Hasz

Kobo Elipsa (1) is my preferred reader for PDFs/papers in particular. Genuinely good product, software works well enough and presents as USB mass storage, long battery life. Other than perhaps a more responsive, USB-C pen, IDK what else you could improve on.

We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

I also think there is an incredible transference of skills from one domain to another. This is a risk (everything looks like nail when you have hammer), but there are many domains that are very mature where you can learn a trick and apply it to a new domain over and over again.

all 88/12 ground. Choice sirloin is $8/lb. Boneless chicken breast is $2.5/lb.

Beef on craiglist (1/4, 1/2 or whole) is averaging $6-12/lb for mostly grass fed beef raised <50 miles from me.

Most of the references are not to actual price data, eg CPI basket of goods, so here is the actual link.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...

Energy stands out as actually being noteworthy, but is not discussed in the article compared to food, consumer goods. It is pretty inelastic for most people, especially gas/diesel.

I feel like I am living in a different universe to the author. My beef still costs around $5/lb, my milk is still roughly $3/gal, similar on a lot of staples I buy regularly. My shirts cost about $5 for a t-shirt, and my jeans cost $20 or so. I spend 80% at Costco and 20% at King Soopers (Kroger).

Ancedota I know, but the author is writing like Big Business has 100% coverage of the whole market.

> tell me about tianenamen square

Tiananmen Square (1989)

In spring 1989, students and workers occupied Beijing's Tiananmen Square demanding democratic reform, free press, and an end to corruption. The protests grew through April–May, peaking with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. On the night of June 3–4, 1989, the Chinese government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army with tanks to clear the square. Troops fired on protesters and civilians. Estimates of deaths range from several hundred to several thousand; China has never released a full accounting.

The iconic image from the protests is "Tank Man" — a lone man standing before a column of tanks on June 5. >Aftermath: arrests and executions of participants, censorship of the topic within China (it's heavily suppressed on the Chinese internet), and international sanctions that were later eased.

Want more detail on any aspect — the causes, the crackdown, or its legacy?

---

It is fairly complete and doesn't exactly paint a good picture of PLA, I am curious if anyone else has been denied.

I have recently been spending time learning go, really really liking the language, awesome standard lib, excellent tooling and great experience.

It sounds like the dumbest thing in the world, but I love the import system auto-adding stuff inside of vscode when I need it. just slick.

IDK what happened to AWS, other than Amazon's cultural reputation is so bad it may be hard to hire the best eng.

Azure, GCP, I generally agree. The Neoclouds will drive prices into the basement, I think custom silicon/data moat/ease to deploy will be the hyperscaler's edge.

Part of the issue -- cloudlfare is an inference provider for models (eg glm-4.7-flash) on openrouter. Very very hard to get partners to signup if you're going to directly compete with them.

I specifically think many of the hyperscalers are a bad choice to platform on because they have their own models. You cannot build a viable platform business while directly competing with your potential customers and partners, the incentives are too out-of-whack.

Stripe/CF/Vercel are presumably not going to do foundational model development, so safe there. They are already platform plays to begin with, this strengthens that position.

I would not be suprised to see Cloudflare launch a competitor in the next 6 mo. They've done similar before, and it fits their "middle man/service provider" vibe well.

OpenRouter is good because of the market ecosystem play. I see this fragmenting similar to game distribution -- a handful of 3rd-party disti, 1 first-party disti, and some exclusivity/lockup/limited support outside of first party.

I am very interested to see how Stripe develops this. I would be happy to see a less-clunky top-up solution, for example, perhaps with micropayments. Not sure what else they are planning.

If this is the same dude I am thinking of, his wife is also the CISO of Mozilla and do security research together, afair they have a whole book on x86 reverse engineering.

Very cool!

It is to hire new reps, they are competing for talent.

Completely standard for enterprise (and even commercial/etc) sales. It would be extremely surprising if they did not have it. Usually take top n% of reps by quota attainment, GP, or incentive/SPIFF hits.

Most (enterprise focused) companies, even outside of tech, has something like this. Called Club, P-club, presidents club, circle of excellence, etc.

HackerOne chose a sales-first culture and this is their way of rewarding that growth.

Taste good, taste hard to cultivate, taste easy to fake and hard to prove. There, TLDR.

We still have a metric for good taste, and it is $. Solve a problem that people care about? They give you $. Solve problem no one care about? No $.

It is not perfect, but I challenge you to find a better metric that is as effective and simple.

damn. I am so sorry to hear his wife passed, my heart goes out to him and his family. What a thoughtful tribute.

I have always been a big fan of Stephen Wolfram, I had no idea his wife was such a great mathematician.

> China did not make an "autocratic bargain" with its people

For a good review: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/10/05/chinas-authoritarian-m...

