MountDoom

As much as I like to reminisce about the good old days, I'm not sure the thesis is entirely true. In the 1990s, home computers were more conspicuous, but we didn't really have such a variety of designs. Almost every PC-compatible computer looked the same: a beige plastic monolith. Most corded phones looked the same, most TVs looked the same, most film cameras looked the same, etc.

Now that we look at the designs from 20-30 years ago, they stand out simply because they're outdated. In another 20-30 years, someone will write an article about the beauty of "glass slab" phones of the 2020s.

We also tend to cherry-pick outliers. You can find some beautiful designs in every decade, but they're not necessarily representative of everyday life. There's a modern-day company making portable cassette players that look like this:

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MfFjHvcZjFzZLRPa4p7QZm-970...

Striking and prize-worthy, but not how we roll.

Taxpayers subsidize data centers in many other ways. These are prestige projects for politicians, so they often get long-term tax breaks and other preferential treatment.

I think it's part vanity, part a misunderstanding about the economic benefits of a datacenter (which are nearly nil, as they employ very few people and produce nothing for the local market), and part just a desire to score brownie points with wealthy corporations, which might mean donations, campaign support, or other perks for the politician who makes it happen.

It really couldn't. "Intentional" as it, you destroyed your property on purpose. Not "you were a dumbass and caused damage", not "you didn't apply for a permit and caused damage". Insurance covers stuff like that, because otherwise, a good half of claims could be getting denied. Basically all kitchen fires are "dumbass moments", for example.

I think plenty of folks just have a vague understanding of electrical codes and say stuff like that to impress others.

Generally speaking, you're just not supposed to do permanent electrical wiring with extension cords and power strips, especially not for stuff that goes into or through walls. This has nothing to do with plastic - you have plenty of plastic in electrical boxes, outlets, PVC conduit, etc. Cable insulation is plastic too.

The electrical code doesn't want you to put extension cords in the wall mostly to make sure that the connections can't come apart, that the comparatively softer and more delicate wires aren't easily crushed or abraded, and so on.

This project definitely isn't done the way you should do it if you had a real budget dedicated to it. Is it a death trap? Meh, I've seen far worse extension-cord contraptions in US homes.

> * Fire insurance or well, potential no-payout if your installation creates a fire.

This is pretty much a myth. Insurance pays out even if you cause a hazard, as long as it's not intentional (i.e., not insurance fraud). Talk to any insurance adjuster: undisclosed DIY is not enough to deny a claim.

What happens instead is that if you make a claim and the damage is due to stuff you didn't tell the insurer about, they will drop you right after they pay. Another possibility is that if they do any proactive inspections (e.g., drone fly-bys), they can decline to insure you or drop your policy.

A more substantial problem is that this page sort of oversells what they're pitching. 1.2 kW of solar power is a fraction of typical household usage. 2.4 kWh battery storage also isn't a whole lot. And yeah, it's cheaper than paying someone, but if your roof starts leaking, it's gonna cost you and you have no one to sue.

I'm surprised you say that. To flip this on its head, what would be your principled argument to accept ambient surveillance?

I don't doubt that license plate readers are used primarily to solve crimes. But the fact that it is collected and can be made available to anyone essentially strips you of privacy in everyday life. Cops are people too; once the tech is available, it is sometimes abused to spy on spouses, neighbors, journalists critical of the local PD, and so on.

There is also a more general argument: an ever-growing range of human activities is surveilled to root out crime, and we can probably agree that the end state of that would be dystopian: it'd be a place where your every word or even every thought is proactively monitored and flagged for wrongthink. We're ways off, but with every decade, we're getting closer. I'm not saying that Flock-listening-to-conversations is the line we can't cross, but if not this, then what?

For senior engineers with some fiscal discipline, it's great, although it's more great to work remotely.

On the more junior end, that $250k goes about as far as $100k in a less expensive region. Keep in mind that the average 1-bedroom rent is $3k+/mo, the average home for a family with kids is $2M, the average PG&E bill for a house is probably $400+, any repairs or remodels will cost you 2x as much as in most other places... and state income taxes are 10% on top of federal.

Most CoL estimates put the cost of living in San Jose at 2x the national average. And that's San Jose.

Yeah, but net worth is weird because for most people, it just measures age. When you're young, you have nothing in your 401k and you have a brand new mortgage, so you're worth around $0. Negative if you have any student loans.

When you're in your 50s or 60s, the mortgage is repaid, and if nothing blew up, you probably also have a million or two in your 401k, so at that point, it's actually not that hard for a person who had a decent career in the SF Bay Area to be worth $4M+. And many FAANG retirees will probably flirt with $10M+ if they don't spend too much.

