Anamon

> A friend of mine from the US told me that one of the most surprising things about visiting Shenzhen was how silent the downtown was, because almost all the cars are electric there

Can that be true?

I've read at some point at which speed on average the sound of tires on tarmac will be louder than the sound of an engine, and it was a surprisingly low speed. I don't recall the exact number, but I remember that it was below the average in-city traffic speed (save stop-and-go averages).

This definitely matches my real-world experience. I can't usually make out engine sounds in passing traffic, because the tire noise is so freaking loud. I certainly couldn't blindly tell electric from ICE by sound of a passing vehicle at, say, 40 or 50 km/h.

> you just can't beat the efficiency.

High-rise buildings are extremely inefficient compared to low-rise buildings, in pretty much every dimension except amount of people packed per area.

I just had a horrifying flashback to the Creative Labs driver download page... some wizard-style abomination three levels deep, nothing just a simple link.

Still, the archive was complete and you'd end up getting what you went there for, so still infinitely better than the average experience today.

> Bill was in charge of MS at the time

No, he wasn't anymore.

My favourite bit was this:

> Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?

I don't subscribe to that absolute of "everybody".

Counter-example: me. I define enough money as not having to worry how to pay rent, bills and food, and being able to do spontaneous purchases without thinking too much about if I can afford it. I'm at that point with my medium-high middle-class income, and I don't want to earn more. I probably wouldn't refuse if it was offered to me, but having more money than I do now would also very likely make me feel very guilty. I don't need more, and I'm already in an incredibly luxurious position that I feel pretty conflicted about because of how much it was all down to luck.

I suspect most of my best friends, who are predominantly about as not-rich-but-comfortable as me, feel similarly. Otherwise we probably wouldn't be such good friends.

Indeed, the most authentic memories you have may be the ones you never think about.

I've met my fair share of people throughout the years for whom this wasn't self-evident. Anecdatally, they also don't tend to stick around for too long. I suspect it's because teams don't tend to warm to people who already enter the door with a "you're doing it wrong".

But yes, the article can basically be distilled into just Chesterton's Fence.

People who value their time more highly than wanting to spend 5 minutes reading something that took someone 3 seconds of effort to produce, if that.

I visit HN because it's supposed to surface interesting, novel, engaging, challenging articles. LLM output is the extreme opposite of that.

The Chesterton's Fence one also says in the caption that the fence has been removed, while in the image it's actually wider than in the first panel.

Yeah, nobody took one second to look this over before posting it directly from the slop machine =(

That's not true. The Data Protection Officer doesn't need to be a dedicated person, an employee can simply be given that role in addition to their regular roles. There are rules to prevent a conflict of interest. But I don't think many small corporations have a dedicated DPO.

> The solution to children in Africa suffering isn’t me living worse

It may very much be, to be honest. The causalities aren't that mysterious.

This isn't a technical article, though. It's about contracts, so one party's self-admitted habit of ignoring contractual obligations seems very relevant and not a random ad hominem.

I don't like being that guy, but wow, the AI slop copy on that website is so terrible, it's almost impossible to read. Every other sentence means absolutely nothing.

Slop website indicates vibe-coded software, and I wouldn't let anything like that even look at my code.

Exactly, looking at a few of these traces is enough to realise that it's a waste of time to read them. A friend once described it as like reading a fever dream, which seems fitting. They're a necessary crutch for how the tools work, but probably should be considered an internal state representation that only sometimes accidentally seems to make sense.

Wasn't there a study recently that even found a model's performance was sometimes better when the "reasoning" was nonsense? As in, no clear correllation between what the reasoning says in a human's interpretation, and how the model actually did with the task.

I sometimes read the traces out of boredom or morbid curiosity. My favourite bit with Claude is how, even if you give a very comprehensive prompt in complete sentences, almost every trace will contain a variation of "the user asks me to X, but their thought cuts off mid-sentence."

Fever dream.

On the one hand, I'd love to see Cursor/Grok/xAI/SpaceX/Musk disappear forever. On the frustrating other hand, Cursor is the absolute best LLM IDE by such a ridiculously wide margin. Everything else feels so broken and ramshackle in comparison.

My employer let us evaulate all the big providers for a month each before having a vote on which one we'd like to keep. Cursor won almost unanimously. (This was before the xAI takeover was even on the horizon, otherwise I would've voted differently myself.)

You're still overlooking some glaring issues in your scenario.

How many tech workers can affoard such a homestead? How many will be able to afford it once millions try to go down the same path after the economy crumbles?

Is running a profitable farm so simple that anyone can do it after watching a few YouTube videos? It seems to me that if it were so easy, so many farmers wouldn't struggle and give up farming.

If there are suddenly several times as many egg farms as before because of all the career changers, will eggs still be sold at $5 a dozen?

How will all of these homesteaders compete against the scale of conglomerates in an increasingly automated industry?