Shangahi went from a dusty fishing village to one of the largest, most populous metropolises in <50years.

> Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture

cmon, democracy as a word should tell you that is not be true. Earliest is probably Greek, about 500 BC. Notably, this is before Christian culture existed, unless you want to talk about the "borrowing" from older religions.

> China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy

Otherwise known as the Chinese Civil War :)

> China, a fairly insular culture

Modern China, 90% Han Chinese. Han were not always on top, notably China was ruled by outsiders (most famously the Qing imo), but also Liao, Jin, Yuan dynasties. Phrase is "conquest dynasty".

The article explictly mentions trying to export it via belt and road, which is why I bring it up.

I'm sorry to hear you feel it rings hollow. As you know, the secretary of state is Marco Rubio, who is appointed and confirmed by the senate (bipartisian-ish, I might add).

I am no fan of Kushner, but saying he runs US foreign policy is generously misleading at best.

I am not Chinese, but the CCP loves to insinuate that the middle kingdom is 5000 years of uninterrupted rule. As we both know, that is hilariously untrue.

> Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now?

Yes, of course, and I am happy to put my money where my mouth is based on asset allocations. I can also freely invest in the outside world, without CCP capital controls. I can freely insult the US president, congress, and judiciary by name, and not worry about disappearing for 6 months. I don't need a cadre of police to throw an old man who advocated for democracy in jail in HK either.

> greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.

ah, come on now. We both know who comes out worse in that scenario, the princelings make Kushner look like a saint.

> Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles

Oh common sense. If you believe all countries are autocracies, maybe. But to examine the trajectory of the US on a "Chinese timescale", the US rejected autocratic rule, built a system that decentralizes power, uses ambition to check ambition, and provides for frequent, peaceful transfer of power. To an autocratic Chinese bureaucrat, this is all wasteful shortsightedness, but allows the US to pivot, change, adapt, etc at very fast pace, at least for government.

I do not believe the autocratic bargain that China has made with its people is stable, lasting form of government, even as they seek to export it elsewhere. The fundamental trade is individual voice in politics for breakneck growth and dramatically increased standard of living. However, if you are one of the few young people born in China recently, what breakneck growth? A vicious gauntlet of schooling, the great filter in the gaokao, only to work for 996 company until you cannot anymore.

We can see what happened in places like Venezuela or Argentina when the government breaks their end of the bargain, as will likely happen to other autocratic states.

I recently read capitalist realism by Fisher, and I think it is impossible (or very close to it, barring major war/plague/thanos snap) for something like degrowth to be seriously considered. There are simply waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to many incentives at multiple levels and across traditional alliances against it.

Hey that’s pretty smart! Fradulent, but very smart. I was honestly expecting botnet.

I expect many cameras of “dubious” origin are used for similar tasks, same with most “smart” devices with sufficient horsepower.

Climate change will almost surely increase growing seasons and agricultural productivity in higher latitudes (for some crops). It will be extremely crop and cultivar dependent, I expect lots of R&D to go into crops that can deal with wider vairety, and generally hotter, conditions.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4974

The issue is recognition. Everyone can see and admire shiny tools. Very few people can look at an empty editor or stub and see a good new product/feature. So lots of focus on tools, because lots can see it, and little focus on the what, because it is obscure, difficult to see, etc by most.

I like to marie kondo my tools -- if it is not bringing me joy to use or making my life easier, I yeet it. If it is, it stays.

bah, all is not lost.

Climate change will create winners and losers. Losers -- anyone on the equator or within the the tropic of cancer/capricorn. Winners -- those outside those regions or with enough $ to adapt.

Give me solar geoengineering, 2x increase in R&D spending on reducing fossil fuel usage, and funding for direct carbon capture (and a financial incentive to do it).

It's going to get worse before it gets better sadly.

the company, sure. The stock or people who own in, less clear.

Very impressed at net cost. I used to run a small ecom business targeting total prices in the range of $3-10. At $3, payment processing is nearly 11-12% of costs, which is absurd, more if you amortize the occasional chargeback/fraud. Lightning can do it for <<0.1% net cost even at the low end, which is incredible. There are plenty of these kinds of vendors on eBay, Aliexpress etc that would be willing to adopt with a bit of help.

For whoever posted, your cost calculator should be first thing on the page, and you "How we calculated this number" link is broken

Because it isn't about CSAM, IMO. You see this with plenty of social issues, notably firearms ownership. The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc)

The same technology/access used for CSAM identification can find copyrighted files, materials that don't support current government, etc. Full E2E encryption seriously raises the cost of mass surveillance, and why the US government fights it at every turn going back 30 years.

feature velocity >> feature stability.

Core libs/software have never been better, eg I have had much better luck with stuff like ffmpeg and virsh than ever before.

If it has a UI and targeted at consumers though? Bug city.