PaulRobinson

I've been thinking about this a fair bit recently.

We make a lot of price/performance compromises for having an attached screen and keyboard on our computer. That was what got me started.

Then I remembered the days of having to go to a special corner of the house to use a computer, vs now when I have a computer with me all the time. In my bag, on the sofa, on the train. Hell, I'm writing this on the work MBP while waiting for an appointment.

And you know what, I think I got more done when I went and sat in a corner of the house all those years ago. I set up an area for "computer work", and it worked really well.

I have a home office, but it's a jumble of cables going into docking stations and all sorts of weird stuff. I think if I streamline it and turn it into a proper "computer room", I might get some of that mojo back. I might even convince my partner that surrendering the home office and having a corner of the den might be good - she can watch TV while I tinker. And I won't be balancing a laptop on my knee and trying to do two things at once.

And the price/performance thing comes back in. Hmm.

GPUs are in a weird bubble captured by weird finance tricks in the private sector. They put money into that, taxpayers are going to freak out.

If they can make progress on QOA and HHL algos, that has value.

But the main thing they're trying to avoid - and this can't be understated - is dependency on US tech firms when quantum gets good enough to be practical for those sorts of problems.

Since WW2, Europe has happily been a consumer of US produced tech. The last 10 years has caused a revisiting of that view. It's an exercise for the reader to figure out the factors leading to that, and whether they think it's sensible or not.

As the old quip goes: people don’t want to be writers, they want to have published a book.

You can turn this around as well: people don’t want to read, they want to be well read.

The difference is “effort and process” versus a status. People want the label, but don’t want to do the work to get there.

John Oliver did a piece on this a couple of weeks ago. The videos are not widely available outside of the US, but here's a Guardian write-up [0], and in the UK you can get access to the episode via catch-up if you have Sky Atlantic.

TLDR: the police do this whenever they want, pretty much.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/aug/03/john-ol...

I'm sorry to hear that. I'm glad that you've prefaced it with "temporary" - it suggests perhaps that the effects are known not to be permanent for you and that you are on the mend, which is marvellous. Godspeed.

To be clear, the people I encountered who had these interactions with me were very ill over a long period of time. At least one of them was sectioned after a failed suicide attempt (that involved trying to roll his car down the motorway and jumping off a bridge - thankfully nobody was hurt and he came away with just a few bruises). I was asked to go to the secure unit he was sent to, to convince him I was not controlling his brain, by his wife, who was acting on his request.

Another refused to get help after I urged him to talk to his doctor and became threatening enough I had to start forwarding emails and texts he was sending me to others as "witnesses" in case anything happened to me.

I am not the hero of these stories. I'm just part of them. When people you know behave like this towards you, it is deeply unsettling. Almost all cognitive changes in people you know can be disturbing. Talking about that is not me making myself the victim: it's saying how it affects me.

If I'd known PKD while all this was going on, and was aware of it, I think I'd be both saddened and terrified. That was my point.

Good luck with dealing with your own recovery, and I hope you're well soon.

Is saying it's sad and suicide is horrid a stigma? Apologies.

As somebody with mental health issues himself, I was not aware of other people's sensitivities on this, only my own.

What you've done here is build a transpiler that takes a lightweight pseudocode representation and turns it into a concrete and executable form in another language.

There are good reasons for doing this: I might want to write something in Ruby (the way I think about problems might fit that language best), but might want the artefact I check in to be Python (my colleagues might prefer it), and my build pipeline might want to transpile it into C, and then throw it through a compiler with a pile of optimisations to make it all scream at 100x the performance my original code could run in, in Ruby.

Hell, why not make the Ruby interpreter just a call out to an LLM to get it turned into byte code?

Of course this is all starting to sound a little absurd because it is. We're reinventing a domain that has had decades of research into it using an expensive, slow, stochastic black box.

Where there's some utility is in a language where I can be a little vague, but that doesn't have all the semantic confusion of natural language. But without defining that as a formal grammar (and therefore implementable in LLVM, JVM, whatever), you may end up with the worst of both Worlds.

