dontparticipate

I completely agree. My first intervention with this person was to try to get them to set up a test driven development framework. Unfortunately, that's also when I learned he didn't know what that was. He also just copied "do TTD" into Claude. It was definitely my mistake, and probably over optimism about what AI might be able to do, that we didn't enforce that a lot earlier, and have been working on making sure to enforce a lot more gates going forward.

We've already started firing people for being meat proxies at my company. Was reviewing a huge and awful slop code base that a vibe coder only had been working on getting started. I started giving my feedback to the developer, and it became quickly clear that I was the only human involved in developing this "software" and the only one that had ever read the code and evaluated it.

Cost the company a ton and had to take it over from scratch. AI is unleashing a small army of 0.01x engineers and making them harder to catch, so not only are you burning the tokens, you're also setting that labor cost on fire.

Today's bombing of Yemen is tomorrow's landing of Marines on Taiwan, or I guess these days marching into Montreal and landing in Greenland. All of these require complete OPSEC from the entire chain of command.

There's a body of government explicitly built to do exactly that and given exactly that power in the constitution. It's called Congress.

We need to use our skills to build platforms that have both high retention and diffuse ownership that uplifts its users. We need to build a media ecosystem that isn't just a toy. My generation treated social media like it was just an amusement, and didn't notice it slowly turn the flow of information back into AM talk radio until it was too late. There have to be genuine alternatives to Tiktok and X and Instagram that are just as obsessive about UX as the proprietary apps are, but can't be owned.

If only there was a group of people that were given the legal rights to make that decision... We could call them like... A Congress and we could like write those processes down. Maybe call that document a Constitution.

Being under 30 and already having this mindset is going to take you far. I would argue it makes you even better at work because you'll over time iterate towards things that you value weighed against all the other good things in life rather than just try to find the biggest paycheck making a Belching as a Service app that some VC thought up on ayahuasca.

So you're spending time with your families and communities instead of working during the day then. That thing you're calling "forced socialization" has another name. It's called work. Your ability to have conversations with your coworkers and customers about your work is in fact part of most jobs that involve developing products. Most of us making over $200k don't just pull the code lever at the code factory all day and if your idea of what work in software is doesn't involve people, you've put a permanent ceiling on your career.

Psychedelic assisted therapy is so good an powerful precisely because it exploits the best case scenario of set and setting with the way the drug has an impact on your mind. I'm far from against psychedelic and have done the therapy myself.

However, if you're in a positivity cult, and don't realize you're in a cult, and don't have someone guiding you to consider you might be in a cult, the shrooms are just as likely to make the cult seem like the most profound and important experience in your entire life.

If you are a lead in a company, you suddenly have a profound spiritual experience based around your ability to hire and fire people and tell them what to do and can use the drug to convince yourself that the ideas you are coming up with are the most profound thoughts a person has ever had. You won't even realize you're shutting out good ideas, because you have a messianic belief in AI or crypto or whatever the thing is, and you take the shrooms to reinforce that belief and you create an environment around yourself and put people around you that reinforce that belief.

It's a very different experience than going to therapy to work through your fear or depression.

> Tech can't stand "bad thoughts". > it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore

It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech. What that leads to, other than the obvious hallucinations, is an obsession with set and setting. Bad vibes will literally give you a bad trip and ruin your high. I've seen this with wealthy shroom heads over and over again. Their entire life becomes centered around making sure the set and setting are always perfect, which means any little bit of someone trying to talk some sense in to them, they get ignored.

Once you start to think through the kinds of behaviors that shroom addicts would start to engage in, especially if they had the wealth and resources to facilitate their addiction, you'll see it everywhere. It's not the typical "ruin your life" kind of addiction, but it's having an impact on what kind of ideas are allowed among the SV venture types.

So the purpose of debate is to teach high schoolers things? If only there was some other institution they were a part of that could do that. Do HS students no longer take AP history and economics?

You could just as easily have a research club where awards are given for the best research on any given topic. That's essentially what the science fair is.

But it's important to you to have a winner declared between a and b? A fun game, sure, but don't delude yourself into thinking it had more value than entertainment. You could have learned about or been taught energy policy through any number of means. But you are failing to consider why the framing of HIV vs energy funding as a winner take all debate is, as I said above, incredibly dumb.

Except it's not nihilism at all? There are all kinds of ways to increase your and the public's understanding and knowledge. Competitive debate is not it any more than a trial by combat is.

Because competive debates are dumb and a dumb way to make up your mind about anything. The objective of the competitive debate is not to find some kind of truth or meaning or understanding but to win the debate. No honor or pride or authenticity needed. It's meaningless. And Ks are just the inevitable endpoint of this pointless exercise. They don't even have to pretend to debate the topic now, just win becaue that's what the judges like. It's actually always been like this, even without the Ks. If it was a right leaning jury you could win using what abouts and saying "woke" as many times as possible. The Ks just make the uselessness of debate as a format more obvious.

When it happens, I'll have a hyperloop tunnel to sell you under Los Angeles.

It absolutely has become a new faith. A lot of the cryptocurrency faith healers moved into the space as that grift began to collapse and moved from copying the prosperity gospel to apocalyptic "the end is nigh, repent for the second coming of Christ is at hand" type preachers. LLMs that these people envision are not about intelligence. They're about creating a God you can pray to and it answers back, wrapped in a veil of scientism. It's a slightly more advanced version of 4chan users worshiping Inglip.

