davidw

This sort of seems like a pattern in CS - someone creates something and then it blows up 20 or 30 years later when the world is ready for it.

Unsurprisingly, the blog they're quoting is just straight up white nationalist trash:

"Cut off nonwhite immigration, meaning dropping it by at least 90%, similar to the Quotas Acts, with the top priorities being Mexico, India, and the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. Ideally, you would increase white immigration too, because even in the absence of further immigration the white (meaning American) population will be a minority in a few decades, and it’s very difficult for a minority to assimilate others."

They don't care about the long term - it's a smash and grab to get as much as they can while they can.

Organizations that are overall bad can have people who have done some good things, or at least technically impressive things.

And of those, how many does this help, and how much? Like does this mean I could look at a map application while my wife drives for a few minutes and be ok? Or does it help a lot of people be able to read for a long time?

It'd be interesting to gather some actual statistics. I can't look at a screen for more than a minute as a passenger without starting to feel a twinge in my gut.

Still though, perhaps the existence of low-margin, generic, cloud LLM's puts some downward pressure on the 'brand name' companies?

Aren't those widely regarded as 'not as good', because right now LLM's are a game of "who has the most resources wins"? And even those require very high end personal computers.

The freedom pendulum looks like it swung away from individuals.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542100

You only have as much freedom as you can buy from a handful of huge corporations.

They are also dragging their feet on 'single stair' reform, despite single stair being perfectly safe with adequate construction techniques

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2025/02...

Good plan.

Hah - I was going to mention all the other types of things the fire people seem to be blocking, but decided to stay focused. But yeah, it seemed like 'aversion to change'. "Firefighters might trip over solar panels on balconies" or something kind of far-fetched sounding.

Utah passed a balcony solar bill; I think they're the only ones so far. Oregon tried in the short session last year, but it got shut down by fire marshall type people, sadly.

[Old man voice] Back in my day these kinds of articles loved pointing out that, well, the email address could be a UUCP address and that's a whole different parsing situation.

Of course, even then in the mid 90ies, UUCP was not something one really encountered outside of "so you think you're going to parse an email address with regexp?!" articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing

On the subject of crime and that web site, I thought this story was quite fascinating:

https://magazine.atavist.com/2019/outlaw-country-klamath-cou...

There are a lot of those bits of land throughout the west that have been, for whatever reason, subdivided enough to make them very cheap plots of land in remote areas. They tend to attract a lot of very random people.

There's an area like that near where I live in Bend, Oregon where some guy called in to the Sheriff's department worried about his brother. The deputies decided to visit the next day because it was winter and already dark. Reading that, I had a record scratch moment where I was going "wait, the sheriff's deputy wouldn't visit the area after dark - holy crap".

Or scientists know how to count and see that one number is larger than another; and understand that that's an important factor in many political systems.

archive site seems to be working now: https://archive.is/WnoiH

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363245 "The SpaceX Squeeze"

They say a paywall.

Having corporations be distinct entities whose investors have limited liability is a pretty fundamental to a lot of things. But voting? That is way too far.

I'll add to the love for bicycles. I wrote this a while back about how bicycles are, for me, a "thinking machine": https://journal.dedasys.com/2015/04/20/the-bicycle-a-thinkin...

"Outlaw Techno Psychobitch"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ

If it continues to be a numbers game - the more resources you throw at it, the better it is - then on-device is always going to be not as good. I guess it might be good enough for some uses?

I kind of loathe the move away from a world where we could control our own computers and run our own software on them.

LLMs represent a big shift of power towards capital until such time as local ones are 'good enough'.

"Cast My Apps" - did they, uh, use AI to make that actually work? Because it's very flaky on my Chromebook, which I am otherwise very, very pleased with (especially given the price)

Commenting on Hacker News?

He can absolutely counted on to do stupid, corrupt shit. We saw plenty of it when he had 4 years in office and was somewhat held in check by having hired some more or less 'normal' Republicans.

It was entirely predictable that he would fuck things up in some way. He's demented (although the press stopped caring about that sort of thing when Biden dropped out), deeply corrupt, narcissistic, and was never particularly intelligent to begin with.

Yeah, the shifting with electronic components is so fast, easy and precise, but I don't love how many batteries are all over some of my bikes. I kind of enjoy bikes in order to get away from screens and tech and all that.

That's pretty interesting; I've always wondered about the internals of those things, as I stared at mine while pedaling up some steep grade.

I'm also curious about what the electronic derailleurs and shifters run.

Yeah, where I live, one guy was like "You know what, I've had it". He then started organizing within the community and got a big crowd to show up at a city council meeting, and we ended up getting rid of the Flock cameras. Yay!