Guid_NewGuid

Yes, never again is right now and I am afraid to even say that under my real name because it would put my job at risk.

Watching a redux of the Warsaw Ghetto being livestreamed, watching children starving to death because of state military decisions, watching 500 pounder bombs being dropped on seaside cafes and ambulance medics being murdered. Never again is right now and I'm doing this, bitching pseudonymously. It is truly dystopian as you say.

Further, state influence campaigns using social media are well known, it is absolutely happening on this forum and all forums as you say. What to do? I have no idea but I know that those who suffer the consequences of speaking out against this, such as the tens of people arrested in the UK, are truly brave.

Never again is right now. One day everyone will have been against this.

I'm sure existing restrictions have had exactly the desired impact and that China -- being a state that prioritizes science and engineering over lawyers and financial engineering -- has no answer to it... Oh...

https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/16/huawei-ai-cloudmatrix-38...

I have a theory that this is built into the American system. People are brainwashed into thinking the system of government is perfect and unimpeachable (pledge of allegiance, constitution being this holy scripture). So when the imperfect system inevitably breaks down it is regarded as an unavoidable outcome.

Because the system delivered the outcome it must be the only possibility.

Just to add to their pile of woes there's also the loss of regulatory credits[0] for offsetting other automaker's emissions.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...

It's worth noting that crypto lobbying groups also spent a lot to support Democrats too.[0]

As usual this heavily leans towards one party and the situation would be 'less bad' with the other party but as usual the problem is money in politics and Citizens United. At least watching the collapse of your state from abroad provides entertaining reading.

[0]: https://apnews.com/article/democrats-crypto-genius-act-stabl...

I keep meaning to do a project where I try and categorise this rightward drift over time. I've only been here for about 8 years on my main account but increasingly it feels comments here reflect the ideological schism in reality reflected everywhere else. This, I suppose, shouldn't be surprising, but it felt like for a while people in general held a higher standard of evidence.

As much as I'd like to chalk that up to bots, of which I'm sure there are some small amount, I think it has more to do with the ideological roots of this space. Extremists like Yarvin and Thiel are in the DNA of this forum and its userbase. Of course I'm likely to fall afoul of the guidelines even mentioning this. On any political thread you get this strange through-the-looking-glass sensation of people inhabiting an entirely disjunct reality.

And it also appears to be wholesale for many people, you can hold the position that DEI was pointless corporate propaganda and rolling it back is harmless, or H1B visas should be ended, but also that attacks on science and vaccination are bad but most people seem to have lost that nuance.

Study link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00029...

I really struggle to take dietary and nutritional science seriously. It seems impossible to control other variables sufficiently to make any statement with any kind of certainty. Plus it's something the media love to seize on and report without context. We've had hydrogenated fats, non hydrogenated fats, sugar, fats, sweeteners, E numbers, eggs, red meat, cholesterol, seed oils, salt, etc.

That's not to say we should stop researching or trying to quantify it, after all we can only know the true impact of salt, cholesterol, different types of fats, by doing more, better, research. However in the meantime you probably shouldn't jump on every new finding to shape your diet. The salt myth has been around for 50+ years and refuses to die.[0]

I'm sticking to eating mostly fresh vegetables, butter, some sugar, some junk food when I feel like it and lots of salt. Plus an inadvisable level of alcohol consumption that makes the rest irrelevant.

Edit: since I just had a rant about lack of faith in climate science elsewhere I'd like to clarify that what I think this area of science struggles with is lack of settled consensus. For every study showing one thing to be bad, you can just as easily find studies showing it not to be bad, or the real picture to be far more complex.

[0]: though more recent sources seem to back up salt's impact on blood pressure and cardiovascular disease - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26997359/ , https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7384997/ at this point it feels like something of a 'poisoned well'.

It's interesting because I'm very ideological about politics in the UK. I have a burning hatred for the party that just left power after 14 years to the point that would make most zealots look positively tame. However I will concede that the UK has made pretty good progress on energy transition with a fairly broad base of support from most major parties and a lot of that transition happened under the party I detest.

