue = oh well

The combination of outsourcing to India and AI and how it's destroying western job markets to squeeze out more profits to a few on top.

Those people in India want to eat too.

Yea, and there's over a billion of them. Why do they need to destory a country of ~10 million people for the indian population to "eat"?

Interesting to see the posts almost exclusively macro here. What about the micro. While I benefit from an urban environment in which raising a family is easier I don't even have to get into a car there's still so many daily challenges and unglamorous moments I have so much sympathy for everyone else who's raising kids... it still feels invisible to many.

Hello fellow French, I understood a decade ago our country had turned into a gerontocracy, it's just how it is and it's mechanical, nothing you can do. I left the country and never looked back, I go there on vacations to see friends and family, but there are just better options to work and make a life, I suggest you relax and do the same.

I can relate to the sentiment I moved abroad last week too but I know the country is totally fixable and it has to be done now or pay more later one way or the other.

https://julienreszka.com/blog/france-needs-45-years-to-grow-...

-I am keenly aware of so many environmental warming triggers that indicate irreversible exponential climate change acceleration in 2030.

-There is nothing I can do; everyone in power to do something is corrupt and actively working to accelerate it.

-I have forseen death on scales beyond your wildest dreams so much sooner than you think

Mine is that I got 70% of my work challenge sorted, just by discovering AgentKey by Chainbase. Any developer who plans on scraping websites and social media should look into using this unified Api key, researchers are also not left out

The feeling that it is theoretically impossible to give everyone equal opportunity. The more I study about this topic, the more convinced I am getting about it.

I am worried that we only have censored AI models so far. Where is the model that I can chat about sexual fantasies, life, death, drugs and pistols?

Local.

Even local models are censored. At best, there are so called "uncensored" RP models.

Saas subscriptions for something that should be usage based. It's great for the business, not that great of a deal as a user.

- My country's descent into fascism.

- The rights of my children being legislated away.

- The people that could do something about it have chosen not to.

- Any time I talk about the above, I feel like I'm shouting into the void and no one cares, either in-person or on the internet.

- I still have to go to work tomorrow.

Are you living in the USA?

Have a look at the many foreign streamers raving about their visits for the World Cup. It’s refreshing and incredibly uplifting to hear other perspectives.

I have been watching a Japanese YouTuber attending the different matches. https://youtu.be/UwVI852dzE8?si=2lcRSlpb1-zo08jV

Please let me know which ones you found interesting.

There’s not much I can gather from that guy, as I don’t speak Japanese. I will say I’ve seen several media bits showing Japanese fans remaining after games to pick up trash. It makes me think we could benefit from some parts of Japanese culture.

The main takeaway I got is he said Mexico City people were very friendly and welcoming. For the US, he said the cost of living is high compared to Japan and everything was expensive; he buys groceries in the US so he can cook to cut down expenses.

The Japanese believe that cleaning up after yourself is a moral obligation; similar to what the Germans believe about punctuality.

Interesting. I guess I'm Germanese. (Japerman?)

I am in the USA.

I’m glad that people are having a good time with the World Cup. Truly.

I know I’m feeling negative at the moment.. but this feels like the “have you tried yoga?” of your president started 2 wars, continues to undermine public health, got a lot of people killed, Congress has completely failed and is complicit in the wrongdoing. It’s bad..

Finding a job in tech that would genuinely excite me.

The mainstream Job search tools are not very flexible so I built a tool where you search based on what you are excited about. It outputs results from the web with why it’s a good fit, Wellbeing & Flexibility, Pay & Benefits, Stability & Security

https://reloadium.com/reloadium-careers/

sound. my neighbour has some kind of AC or the like that is constantly humming around 30db in my room. there is no way I can sleep with this, even with earplugs. talked to him but he does not care, so I'm reporting him... and that takes time, with no guarantee that that will fix it.

maybe this sound much smaller than economic policies in France but for me this sucks big time

I can relate to that had noisy neighbours too and wanted to do illegal stuff to them but eventually learned negotiation is skill and pretty effective. https://julienreszka.com/blog/difficult-conversations-don-t-...