Ah, we've got back to the "we should event source everything, and allow ourselves to change history and re-snapshot current state", idea gaining followers again.

Well, yeah. But it's hard. Also, git is not the solution to this, it's just the screwdriver you have in your hand right now.

Having dealt with a few people with schizophrenia, either diagnosed, or clearly exhibiting many of the symptoms and refusing to engage with medical professionals until I cut off relationships for my own safety. I think something really sad was happening here.

In fact, in a bout of lucidness, he tried to take his own life because "Elijah had left him". That's horrid.

The people I have known have hurt themselves and took actions that were designed to hurt others - physically, emotionally, in one case financially - because they believed in a higher order. Sometimes, that higher order was, errr, me. [1]

If the story of saving his son's life is true, that's marvellous and mysterious and wonderful. But the surgery referred to at the start of the surgery sounds like it introduced an infection and/or change in brain function somehow, and he suffered with the consequences the rest of his life.

As an aside, it's weird how many stories of mental hallucinations are tied to the music of the Beatles. Perhaps its popularity, or because it was a step change in how music was written and produced, but I was watching something the other night that mentioned just how obsessed Manson was with the White album. Now this with Strawberry fields. Don't know what to make of it, just an odd data point.

[1] These people felt I was controlling their mind, I could read their mind, I was instructing them, and so on. I was just having a chat down the pub with them, nothing more (but then, if I were a mystic being trying to do my work through others I would say that, wouldn't I?). The common factor in all these men (and they were all men < 35 years old at the time), was heavy cannabis use, particularly in teen years. This is now well documented in literature as being linked to schizophrenia.

Yesterday I was flipping between some TUIs, native apps, web apps and an electron app. I think it was only because I was trying to do a lot in each of them I became really aware of the latency lag in some of these.

There are real advantages of TUIs: less CPU; sometimes I want to be using a personal TUI on a personal dev server quickly from a work laptop at lunchtime and an ssh + tmux + TUI is perfect; most modern TUI libraries are significantly less painful to work with than most modern web app frontend libraries; I can change the font size of my terminal easily if I need to, more easily than native (but not web app). But by far the biggest, is they just generally tend to be very fast and responsive compared to everything else.

Building software for yourself - and only yourself - is a super-power.

I can see how LLMs help.

I wouldn't want to maintain software for other people entirely vibe coded. I think I might think again about native app development for my own needs, if it's kind of disposable.

My dad once told me that being smart was a curse in some ways, but he framed it as having a World view that few others had.

I think however your take on it is closer: when you're smart, you're told you're smart (both as a positive and as a negative - I was bullied for it), it just becomes part of your self dialogue and identity and it gets in the way.

It's taken years of therapy for me to get to the point where I realised none of that really mattered as much as having great relationships with people I liked, and going for long walks in green spaces and not thinking about anything.

This is missing the "(2013)" at the end of the HN link, but it does seem weirdly prescient as we say a rise of more polarised politics across the World, just 13 years later.

That's an amazing battery life these days. Love my Apple Watch, but having to charge it at least once a day, is a chore.

Might take another look at these - given the price, it's not a huge gamble to try it out for a few weeks.

It feels like the only way to stop this happening reliably, is to get as many people as possible off Google and Microsoft.

I'd argue that self-hosting is the first step. The second step is helping everyone you know get their own domain and host their email for them. If they don't trust you to not read their email on your server, point them to somebody else who offers mail hosting.

The more people we can convince the internet is something anyone can help build outside of the silos, the more likely it is to survive.

I think this might be the core signal that it’s a bubble.

You don’t think GPUs depreciate massively in value? I think they are written off to zero in less than 5 years.

And if you look at the ARR of the companies “buying” them, I think we can see there’s some significant leverage going on.

It's a strange game, in which the only winning move is not to play

In about 1990, my Dad gifted me an old XT. By that point it was almost ancient, no modern software would work on it, but I could do some BASIC programming, and learn DOS and a few PC magazines still had PC software on 5.25" cover disks, so I got some of those going. My mates by this point had Amiga 500s and Atari STs and the other rare PC owner I found was using 386s and dreaming of a 486 (the Pentium was still years away).

