brightball

After 25 years heavily paying attention to political news, the "bad thing happened" followed by "we have to pass this bill that won't fix it but I want to capitalize on the news cycle to gain support anyway" cycle should just be assumed now.

> SaaS stocks are currently the buying opportunity of a lifetime.

Is anything down far enough to look like the opportunity of a lifetime right now?

There were some deals out there over the last few years. I still kick myself on a daily basis for not taking Carvana at $5 in 2023.

My dad kept trying to get me to watch this show and I never got around to it. Maybe I need to.

Good use case for Elixir. Apparently it performs best across all programming languages with LLM completions and its concurrency model is ideal too.

https://autocodebench.github.io/

Trust is an interesting thing. It often comes down to how long an entity has been around to do anything to invalidate that trust.

Oddly enough, I feel pretty good about Google here with Sergey more involved.

He was a huge Clemson fan.

https://www.tigernet.com/clemson-football/story/legendary-ac...

I mean, sure.

But when the conspiracy involves lack of prosecution or inconsistent sentencing at scale and then the Ministry of Justice issues a blanket order to delete one of the best resources to look into those claims...? Significantly increases the legitimacy of the claims.

I assumed it was the usual conspiracy stuff up until this order.

Grok also said to drive. Also made an eco case for washing your car.

> If you're really trying to be an eco-warrior about a 50-meter trip, the real win is washing it in the first place so you're not driving around with a rolling dirt magnet that creates more drag and uses more fuel. Drive. It's the only option that actually gets your car clean.

This aligns with what all of the conspiracy theorists have been saying about the UK over the last year. Maybe there is something to it.

It's a lot easier if you live near either your parents or your in-laws. Having grandparents around to help is the cheat code to making parenting easier. We didn't have that until our oldest was 7 and it was life changing.

But before that, it's exhausting and still by far the most rewarding thing you'll ever do with your life.

Right to Repair and some type of incentives that actually rewarded it would probably do more globally than most other consumer level solutions.

I've watched most of my life as narratives have been pushed in popular culture, TV, music, magazines, online articles, etc that go out of their way to convince people not to have children. Just some examples of trends I've observed personally.

- Scare media about the cost of having children

- Scare media about the environmental impact of having children, even calling it irresponsible for the planet

- Scare media about the state of the world aka "how could you bring a child into this" when, at least in the western world, we have the highest standard of living in human history.

- Scare media about motherhood, things not working out with your husband, kids being brats who don't respect you and constantly living in a house of sadness.

- Scare media about fatherhood promoting the idea of women having a baby just to hook the father for child support and the divorcing him.

- Scare media about having to trade your career for a family

All of this while growing up and realizing more and more, by talking to everyone around me, people older than me, friends of my parents, my other friends in their 40s and on down the line...there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing. It's devastating for the people who I know who can't have children despite all of their attempts and even then tends to lead to adoption in many cases.

All of the narratives, trend marketing and media capitalize on a story that people have been invested in pushing for decades that is at worst an outright lie and at best a half truth to accomplish some political goals.

People need each other. Men need women. Women need men. Children need both parents. And we are all better for it. No matter how broke you think you are or how much you think it will cost, you will figure it out together. People do this all the time with less than you have ever had in your life and they make it work. Together. And it's worth it.

I've run the Carolina Code Conference since 2023 and we've setup Zulip as a chat system for conference attendees to network every year. It's a really cool platform and I wish it had more widespread adoption.

I graduated just before social media took off, but for us everybody was on AOL Instant Messenger. You left it on on your computer all the time, people updated their status messages for all to see and it showed when you were idle.

It was so much better than online by default as we are now.

I fixed Facebook on my feed at least. I started aggressively unfollowing people who post or comment about politics constantly (even if I agree with them). Not unfriending, just unfollowing.

What’s left is a feed with pictures of my friends and family, important news about what’s going on in their lives, and trash talking about college football.

It’s great.

Was that session published online somewhere? I’d love to watch that.

Yea, this is accurate in my experience.

For what it's worth, I've been very happy using Crunchydata PostgreSQL with Fly.

All I can say is thank you. I learned to manage servers because of Slicehost and the articles on it back then.

I remember being excited by the merger because well, Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time. People still tell stories about their service. The Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in AWS and never really became competitive.

I remember feeling the same way about Slicehost back in the day after Rackspace acquired them. Loved Slicehost. Not too long after though, Digital Ocean appeared with everything I loved about Slicehost and has kept getting better ever since.

I feel like that's Fly.io now. They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities...while improving on pricing, particularly for lower traffic stuff. Love Fly.

Fly.io is incredible.

It's a simple question of economics and observation.

In a free marketplace, when a product, service or company is no longer useful...it dies. This creates a natural incentive to constantly improve, operate more efficiently or expand into new areas where it can create value.

With government spending, this doesn't happen because there's no incentive for it to happen. Programs are created and then they grow, perpetually, forever.

My goodness, I still remember Bill Clinton proudly showing a balanced budget. I remember George Bush Jr running with one of his biggest campaign points around fixing Social Security.

How we got from that era of energy for fiscal responsibility to $39 trillion in debt is...maddening.

I think a tremendous amount of people want value for their money. It's one of the reasons so many people talk about cutting government spending where it's wasteful, operating with a balanced budget and reducing the trillions of dollars in debt that we've accrued...which will eventually devalue all of our money.

One of my favorite things about this field is getting to learn about all of these different business domains.

Edited to add clarification.

I meant to reply to you with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886801

Agreed. For anyone curious, here's the UK report from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) from 2023-2024.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze3p1j710ko

Reports on sextortion, self-generated indecent images, and grooming via social media/messaging apps:

Snapchat 54%

Instagram 11%

Facebook 7%

WhatsApp 6-9%

X 1-2%

I have heard of title theft but I imagine it is more prominent is areas where an attorney is not required to process the sale of a house. Some states allow "title companies" to handle this process.

I'm not well versed, just passing along what I've heard from people over the years.

I have always heard the best way to make sure your title can't be stolen is to have a loan against the house so that a bank is involved. As long as a bank is involved, there are numerous additional hoops for something like that.

The pattern I’ve observed throughout the US is that we have all those same things as well as citizens who can go to speak at various council meetings.

People are ignored, councils seem to rubber stamp things and the tactic at higher levels is to make a terrible decision and then attempt to use courts to delay any attempt to stop whatever the decision was. When it’s finally stopped, it will be done again slightly different and restart the lengthy court process.

Aside from Elon Musk, there are a few other people with a lot of capital aiming to do the same thing. That means, either they are all wrong (possible) or this problem has been solved somehow and the solution itself is not public.

Google and Amazon are doing the same thing. Maybe it is a moonshot (pun intended), but Musk is hardly alone in the push.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/bezos-and-musk-race-to-bring-data-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-cen...