While the UK faces some ongoing challenges:

- Transmission bottlenecks in Scotland

- Dwindling opportunities for offshore wind construction

- Natural gas for heating in an old and poorly insulated housing stock

- Electricity prices tied to gas prices

- A generation of NIMBYs who don't want wind turbines ruining their view of transmission pylons and ecologically dead sheep pastures

- Lack of zonal pricing to incentivize more on-shore renewables

And needs to go further and faster I don't think energy generation falls into the same ideological divide there (though this may change with Reform UK and their questionable funding/astroturfing). Certainly net zero and 'green crap' remains contentious but from an actual building-the-thing perspective we're just quietly getting on with it.

You're correct that uninhabitable was my exaggeration and the OP's reasonable point was that some parts of the US would see less impressive outcomes.

But from a brief Google California isn't even in the 10 most southerly states in the US. While I have broader problems with the political direction of travel of this site in general my main concern is trying to shake Americans out of this fatalism where nothing ever works, nothing is possible and the country has to be left to decay.

You guys landed on the moon for goodness sake, where's that America gone?

I'm originally from the UK so I know cloudy. Not sure if we're better or worse than Michigan but the weather is one of the main reasons I left.

For sure solar isn't as effective in the UK but we're lucky to have shallow sea nearby for offshore wind (onshore wind being opposed by the same kind of NIMBY clowns that are a true biblical plague in every country). But if solar is cheap enough you may as well deploy it even where it's not especially efficient. Then you can start to look at things like transmission lines or whatever energy source works best for your area.

Edit: it's a reasonable point that dollars spent in the 2nd cloudiest state on solar aren't particularly well spent, but that leaves you with 48(?) less cloudy states. While CA is pretty south there are 10 more states to the south of it, one of them is even called the sunshine state and is effectively an uninhabitable sinking swamp, ideal for solar!

That's fair and it was less a dig at the specific comment than the overall trend of American fatalism that can be summed up as "a new thing can't possibly work because we live in a weather torment nexus".

While the point that the benchmark favours CA is reasonable what about the other 10+ states on California's latitude? Even as far North as New York is equivalent latitude to Madrid. I just struggle to believe the desert of Nevada for instance or Texas isn't also viable for solar. Plus those states have the advantage of not having California's crumbling transmission infrastructure (though even worse for Texas from what I understand) or anti-building regulatory regime.

This strand of American pessimism seems to only ever lean one way, to ignore lessons from other countries and to oppose new tech.

What would be favourable for that cost curve is not putting tarrifs on Chinese subsidised panels and this fatalism leeches energy from that consensus. When the tech is cheap enough to slap anywhere the optimal deployment is less important and why not make the most of China's 'blunder' with these below cost panels.

A funny thing that I notice on this site, as a foreign, is apparently everywhere in the US that isn't the place in whichever article is under discussion has weather such as to be effectively uninhabitable.

I realise there is extreme weather in the US but every discussion on renewables, cars, trains, cycling, construction standards or whatever else has comments along the lines of "good for Utah (or wherever) but this couldn't possibly work in the 95% of the US that is constantly inundated by biblical plagues".

Sure the performance of whatever technology might be suboptimal but I struggle to believe vast swathes of the US experience weather so extreme as to be uninhabitable. If I'm wrong y'all really need to leave that country for your own safety.

Ultimately you end up in an abstract or values based discussion either way though.

Your question, is the world better off, is impossible to answer in a manner that isn't based in conjecture I feel. Would people not feel the urge to create with a 20 year copyright term? 7 years? 90? zero? Aren't some of the most valuable pieces of software in terms of social good open source? What drives the creation of those?

The closest we have to a counterfactual of the current US based intellectual property hegemony is probably China, who are renowned for their lack of scruples in this matter. Isn't some part of their supercharged technical progress based off willingness to ignore IP? How much? Is California's ban on non competes partially responsible for it's innovative tech sector?

These are all fuzzy questions that are difficult to answer and you end up approaching them with values judgements in mind.

