160 karma · joined May 23, 2025
> 2) so the stock market has to go up
This is why I've come to despise 401k's replacing old-school pensions. Yes, pensions had their problems but with 401k's workers must fleece themselves to have any sort of retirement opportunity.
Want a shot at retirement? Now we all have to run ourselves into the ground to make number go up. It's insane.
"CONSENT: A clear and unambiguous agreement, expressed outwardly through mutually understandable words or actions, to engage in a particular activity. Consent can be withdrawn by either party at any point."
and
"No means No"
What I'm about to say is strongly worded and I understand not a _perfect_ analogy by any means. However, it does sum up my feelings on this issue.
If Person A makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B, we have words to describe that. But if Person A, a company, makes repeated unwanted advances towards Person B we call that business.
Please, please continue to be curious. I feel you. Every day I find myself throwing in the towel on "those people". I use "us vs. them" language far more than I should. My instincts say to give up.
It's a fight that maybe I'm losing, but if we stop trying to understand then the remaining options on the table are considerably worse.
Just look at Daryl Davis'[0] success in convincing Klansmen to denounce the KKK. The man is an absolute hero and had major cojones for what he did. I truly can't fathom the guts it took for him to do that. I'm white and it would scare me.
Few people are beyond being reached. MAGA is fueled by fear (and anger). We need to dismantle the fear and redirect the anger. Fear leads to brain-rot. Anger can sometimes be justified and a powerful ally when pointed in the right direction. I have no implementation ideas that are worth discussing though.
That being said. Despite the above ramblings, I have given up on some people. And it feels bad. Disconnecting from each other can only escalate further.
All to say, I feel you and I feel your position. But please do your best to not throw in the towel, even though it is so appealing in our current climate.
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Citations.
Have you ever been to Portland or do you just believe Trump? There were few (not many) Trump flags in Portland during the election and I don’t recall a single person being hurt for it.
Democrat voters didn’t turn out this past election cycle. Even in the face of Trump. They’ve truly made their base apathetic. “Hold your nose” is a tough strategy to sell long term.
I will never forget what they did to Sanders. Maybe he would’ve lost anyways. It’s likely. But that whole take the high road thing is only messaging. Internally they function nothing like a democracy.
Please just call me an employee or engineer. As for "leadership", I am somewhat convinced that the word "management" would lead to a mid-life crisis. Such inflated egos. As for "the brand", they are my employer.
This Newspeak has benefits though. Mainly that it hides in plain sight the top-down hierarchy of power that exists. Despite that fact that some employees are on food stamps while others make millions, it _sounds_ like everyone is on on somewhat equal footing.
Not to say this isn’t a worthy problem to solve or that cars have no use. They’re great for rural life. But maybe 80% of the use-case for self-driving cars is pretty much solved by trains. They’re fast, generate no traffic, are very safe, and reduce pollution in urban areas. Even electric cars produce noxious break dust.
Addendum
The “America is too big” argument drives me nuts. (1) Again, look at China. (2) The EU is decently large and connected very well by rail. (3) We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Not to mention what a boost it would be to the economy with all the jobs a project like that would create. Sure, we wouldn’t have an Elon but that’s fine by me.
Of course when the prediction doesn't fit, the Cirque du Soleil level mental gymnastics come out to explain how "this generation" didn't actually mean that.
Meanwhile, scientists predict solar eclipses with 100% accuracy. Among many other physical phenomena. Much of that knowledge was ascertained despite religion relentlessly persecuting those seeking out answers about our universe.
> Unlike other religions, it said a lot of things that have come true...
I can promise you that followers of every religion have made this same claim and also have a list of "proof". They don't look at each other and go "darn, that Christianity keeps getting it right somehow!".
I highly recommend checking out The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan [0]. It is a great way to improve anyone's baloney-detector kit. We all want to understand our world, but some "answers" are pure Grade-A baloney.
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[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_...
I had a whole comment written up but, meh. The noisy people are made out to be conspiracy theorists, even when someone like Chomsky brings all the receipts. People want to believe the person they voted for is the "good guy" in a superhero sort of way.
Trump is partly able to do what he does because of these extreme expansion of powers from previous presidents. This is why "but my guy good!!" is among the worst forms of reasoning for justify $bad_thing.
1. It’s easy to apply. Slip a sun hoodie over the head - protected.
2. Because it’s so easy to apply it always goes on when needed.
3. It’s impossible to miss spots or under-apply in certain areas. If fabric covers the skin, you’re solid.
4. This is subjective but it’s more comfortable. On a sunny 90F day with a high UV, direct sun on skin feels like sticking your hand on a hot skillet.