A few years later the PSU blew, a mate and I isolated it to a capacitor that burned out, we tried replacing it but it didn't work. I left it to one side and I decided I'd get back to it one day and restore it with more time and knowledge - or get a professional (I'm a software guy), to fix it.

I returned from University one break to find it missing. My step-father had known it was broken and decided it was rubbish. He'd put the whole thing - base unit, monitor, keyboard, all of it, into a wheelie bin for the council to take with the household rubbish collection.

I felt sorry for the rubbish collectors - that thing was heavy. I'm surprised it didn't break the bin, TBH.

And of course, I still haven't forgiven him. Love the guy, but man...

Anyway, when I have the time and space for a small retro computing museum, I'll be getting one of those in the collection. Iconic, beautiful, and close to my heart. And also - I can't understate this enough - really, really heavy and not something you should dispose of with household rubbish.

The Test is repeated every day you get in the cab.

If you get into a black cab in London and ask to be taken to any location, anywhere within 6 miles of Charing Cross, that driver will know immediately the right route to take without satnav. To get to that point they need to know 25,000 streets and many, many landmarks - statues, museums, galleries, restaurants, hotels, and so on.

I used to regularly drink with a cabbie in London, and he said that every time somebody got in the back his heart rate would rise, as he'd realise he's "on" and about to have to work out where to head from scratch. Within 30 seconds he'd have every step of the way worked out, down to which lanes at which intersections, no matter where in London he was or where he was going.

That's the thing that's likely going to reduce Alzheimer's.

I'm not saying this, because I'm not aware of this. I have a friend who is enjoying living in Osaka, but I wouldn't feel qualified to talk about Japanese sentiment towards him or any other group of non-natives.

I'm saying that culture spreads through fear of being ostracized and the cost of not conforming to that culture. This is true in any country. It seems Japan has a "broader" and "firmer" culture that is rooted in respect to others, but it would take some serious effort for a similar culture to take hold in Europe or the US, I think.

A sense of "non conformity" leading to issues is not unique to Japan though, in Europe it is described as a problem with "multiculturalism".

The British (of which I am one), have spent thousands of years stealing the best bits of immigrant culture but seem to have forgotten that (or have been unable to absorb, for whatever reason), for the last ~60 years. That's leading to a rise in far-right sentiment and a growing desire for mono-culturalism. I can see evidence of that in Germany, France and other European nations. I could easily imagine it appearing more in Japan.

That "simple process" requires equipment most people don't own or know how to operate, an oil most people don't keep in their cupboards, and is suggested in a book most people haven't heard of by a tech CTO they would not recognise the name of.

Honestly this is like the Dropbox comment all over again. Everyone is missing the point, it's glorious. :)

Most people cooking steaks don't care about the optimal way to cook steaks, or want to find out.

Most people building software today don't care about the optimal way to build software, or want to find out.

That's TFA. That's the point. That's what we're discussing. :D

All metaphors break at some point.

However, your example actually proves the point.

How many people who want a good steak know how to identify a high quality cut? Do they even know where to buy a high quality cut? What the different cuts are and whether they want rump, sirloin or fillet? How many kitchens have a meat thermometer? How many home cooks know how to use it and what the right temperature should be? How many home cooks know about reverse searing? Or timing? Or resting? Or seasoning?

Is it all learnable? Sure. But even something as simple as steak has nuance that needs to be learned, equipment deployed to go from "pretty good" to "great", experimentation and trial and error.

Steak is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.

Building an app is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.

So, honestly, the whole metaphor stands up pretty well for me, specifically because of your response.

TFA explains that Japan is unusual as being the only country in Asia with two cities in the top 10 most liveable cities in the World. That's why they wrote the article. If Spain had been the only country in Europe with two cities in the top 10, they might have done it in Spain.

It needs critical mass, but then it cascades.

If you read through the description, what they talk about is that the culture is built around the idea of the individual being part of something bigger, and that consideration and respect for that something bigger (other people), is core to your own identity.