So to restate mine without that controversial phrase; the more people that can access and share information and knowledge the more we unlock the possibility of progress and improvement for the greatest number of people.

I had prefixed that with "in my view" but in a purely literal sense you're right. Code and knowledge are inanimate objects, they don't 'want' anything. The statement is influenced by my belief, it is merely a common turn of phrase.

To expand a bit more, code is freely, instantly, trivially duplicated, shared and remixed[1]. Much like knowledge there is no scarcity for these artifacts without legally mandated, police enforced, artificial scarcity. If the full source code for anything (Windows 11, EPIC Systems, whatever) was leaked tomorrow that would be a non-destructive event for both the code and knowledge involved. People work around this with trade secrets and intellectual property law but the 'entropic' norm is for these things to become more available, not less.

[1]: Since we're being literal there is of course some energy and time cost to the listed actions.

But this doesn't really contradict the idea, in my view. Our existing property framework is built around physical goods that experience scarcity. The cost of code duplication is zero and it is (barring catastrophe) indestructible. Today you can browse the git codebase in the same way as 2 decades prior or hence.

All the knowledge in those codebases is preserved for all time, freely available to anyone. They have been built upon in ways that don't necessarily give back but that wasn't a destructive event.

Aside: Though if I remember correctly git and Linux are GPL so they create categories of thought-crime under copyleft if a judge holds your code to be too influenced by them. How influenced is too much? You better have enough money for lawyers to find out.

I think people who prefer GPL and I hope for the same outcomes but we have a different (irreconcilable?) philosophical approach to getting there.

In my view code (and all knowledge) wants to be free and a commons of knowledge enriches the whole world. I am opposed to most forms of copyright, patents and intellectual 'property'. Aside: My compromise position to this maximalist view is that I'd accept a 5 year copyright term with an exponentially increasing renewal fee.

For me MIT/BSD/Apache is a way to provide code with minimal encumbrances under the current dominant legal system. GPL is an attempt to free knowledge that relies on the legal system and the threat of men with guns coming to force you to comply. However noble the intentions at the end of the day it is reliant on state force and reduces freedom, it is very good at providing fees for lawyers.

Corporations can't embrace-extend-extinguish open source. This is because the source is always available. Sure they can use that knowledge to build a new, more popular, thing, but the existing source never goes away. It represents an un-enclosable commons.

The use of AI for this seems somewhat overkill, one could just use a language and environment that is aware of whether `logger` or `logging` is available, and what variables are in scope. We have tools that allow us to treat programming as more than guessing the next character at random. Rather they allow you to offload tracking this context to the machine in a reliable way, typed languages and auto complete.

I do wonder if this is part of the divide in how useful one finds LLMs currently. If you're already using languages which can tell you what expressions are syntactically valid while you type rather than blowing up at runtime the idea a computer can take some of the cognitive overhead is less novel.

There's nuance to these numbers since interception will be an artifact of where people are looking but 95% of intercepted fentanyl was from US citizens crossing the border.[0]

Funnily enough the Republicans seemed content to sit on their hands and play politics with this so called crisis until the media broke the story.[also 0]

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/border-fe...

As someone who has been operating in hacky mode for years there's another situation where

> we might not be here tomorrow

Is true and increasingly common which is the recurring rounds of layoffs we all seem to be experiencing. It's in the individual developer's interest to bodge something in if it makes them appear productive in time for the next layoff. Certainly not a healthy incentive for building good software but it is what it is.

This is positive news, I wasn't aware of this research.

Nevertheless the point remains that the food industry having a free hand to craft the most addictive possible products and then advertising them to kids is also a problem we should address in parallel with getting these drugs to the people who need them now. We should do both.

One wonders to what extent the management of these companies having a background in actual engineering, as opposed to financial engineering, gives them an edge over US companies:

- DJI: MPhil in Electronic and Computer Engineering

- BYD: Chemistry Graduate

- CATL: PhD in Physics

- Huawei: engineering

Maybe a generation of companies who followed the Jack Welch school of management rather than valuing people who used to make stuff, also contributes to the US falling behind across the board?

