FredPret

This is unbelievably amazing. Instant favourite, along with the Apollo 11 replay site https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

The Nazis built a secret weather station way up in Canada, out of a U-boat, and it stayed there until 1981. The batteries died after a few days, though.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_weather_war

Agreed. If you love it, also read the Baroque Cycle, REAMDE, and Fall. Cryptonomicon is the best but it all fits together.

I grew to like vi after thousands of unpleasant exposures, but I'd like to see the day the New Yorker writes about vim at all, nevermind about how simple it is to use

I owned the tiniest sliver of a fraction of a percent of Apple, but I sold my shares due to a lack of technical leadership.

But do monocultures always stagnate?

If Apple was made up of only top-end engineers led by a quality-obsessed maniac, would they put out better or worse products?

Of course, not everyone can follow this philosophy, but they don't have to, and most don't want to anyway.

I should've typed fewer but better words!

Apple added too many features too fast, so they fell into the Feature Whirlpool. They're going to try and get out of it by adding more Features, Faster (I hope I'm wrong!).

Instead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narrow of Quality - where they were for many years - where you move up to computing paradise by having fewer features but more time spent perfecting them.

Your argument was "there's no tribalism except what the whites brought to South Africa", remember?

And elsewhere you say that because of this, violence against white South Africans are justified.

This is not only insane, but simply historically incorrect. I'm going to stop replying to you now (apparently there's a "HN Blocklist" Chrome addon!) but feel free to keep justifying calls for political and ethnic violence.

It should make interesting reading for others in the decades to come.

Moral relativism at its finest. Turn away now, because this is a dead end my friend. "ethnic cleansing is justified if the violence goes the way I prefer" is the red flag of all red flags.

Are you familiar with South Africa?

There's at least a dozen different tribes, of which only two are white. There's been inter-tribal violence between all of them since time immemorial leading up to today.

Poor innocent descendants -> I did not call them poor, or innocent.

Deny rage -> of course not. I'd be furious too.

But singing songs like "bring my machine gun" and "shoot people from that ethnic group" just aren't justified, especially since South Africa has been a democracy for decades now.

It's "anti-colonialist" in the sense that it encourages the mass murder of the descendants of the original colonialists.

I don't know the US well enough to give you an exact equivalent, but "shoot the WASP" might be more or less the same thing. It wouldn't be any better if the same song sang the praises of a white member of the Weather Underground.

I just knew someone would bring up child labour / slavery.

There's a big difference between gig jobs and very low-paying jobs that help free adults with no other options in life, and kids in work houses & coal mines, and you know it.

It’s reality-based, empirical economics, not “mine”.

Place that let adults choose who to work for and who to employ, and furthermore consider it improper to even use the word “let” in this context, universally have better employment situations than places that follow your “spherical cow” theoretical planned / over-regulated economies.

You seem to ascribe agency only to the employers, but remember that every Uber driver and every shitty minimum-wage job holder is almost certainly just doing their best. Making their jobs illegal will not improve their lives one iota, not in theory, and not in practice.

This really shows the value of saying “no” to use-cases you consider peripheral.

If your customers live in one country, and you don’t care about cloud scalability, things can be much simpler.

Of course, some applications really do need all the complexity.

In addition to your very good points: an economy of people who take this live-and-let-live view is going to be far more flexible and efficient in different scenarios.

An economy made up of people who think it proper to make entire classes of employment like gig work (or work that pays under a certain minimum wage) illegal is not only interfering in the decisions of adults, but can only prosper under the exact set of circumstances those people consider ideal.

Pragmaticstudio is just an awesome starting point for Elixir + Phoenix. I delayed signing up for a long time - wondering if it would be worth the money - but I need not have

BEAM / Erlang / OTP / Elixir feels different:

- no JS (well a tiny bit ships with Phoenix but I never have to look at it), no NPM, nothing that breaks every week

- the whole system lends itself to executing on multiple cores

- GenServers BEAM processes in general are amazing

Saying "no" to off-topic / dumb ideas in a consistent way is an amazing product development skill.

It's like carving away all of the marble that doesn't look like David.

Neal Stephenson wrote a really great Substack about art and how it's the end product of many small decisions. That's exactly what Jobs did on the hardware he worked on.

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/idea-having-is-not-art

AppLovin makes a gargantuan profit margin of 45%:

https://valustox.com/APP

Even so, I avoid stocks that don't have a sustainable, value-based business model.

Take the hourly billing for those of us who work that way. Multiply by family tech consulting time. It's probably cheaper to buy an iPhone for everyone!

At least this used to be true in the halcyon days when iOS was simple.

BEAM + Elixir + Phoenix feels like I can control a whole system from the CPU processes (almost) up to the UI elements on a remote user’s screen, all in one easy-ish-to-understand system and language.

Granted, I’ve only used it for smaller projects, but I can almost feel my brain relax as the JS fades out, and suddenly making web apps is super fun again.

Off-topic, but do you think Harris is the likely D candidate?

I'm a mere observer of American politics, but both Polymarket and electionbettingodds.com have Gavin Newsom in the lead to be the candidate, and JD Vance to win the election.

https://polymarket.com/event/democratic-presidential-nominee...

https://www.electionbettingodds.com

But assets and technology itself is ultimately created by labour.

There might be an exception for natural resources that are exceptionally easy to exploit even without labour, like sunlight or fresh air.

Bad news sells, especially about leading people/companies/countries.

"${rich_guy} is doomed" will get more clicks than "poor people can now afford 5% more daily protein than last year".

This is exactly right and is what one would expect from improving technology. A fractal frontier of new niches crack open as the economy keeps expanding.

I agree with this but going on as if either fission or solar is the One True Electricity Solution is ideological. Every technology has tradeoffs.

In that case, yes. But for solar farms, it's the opposite.

That's why I think we should end up with:

- gas plants: easy and cheap to spin up, can provide district heating

- nuclear: squeaky clean, issues are concentrated in one spot, district heating

- solar panels: super cheap, decentralized, and there are lots of opportunities like rooftops and carparks where we are wasting sunlight right now

I just re-read Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (great book if you like hard near-future sci-fi) and that has the idea of solar stations in geostationary orbit and beaming power to where it's needed with a phased-array microwave transmitter on the station, and rectennas where you need them on the ground. We can't do this economically any time soon, but that would be clean, and require no power lines

Renewables have huge hidden costs as well.

Solar panels and windmills are low density sources - we need a LOT of them to get the job done, and even then you still need base load somehow.

That means a huge amount of extra powerlines and future landfill of defunct panels. Not to mention the very sturdy windmill foundations scattered around the landscape.

Say what you will about nuclear, but all of its negatives are concentrated in a small mass and volume.

The optimal, nom-ideological solution is probably a mix of nuclear, gas, and solar panels.