Talking to toxic people.

Its so exhausting walking on eggshells, and engineering discussions to avoid conflicts.

I can relate to that. I wrote a blog post about it with easy fixes. https://julienreszka.com/blog/difficult-conversations-don-t-...

I'm tired of people not taking responsibility for things they do and not being held accountable for their actions - politicians mostly; for example - currently in Poland there's a controversy around Zondacrypto (read here: https://www.politico.eu/article/a-missing-investor-millions-...); I'm so disillusioned that I believe nothing will come out of it - it will again be a case of "nobody did it, it just a thing that happened". Or our politicians escaping to Hungary (and USA) to avoid prosecution (and still being paid out money even though they're not in Poland and cannot possibly attend parlamentary sessions) where they'll live to spew hatred and how they were wronged. Sure, you did nothing wrong and these are just repressions, nevermind the millions that you stole during political campaign.

And generally people thinking about themselves and not considering that we're living in society: "let me blast music so that walls shake and fuck neighbours", "let me just leave my mattress here on the curb blocking the path, somebody will pick it up", "let me not clean after my dog shitting on the sidewalk", "I'm seeing people queuing to get on a train, let me just not notice the queue", "let me just walk down the street with my eyes on the phone, surely other people will accomodate me and get out of my way". This is the variation of the above, but to the civic level; just don't make lives of others harder.

I’m from the USA and understand your sentiment. Unfortunately, the behavior of people rarely surprises me.

It's the constant flood of information. People forget and corrupt politicians bet on that. So I made an app that helps generate investigations with an entity event matrix so people can have a more comprehensive understanding of what happened. https://reloadium.com/reloadium-investigations/

Overuse of the AI agents as a concept and the mental burnout it creates.

(A)Social Media and the destructive power it has on society.

I have been working for 10 years and unable to afford a home to start a family.

I have about 350k USD and live in New Delhi.

It's insane to read that US$ 350k doesn't afford a home in New Delhi... Even in Stockholm that is enough money to outright buy an apartment, not necessarily dead center in the city but definitely within a short ride on the metro.

Performative work. People doing things because other people do or because “that’s the way it’s done”, even when that approach is clearly fucking wrong.

The infinite growth of capitalism is bringing us to the edge of climate collapse, a real existential danger and nobody seems to care

Money talks on this one. The consumer has to make the choice to go without or push for regulation of exploitative corporate practices.

The companies exploiting the earth will have more money and can buy out the others so... I don't see a way out of this while they have to compete against each other

Even if that was true, how to convince enough people, given that the enemies own the newspapers and so on?

Elon Musk has directly caused the deaths hundreds of thousands of impoverished people due to his reckless dismantling of USAID (https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-elon-musk-killed-hun...). He's also an open white supremacist most recently responsible for instigating race riots in Belfast (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/06/13/m...). Read his social media feeds: they are literally Stormfront rhetoric at this point. But people don't want to hear these things. They just want to cheer for the trillionaire rocketman. It's sick and infuriating.

Martin Fowler

Care to elaborate?

I just had commented under a thread about it, right before this.

Age, death.

Trump's extreme corruption.

fascism

If you could improve one small, concrete thing about your government issues, what would it be?

Reparations. The only reason we’re in this mess is because the white portion of the southeastern US was left to fester and breed hate for the past century and a half.

Ah, yeah. I assume you've read Foner's "Reconstruction"?

When was the last time you worked with an organization working on that issue?

Ah yes, a snapshot into a brief window where “we did good enough.” I’d recommend Black AF History by Michael Harriott and On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed.

Volunteering for Civil Rights - last week, what about you?

Positions don't have to be filled. Blank votes should be counted and, if the majority , throw the election; or, even better, the majority of people on voter's rolls, should be the condition to be elected.

Excellent. Do you know of someone who agrees with you, in your same municipality?

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