That's not hard for a lot of cultures, but it's almost impossible for most cultures in the Western hemisphere, and to change it would require a cultural reset that would run against the grain of many things that make those cultures what they are.

If it were possible though - and there are times when certain subcultures had standards of etiquette different to those widely accepted today in the West - it wouldn't need 100% of people to "sign up", just enough to make it ostracising to not conform. And then the outliers would conform.

We do this already: it's OK (albeit illegal), to cycle through a red light where I live, because lots of people do it, but if you were to try and get served ahead of your turn in a pub, you might get into an argument, because nobody does that without expecting a problem.

That "trope" is in almost every press release, every corporate announcement I have read in decades.

AI is trained on all that material and regurgitates it. It is trained to do that.

So the problem we have is that AI sounds like that, because humans sound like that. The "identifier" you've found isn't real. It just shows - if an LLM did this - that it's working, and that corporate speak is ubiquitous.

And the lists of threes, man, that's just basic English composition I was taught when I was 8 years old - it's everywhere. It has, to a native English-speaking ear, a rhythm, cadence and elegance. See?

> clearly 100% AI-generated

First, show your working - just reads like generic announcement/PR speak from the last 30 years to me.

Secondly, could everyone who wants to make comments about AI text in submissions please consider re-reading the comments section of the Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - I'm not sure these comments are in the spirit of the HN community. We should stop this in the same way we try and stop "HN is just turning into Reddit" noise.

> Today, what's the incentive to use a mailing list?

Social media is trash that makes your life worse. Deleting the apps demonstrably improves mental health. I'm a case in point, but everyone I know or read about who gets rid of social media concurs. Major, major life upgrade.

I should not have to be on X to get notifications about new security issues. I should not have to sift through Meta's latest algorithm enhancements to find out if my servers are currently hanging their backsides out on the information superhighway.

Secondly, I don't want all security research to go via commercial channels, either via clearinghouses, orgs with "marketing teams" (I actually want to scream at the idea this is OK), or even through platforms like social media that exist to sell advertising.

Mailing lists are clean, simple, filterable, and readable - or ignorable - on any device of my choosing. I can route emails to ticketing systems without fear an API token is going to get revoked, an RSS feed is disabled by a "product owner", or a web scraper fails because somebody added a new react component for "improved usability". Email is email, and it's glorious, in a way no other communication mechanism has ever come close to matching because it's so simple.

Those two other security mailing lists suffer from not having critical mass. Bugtraq may or may not get critical mass back. I hope it does, not just for nostalgia reasons, but because we need a critical mass movement behind security research given the current threat landscape.

I think I would trust a Nobel laureate on their topic of expertise, as indicated by their Nobel prize.

The problem seems to be that they are asked - and often answer - questions on topics unrelated to that topic, in the belief they're just, y'know, really smart.

I think the economics prize must be the worst banana skin for the recipients - popular economics science books like Freakonomics have cemented in the public's (and journalists'), minds, that economics has applicability to a number of different parts of life. And it does! However that does not mean they have any authority to speak on anything outside of their published work.

Indeed. The FIFA Peace Prize winners espousing views they don't seem to have any qualification to comment on (and may express factually incorrect views, unsupported by data), seems to be running at a rate of ~100% at the moment. The Bayesian in me wants to see more data before calling it a disease, but early signs are not promising.

I'm currently weighing up a sabbatical (3 months), for a bunch of reasons.

A vacation (or holiday, or PTO, or whatever you call it locally), is great, but normally too short to properly reset. I often come back thinking "I could do with another couple of those right now". The main purpose for those for me is to travel and get away from home for a week or two and experience new things.

What I'm more excited about is taking a few months to basically do very little. Read, walk, no alarms in the morning, no Sunday night anxiety, no wishing it was Friday. Just wake up, do what feels right, don't work, don't do anything.

I'm in my late 40s, I have chronic health issues, and have symptoms of burn out, so even this might feel "too short", but I think it's such a valuable experiment to try, it's got to be done.