My fun fact for all this is that the Bedouins wear black robes in the desert heat. Not white. It’s counterintuitively cooler for the wearer [0]. Sunscreen is a great modern invention with its use cases, but humans have been wearing clothing for eons to ward off the sun for a reason. The only real downside is that you may look a bit silly when everyone else is lathered in sunscreen wearing very little clothing.
It took some effort and pain but I have a pretty solid self-hosted system now that requires no futzing around:
0. epoupon's Lightweight Music Server (LMS) [0] is an awesome, barebones Subsonic client written in C. It's really good and deserves to be more well-known.
1. wrtag [1] is a less-fully-featured beets written in Go that handles tagging.
2. amperfy [2] is an excellent Subsonic client that runs on iOS. It's configured to automatically cache anything and everything on LMS.
3. Syncthing [3] syncs music files. Needs no introduction. Rock solid.
4. Swinsian [4] a macOS music player that is very reminiscent of old iTunes, but much better. The information density is so incredibly refreshing after using Apple Music.
5. Everything talks to each other seamlessly over Tailscale [5].
All together, an entire open-source stack maintained by volunteers that easily outdoes Apple's own UX in the music department.
[0] https://github.com/epoupon/lms
[1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag
I can't agree with this enough. Companies want to believe they're Google or going to be Google. As a result they invest time, money, and engineers in problems they quite literally don't have and likely will never have.
> Then Drop the Act...
This, in my experience, depends. KPIs, goals, or whatever goofy games usually require the appearance of doing something impressive. Doing things that make sense isn't impressive.
Please, no. There are few things worse as a consumer than going to the Apple Store.
The overall design is…lacking. It’s fine for a regular website one might stumble upon. For a demo of America’s prowess in design it’s pretty bad and bland. The GIF loop (as mentioned by another commenter) is borked. The text goes to the edges of my screen. The italicized blurb towards the bottom has weird commas and capitalization. The copy just reads weird too.
18F walked so that we could, uh, regress back to crawling around on the floor babbling?
It depends. If you're fine browsing torrent sites, choosing a download, loading in into your client, waiting for it to download, then plugging your laptop into your TV. Sure it's free.
If you're out to recreate a better streaming experience then it's certainly not free. Software licenses, server hardware, electricity costs, Usenet access, etc. Not to mention the time/effort to getting everything running so smoothly to the point that it is effortless to request and then watch.
I mention this because for a certain crowd (myself and likely many people on HN) it's not about being free. It's about not having to fight crappy software. Or not paying for the privilege to have ads shoved down your throat and being tracked. Not needing to remember which app Mr. Robot is currently on or having it suddenly vanish due to some licensing expiration. The list goes on.
Do I still pay for content instead of the tools to circumvent it? Sure! My city has a huge video rental store. It's super fun to go browse, find weird stuff, and help out a local business. The owner(s) are clearly huge movie nerds and seem to have spent a good amount of their earnings on some very cool movie props they put in the store. I love it.
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My original ramble below:
This is a Very HN Comment. The problem with healthcare in the US isn't that we don't let Sam Altman administer healthcare via souped-up text prediction machines. It's a disaster precisely because we let these greedy ghouls run the system under the guise of "saving money". In the end it costs significantly more money to insure a portion of the population than the big, inefficient, bureaucratic government providing baseline insurance for everyone.
The least bad healthcare systems in the world take out a significant amount of the profit motive. Not all regulation is good, but the US refuses to let go of the idea that all regulation is bad.
If LLMs are to be used in healthcare they should have an incredibly high bar of evidence to pass. Right now, there's no evidence that I'm aware of. Just as doctors need to prove themselves before being certified. Even then, we get bad doctors. What happens when an LLM advises a patient to kill themselves? Probably nothing. Corporations go unpunished in this country. At least bad practitioners are responsible for their actions.
If the story is even remotely interesting and something you'd be willing to share I would really appreciate the read.
Will definitely look into those books. Thanks for the recs.
Most frustratingly, many people know how to be properly skeptical. To use Sagan's example, it comes out in full-force any time someone buys a used car. Never trust the dealer. Everybody knows that.
I really appreciate that Sagan refrains from looking down on anyone. It's all too easy to do and I am guilty of it at times. It also leads to a much more useful conversation. Sagan provides hope that we can educate better. Compared to say, Dawkins, who I think has ultimately hurt the cause. Nobody will listen when they feel insulted.
> So sad to see its worst predictions come true.
The most recent bit of the book I read involved James Randi. I was curious about the guy so I did some other reading. Randi gave out an annual "award" called the "Pigasus Award" to fraudsters and similar. Mehmet Oz received the award [1] three times. Now Oz runs Medicaid!