The amount of people voluntarily leaving the business to "do something with wood" right now is insane. We always used to joke about it as inevitable, but now it seems to actually be happening, for everyone at the same time.

Not my experience, an I'm a heavy daily user of frontier models for software development. Have they improved at all in the past ~2 years? Not really, at least not noticeably. We've improved some of the tooling around it, developed some mitigations for the many systemic weaknesses, and wrapped some things in a for loop to iterate faster. The worst they'll ever be? Maybe, but maybe also almost as good as they'll ever be, looking at the sharply diminishing returns. Reactions to every new model seem to always be roughly evenly split between it being better or worse.

And what do we have to show for it? We can localise some bug causes faster, and it takes some of the mindless boilerplate work off our hands. Which affects maybe 10-20% of our actual job, and even there occasionally eliminates the gains again right away because you have to babysit or manually redo it, without always knowing when and where that might happen. That's not what I'd call a revolutionary increase in efficiency.

And this isn't just my impression, it's what I hear from pretty much all of my professional peers, which includes people waaay more experienced and smarter than me.

Internet Archive provides their scans in various formats and AA seems to mostly archive a very poor one. I think what you're describing is the result of a post-processing step for one of the space-saving derivatives. It's worth looking up the book on the IA and see how it looks there. Very often, I found that it looks excellent on IA, but terrible, borderline unreadable, in the AA copy. The difference is also obvious in the file size. Generally I found the quality of the original scans of books scanned by the IA to be excellent.

I'm not sure if this was ever really confirmed, but it's been said that in the beginning, before they were big enough for record labels to care, they used unlicensed MP3s to build up the library.

This is heavily dependent on where we are talking about.

I live in a fairly rich place and here, taxis were fine, too. When Uber came, they mostly just eroded salaries and protections for taxi drivers, while lowering the quality of service for customers (though also, for a short while, the price). The best I can say about it is that it accelerated the digital transformation of the industry a bit.

On the other hand, I heard from several people from other places in the world that the arrival of Uber meant that they could finally get a safe and reliable ride.

I don't think humanity will run into any capacity problems because of that, due to how grotesquely overpopulated it currently is. As far as I see it, every country in the world should be well below replacement rate, for the long run. Setting aside some problematic side effects stemming from our current social system setups. A small fraction of the current world population would probably enable everyone to have a much higher quality of life, if organised properly. We probably don't need to worry about who builds our cars when there are close to 10 billion of us. Where we'll get our food from, on the other hand -- I think that's where the real crisis lies.

Digital effects also look a lot worse (as in, less believable) than real special effects, pyrotechnics, etc., and I think the quick editing also has to do with that. You have to make a lot of cuts and shaky shots in order to not let viewers' eyes rest on the CGI's uncanny valley for too long and realise how wrong it looks.

I watched the first Rambo very late, only about two years ago, and I was amazed at how much better the explosions look than in any movie I've seen in the past two decades. You can afford to actually show what's happening when it looks that good.

I've noticed a similar thing in martial arts movies. You can save a lot of effort and money with the quick, frantic editing. The alternative is that the choreography and cinematography have to be really on point. If you just shake the camera around a lot and do a cut every second, you can get away with amateurish fighters doing whatever, nobody will really notice.

I'm not sure I see the benefit. Everyone can make up their own what-ifs in their mind. But isn't the joy and value in movies as mass media the fact that it's a shared experience, that everybody saw the same thing that they can talk about, interpret, and discuss?

Talking about a movie after having seen it, or reading online discussions with different viewpoints on it, like this thread, is my favourite part post-movie-watching. There'd be none of that if everybody makes up and watches their own version.

It's very close to the truth in any case. Poor service providers can take comfort in the fact that there's usually no considerably better provider that people could switch to. The race to the bottom is at peak speed.

That may be true for the relative amount, but it doesn't negate the assumption that since at least around the turn of the millennium, a lot of our knowledge, culture, and communication happened purely digitally and is at severe risk of being lost. The thought that nobody apart from one person considered it worthwhile to archive the public web (or at least did something about it) still seems crazy to me.

Also, keep in mind that humans are historically very bad at predicting what of their times might be of interest to future generations. As a representation of the times, even some slop content has its place.

ID3 is hell...

The answer to every question about how to use/write it is the counter question: well, which software or player do you want it to work with? Here are your 8 mutually incompatible options.

> Even if it didn't, it would still be the easy part because you're just building computer algorithms that are like specified and defined and testable.

I'd challenge that. Have you looked at the specifications of any reasonably current compression standards? The AVC one is some 900 pages, I think.

Entire communities exist around discussing the strengths and shortcomings of different codec implementations.

The most bewildering thing about the redesign is that the button to visit an application's website -- arguably the most important one since one would assume people are on the site to try out alternatives -- is now hidden somewhere far below the fold.