I suspect this has the opposite effect. More daily users == higher valuation, so more profit if the VCs decide to sell. There's no pressure on OpenAI to become profitable yet.

Entry-level total comp for SWEs in the SF Bay Area is probably $250k. A senior dev at a public tech company can easily clear $400k. Really senior engineers at FAANG routinely clear $1M.

Bezos is a 0.0001-percenter. Most of people on HN are probably in the top 1% to 5%.

You're in the top 10% in the US if you make $170k/yr.

> Also true of non-tech-adjacent reporters!

It's true for everyone. Over the years, I've been on the business end of several "tech outrage" stories that made the headlines on HN, and over time, became a sort of IT canon: "company X did something really bad".

And they all had the same origin: a party with an ax to grind latched onto a fairly boring story, distorted the facts to tell a narrative, and that narrative "clicked" with everyone else because it confirmed their preexisting biases.

It doesn't mean that there are no companies that are truly evil or incompetent, but I'd wager is <50% of the ones that get raked over the coals here and elsewhere.

> Google Docs, Google Meet and Gmail provide a tiny fraction of Google's overall revenue.

I don't understand your argument here. Like Chrome and Android, these products exist to establish foothold, precisely so that Microsoft or OpenAI can't take Google's lunch.

My point is that brand recognition doesn't matter: if you can get equivalent functionality the easy way (a click of a button in Docs), you're not going to open a separate app and copy-and-paste stuff.

All of this will make it harder for OpenAI to maintain moat and stop burning money. Especially when their path to making money is to make LLMs worse (i.e., product placement / ads), while Google has more than enough income to let people enjoy untainted AI products for a very long time.

Even for search, right now, I'm pretty sure there are orders of magnitude more people relying on Google Search AI snippets than on ChatGPT. As these snippets get better and cover more queries, the reasons to talk to a chatbot disappear.

I'm not saying it's a forgone conclusion, but I think that OpenAI is at a pretty significant disadvantage.

Nah. No one is using Meta AI because it's shoehorned into contexts where you don't actually need it. And that's because these happen to be the only surfaces that Meta controls. They know full well they won't win there, which is probably why they're so desperate for a "hail Mary" in the VR / AR space.

For the average person, what's the most serious / valuable use of ChatGPT right now? It's stuff like writing essays, composing emails, planning tasks. This is precisely the context in which Google has a foothold. You don't need to open ChatGPT and then copy-and-paste if you have an AI button directly in the text editor or in the email app.

Possibly, but I don't think that Microsoft apps have the kind of a foothold in the corporate world that they used to have.

Sure, if you join a bank or a government agency, or a big company that's been around for 40+ years, you're probably gonna be using Microsoft products. But the bulk of startups, schools, and small businesses use Google products nowadays.

Judging by their MX record, OpenAI is a Google shop... so is Perplexity... so is Anthropic... so is Mistral.

All of these teens use Google Docs instead of OpenAI Docs, Google Meet instead of OpenAI Meet, Gmail instead of OpenAI Mail, etc.

I'm sure that far fewer people to go gemini.google.com than to chatgpt.com, but Google has LLMs seamlessly integrated in each of these products, and it's a part of people's workflows at school and at work.

For a while, I was convinced that OpenAI had won and that Google won't be able to recover, but this lack of vertical integration is becoming a liability. It's probably why OpenAI is trying to branch into weird stuff, like running a walled-garden TikTok clone.

Also keep in mind that unlike OpenAI, Google isn't under pressure to monetize AI products any time soon. They can keep subsidizing them until OpenAI runs out of other people's money. I'm not saying OpenAI has no path forward, but it's not all that clear-cut.

Many parts of Europe solved it in a more low-tech way: street-side parcel lockers unlocked with your phone. Massively reduces delivery cost (i.e., one driver can deliver far more packages per hour), is pretty convenient and safe (no packages left unattended), and best of all, doesn't require a fleet of UAVs.

You can pretty naturally extend this once you have self-driving vans.

I think Amazon has a proprietary version of this in some parts of the US, but at least where I live, the lockers are a car drive away, which defeats the purpose.

> "terrible technical decisions".

Another point worth bringing up is that sometimes, that stuff doesn't matter. I see so many engineers get hopelessly invested in technical debates that are, honestly, just silly: it's often better for the company to get something barely-good-enough done quickly than to flesh out the "optimal" design over the course of weeks or months, and over the dead bodies of people who have a different opinion about vi-versus-emacs.

And even if you accumulate tech debt, it is sometimes a wise decision to pay it back later, when you (hopefully) have more money and time.

So, I'd add "pick your battles wisely" to the list of tips.