Sadly, we've lost Sagan and Randi. Sometimes it feels like the world has lost any sort of check against gullibility. To paraphrase from the book, many scientists are particularly not equipped to call these scammers out. Scientists wrestle with nature - nature has laws. Trying to call out the Oz's of the world is hard because they don't play by the rules of reason.
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[0] https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-709
[1] https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-apr-01-la-heb-dr-...
Meanwhile Altman & Co. continue to steal data at large scale. Trump himself encourages it by removing any potential for regulation the LLM industry. I guess his followers can’t be bothered to read the actual news and get angry about it.
Most politicians that stand up against this stuff aren’t allowed to succeed. Unless someone does, this pro-corporate downward spiral will continue.
I’m an avid cyclist in a US city. There’s a pretty large radius around me in which driving is <= 5 minutes quicker, not counting time to park. Plus cycling often leaves me directly by my destination. I can’t imagine how much more convenient it would be in a dense European city.
Anyways, what the hell is everyone in such a hurry for? Leave five minutes earlier. Cars are absolutely magical. Drivers sitting on mobile couches while expending minimal effort? Magical. So, ya know, adding a few minutes should really be no big deal. Which I doubt it does.
Big, open highways are different. Or at least I’d imagine them to be.
You would think, but look at this whole Liquid Glass thing - they can't get something simple like contrast right. On the other hand, they arguably put out the best consumer chips in the industry.
Seems dysfunctional, like every other large corp.
Shoot, if I was in the unlikely fictional scenario where I even wore a diamond and someone asked about it, I would be THRILLED to get into the science of how it was grown in a lab. What a cool story. Instead of just going “yeah, thanks, it cost a fortune and three kids died pulling it out of the dirt”.
Kinda depends what you want. Both work. With Nix Darwin you’ll sometimes run into packages that aren’t compatible with your system. It’s not an ND problem really - some software was just never built for Mac.
Running a VM works great too. I’m a big fan of Orbstack as it’s fairly transparent with the system. It’s nice to hop inside a real Linux box but feel like you’re working ON the actual system. You’ll take a battery hit compared to on-metal as macOS puts VMs on P-cores, but it’s not that bad.
Those banners suck and I wouldn't mind if the EU rolled back that law and tried another approach. At the same time, it's fairly easy to add an extension to your browser that hides them.
Legislation won't always work. It's complex and human behavior is somewhat unpredictable. We've let tech run rampant up to this point - it's going to take some time to figure out how to best control them. Throwing up our hands because it's hard to protect consumers from power multi-national corporations is a pretty silly position imo.
Fair enough. I chose my example poorly. My point still stands: personal anecdotes are a terrible way of understanding most anything.
> It's the same as when the marijuana legalization advocates say "it's basically medicine lol" or deny that addiction is possible
100% feel you here. Even as a user.
> There are a lot of bad things people consume and I support banning very few of those. Pornography is not one. Please don't mistake my position.
I appreciate your clarity here and I apologize for being a bit of jerk. So often it feels like people choose views purely on their own internal personal morality. Not a larger live-and-let-live attitude. Which kinda ties into the cannabis legalization thing above imo. The truth was fudged to make the moral argument easier - because that convinces people.
So, again, apologies for jumping down your throat and I appreciate the links.
It’s also opened up somewhat in recent years. While I personally stick with Safari’s Content Blocking feature for performance reasons, 1Blocker and others do have a JavaScript-based option these days.
Yikes dude.
> …to back up what I’ve consistently observed with my own eyes
People have observed everything UFOs and demons to ivermectin curing their COVID. None of it is real but yet people continue to swear up and down on these things gs.
> ...given the speed at which research sometimes move
Filling in knowledge gaps with imagination is not a substitute for actual data. Ever.
> and particularly since any concern over perceived “sexual liberation” attacks one of the sacred cows of progressivism
Hard disagree. You yourself can go study human psychology and sexuality then perform studies. If you can assemble real data the scientific community would be forever grateful for your contributions. The real barrier is not “liberals”, it’s that it takes years upon years of hard work to get there. Unlike your comment, which is backed up by “my own eyes”.
> I know the research is there and has been if you’re actually interested
Leading with “I don’t need citations”, then promising that they’re “totally there” at the bottom doesn’t really sit right with me.
Anyways, it’s not the role of the state to legislate morality. That always ends poorly. If porn is bad for kids, then parents need to step up. Maybe the state could offer resources for parents - I’m not opposed to that. If it’s bad for adults, they those with chronic habits should seek help.