I think there is absolutely a moral issue with these drugs but it's not the usual "personal responsibility" nonsense.

The problem is it makes it far less likely we'll address our poisonous food system. The US subsidises (crops including those that produce) HFCS to the tune of billions. Fresh fruit and vegetables aren't subsided. Advertising has been shown to impact consumer behaviour in other countries.

These drugs are, provisionally, miracle drugs. But they must be paired with regulation otherwise whatever addictive poison the industry comes up with next will repeat the cycle until everyone on earth is on them.

Wait 5 years. After 5 years of the hype cycle the rough edges are sanded off, or the concept has ceased to be relevant.

You could have built most (web) things in the past 20 years with Java and a SQL database. It's worth keeping an open mind to what useful things might come out of a new trend but give it some time to avoid chasing fads like Web3, NFTs, NoSQL, Microservices or LLMs.

(This is not to say any of these are entirely useless in every scenario but the useful parts will have stood the test of time and the rest is for 'thought leaders' and con artists)

I think -- on the basis of this same argument playing out for years at this point -- it's because the 2 views are talking past each other.

Sure, in office works better for some people and remote makes them miserable. They're real people.

But the side suffering economic compulsion is the remote preferred people being forced back to the office against their will.

If everyone can work how they prefer then great. But that's not the world we live in and to draw a false equivalence between the dominant (at exec level) RTO view and remote workers forced into unpaid commutes and time away from families gets our hackles way up.

I hadn't, that's super interesting thanks for the pointer.

In an ideal world I would go back to chemistry.

Since the option in the world we have is working 60 hours sub minimum wage trying to get through a PhD followed by bouncing round on 2 year short term contracts as a postdoc (still barely on minimum wage) while University administrators make your life hell I took the only rational route.

I switched to software and make people's lives and the climate worse for a paycheck that still isn't enough to live where I want to live.

But ideally I'd use my brain to research some of the fundamental challenges we face, battery chemistry, plastic recycling, industrial catalysts, etc, etc.

But (inserting my own narrative), isn't the point that some deeper societal problem is being masked by this?

> Snack companies take advantage.

I'm uncomfortable with these new drugs but they seem to be a net positive so this is a good thing. But we should also look into legislating junk food companies that hijack people's appetite for a quick buck.

Chile banned sugary food TV advertising to children and saw a roughly 10% drop in purchases high in sugar. An unleashed free market in food has been shown to be harmful and the drugs alone are insufficient. Regulation is necessary.

https://healthpolicy-watch.news/chiles-comprehensive-food-po...

Yes! This is the root of the confusion. Certain dual button flushes have the small button to combine with the larger one to make the complete flush but on others the small button does the small flush.

At what point does the small button cross over from meaning big flush to small flush!? I swear on most toilets where small means small you need steady hands of a surgeon to hit it!

Counterpoint. Engineers created meeting hell.

You know what's a bad meeting? Any Scrum meeting or status 'sync'. Meetings are invaluable. Get together frequently to talk about what you're actually trying to build with the stakeholders and you don't need process, you barely even need tickets.

But you have to be present, involved and responsive to jump on a quick call.

Instead engineers whine about context switching and how the business context of their work is irrelevant "just put it in a ticket". So now we have micromanagement up the wazoo with execrable Scrum type meetings.

I love meetings and feel a lot of anger to the type of engineer who thinks it's beneath them. Equally I detest all 'ceremonies', absolute time wasting dregs.

I don't understand the view that MIT and Apache 2.0 make it possible for corporations to somehow destroy or enclose the commons. Code is code. It can't be destroyed, its cost of duplication is effectively zero. If I take some open source code, add my changes and distribute a paid, closed-source, version, nothing has been removed/lost.

Certainly they make it hard/impossible to build a business from Open Source code. Unfortunately in an economic system designed to maximise the reward for value capture at the cost of value creators this is a common problem. But I believe the answer to that is more communism, not more licenses with more convoluted requirements creating jobs for legal departments for shared code.