I think that's a bit of a scope creep. The study of dynamical systems is obviously important and is sometimes rolled into chaos theory, but it predates it - and tellingly, it almost never concerns itself with chaotic behavior, because you can't do a whole lot with that.

So it's sort of like saying that the physics of black holes are very useful to us day-to-day because we want to make sure we don't fall into any black holes.

I'm not saying that chaos theory isn't interesting. It's just that it's pretty hard to find any concrete application of it, beyond hand-wavy stuff like "oh, it somehow helped us understand weather".

> Yes but with AI, in principle, there is more wriggle room to present a spectrum of opinions on a single topic.

I mean, this sounds impartial but isn't. If you have an article on the planet Earth and present a spectrum of opinions on whether it's round or flat, you're not being balanced; you're implicitly supporting flat-Earthers and their trollish beliefs by taking them seriously.

This has countless parallels in political discourse. Trade flat-Earthers for (actual) neo-Nazis; it's probably not a "spectrum of opinions" you want to broadcast without passing any judgment. It's not the role of an encyclopedia to be a free speech platform.

I'm not really saying this to defend political articles on Wikipedia. It's just that I don't think you fix it by taking an LLM trained on Wikipedia, and telling it to regenerate the articles "without bias".

Pages about companies and contemporary politics make up a relatively small percentage of Wikipedia. And what's the realistic alternative? These pages are always going to represent opinions. Traditional encyclopedias usually represent views closer to the establishment mainstream, but that's just a function of who gets a job at Britannica versus who has the time to edit Wikipedia all day.

Will Elonpedia be better in that respect? Its owner is not exactly known from having a healthy distance to internet culture wars.

More importantly, even if all these pages disappear overnight, Wikipedia is still extremely valuable and beneficial.

You're instinctively ranking TikTok as worse, but I think that parent is trying to say that Duolingo is effectively a waste of time. If you have two ways to waste your time on a phone, what makes one of them worse?

If the difference is that TikTok is a thing that "the youth" does and that we don't understand, then I guess some introspection is warranted on your closing ad hominem...

I am quite familiar with this space and I will reassert that its by far most significant application is making pretty pictures.

The Wikipedia list you're indirectly referencing is basically a fantasy wishlist of the areas where we expected the chaos theory to revolutionize things, with little to show for it. "Chaos theory cryptography", come on.

Not really. Fractals and chaos theory were a bit like blockchain in that it was a "new kind of science" and it was supposed to explain everything, and you could buy pop-science books talking about the implications.

And then it sort of fizzled out, because while it's interesting and gives us a bit of additional philosophical insights into certain problems, it doesn't do anything especially useful. You can use it to draw cool space-filling shapes.

> The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Why is this a problem, though? Imagine hiring doctors or architects with that expectation. "The problem is that no one is truly passionate about dissecting cadavers anymore".

I think our industry got hooked on being able to hire self-taught geniuses in the early days of tech. But the profession has gotten a lot more commoditized, and we just can't continue like that. Gotta hire "normal" people and teach them what they need to know. And yeah, "normal" means people who decided to learn programming because it pays well, not because they want to design compilers in their spare time.

> In other words, we have two different inflations happening at once

CPI is just an index of consumer prices. It's like saying that we have two stock markets because Nvidia is going up faster than Costco.

> People who happened to own the right assets getting richer and everyone else getting poorer

It's not a zero-sum game. Almost everyone is more wealthy than their peers 30-40 years ago.

Wealth disparities widen, but the reasons for this are complex and go beyond inflation. And frankly, many of them are self-inflicted. Every single housing development in my neighborhood is thoroughly protested by everyone. And most of what my city officials do is inventing new rules and regulations. They're not working for big corporations or the federal government.

> I don't think that's what an efficient market would do

Sounds like you spotted an arbitrage opportunity?

Pretty long, given that the US had a fully-fiat currency for 50+ years, and many European countries had it for longer than that. Per CPI, your dollar is worth 8x less than what it was worth in 1970.

This, in itself, doesn't mean anything profound. There's nothing to "snap" if the expectation of stable, modest inflation is baked into the markets. Fiat currencies usually implode only when something else undermines the confidence in the issuing government.

Eh. YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or microscopic inductors might be faulty. You just replace the PCB or tell the customer to buy a new phone.

This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair.

The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module". The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware, not the traces on the PCB.

About the most useful thing you're getting out of this are capacitor values, which are easy to measure either way.

Things used to be different 2-3 decades ago, but nowadays, most commodity PCBs are exceptionally boring - it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.

First, selling generic antibiotics isn't the money-maker you might be imagining. A lot of them are made overseas.

Second, try to convince a random family that they should withhold antibiotics and let grandma die of pneumonia and report how that conversation went.