Just at first glance, and maybe there's a better way to get this data (I guess not anymore with the API changes!), but if you just look at upvotes on popular posts it seems like nothing has changed in terms of how many people are engaged with the site. At a glance, I doubt the blackouts have had any impact on their DAU or concurrency. New subreddits will likely form to replace the permanently blacked out ones, but just like Twitter, all these addicts aren't going to leave, they'll just have a worse experience but carry on. After all, the good fight against the evil Reddit corporation... is taking place almost entirely on Reddit.

The net metering subsidy just didn't make sense anymore. Solar is "cheap" now and the next step of decarbonization is storage.

From a carbon perspective, net metering was basically paying homeowners to provide useless power to the grid (at the bottom of the duck curve) but be able to cash it in when they actually needed it around 7 pm. This meant generating useless solar power and in exchange for letting burning a ton of natural gas when you actually needed the power.

The next step is pairing solar with residential and grid scale storage. Personally, with how intermittent production can be now, the grid should be more like AWS. Allow for per minute billing and rates that fluctuate for some customers. If you can pair storage with solar (or even just storage if you could buy low sell high off the grid), that would be the next big step in the renewable revolution.

Net metering always had to die for the next step (storage) to happen. With the electric car mandate coming into 2035 so that millions of homes will own a giant battery this will eventually be even more important.

I was only able to convince family to use Signal because they didn't need two apps for messaging. It's pretty much a dead app for me now and the decision makes my conversations profoundly less private and safe.

My family members will basically all stop using Signal now because they didn't want two apps for messaging. This will make all my conversations less private rather than more. It was a really dumb decision. I was able to convince a lot of people to switch because "it's just text and voice messaging except if we both have the app then it's more secure." I will basically be alone in my usage of Signal after the change goes through and am assuming I'll just uninstall it eventually as well once my family isn't there anymore.

Since this whole blog is basically an ad for Kubesail and its self-hosting products, I do have to wonder if this was being hosted on one of their Pi products at a home on some cable internet connection, or if they realized, like everyone else that's attempted this ever, that "host it yourself" is great when you see maybe a handful of visits a day and wrecks the connection for you and you family for days when something running at home suddenly attracts any amount of traffic.

I think a more meaningful catchphrase that works on both sides of the things vs experiences spectrum is "buy quality, not quantity." My best vacations have also been some of my less expensive, because I spent a lot of time picking and choosing. Likewise, a good pair of shoes or a quality office chair can change your life while a quick Amazon Prime purchase of the same thing can be thrown away quickly.

Drinking coffee is an experience that also requires things. It doesn't always require spending a lot more money or even getting a lot more equipment, but a great cup of coffee always involves focusing on the quality and little improvements you can make.

I think you'll find any real minimalism practice is more about minimizing low quality things and experiences to allow the things and experiences that remain to be maximally enjoyable.

As an economist, I would strongly object to the idea that data isn't needed to prove points. I've heard about the particular case of the Vancouver market being popular with overseas buyers, but that doesn't absolve anyone from quantifying it.

The Vancouver specific reaction has been the "Empty Homes Tax" https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...

And according to Vancouver again, while the tax did cause a drop in empty houses declared, in every neighborhood except West End they represent less than 1% of total housing supply )https://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/more-vancouver-homes-occu...) and in most cases less than 0.5% of housing supply.

So while this may be an issue, it doesn't appear to be the issue and it seems that the basic economics here suggest that the issue in Vancouver was not limited to foreign investment. It would appear that in the Vancouver case, this ban on foreign homes would in fact be ineffective since it represents such a small share of housing.

Maybe I don't know enough about how this works in Canada in particular, but will this do anything? I thought a lot of the issue was from housing as an investment vehicle, and not specifically foreign investment. And are foreign investors really buying the real estate directly, or are they purchasing REITs and the trusts are buying them on their behalf (laundering the "foreignness" of the investment)?

And, as always, what does this do to address housing supply? Are foreigners also restricted from investing in new construction which might actually lower or slow housing costs?

It's not new so that's how they are getting caught up. It's more like a new major version of Lumberyard which itself was a fork of Crytek, which was able to ship AAA games (as painful as it was to do).

I know the devs say it's a major rewrite but... come on. You and I have both seen that code monstrosity before.

There's not a single person that doesn't understand the "why" of this, especially on HN. There's just no "how" there. It's pretty clear so far that GDPR/CCPA have been complete failures. Companies just design around them and consumers are in no position to jump through the hoops those companies have set up to defend themselves. The game is already over and we've lost and articles like these are just hope porn wishing for a better world that we will never see.

Messing with vents if you don't know what you're doing sounds like a sure fire way to kill yourself.

Never try to catch a falling knife.

Marijuana

I used to think the same way about native first and forcing devs to adopt Linux. The whole "No Tux, no bucks" thing (which has had pretty much zero impact since it's not enough bucks). But, over the years, and especially with Proton being so good with Steam, I've completely switched. If Linux gaming is to be a thing, then there needs to be an adoption first perspective.

So, yeah... maybe that means most devs will just say "my Linux support is just it runs on Proton probably, good luck!" but the thing is... there are games on Linux now. Lots of them. Lots of good ones. I was playing The Witness last night by just pushing play on Steam. No winecfg or winetools or separate DriveC Steam installation. No messing with drivers. I pressed play, the game loaded, I played it. I've repeated this loop in the last few months with most of the games in my library. Endless Legend is back in my rotation again. All of the dumb anime Japanese games where they don't even know Linux is a thing that exists suddenly work. It's glorious.

Wine/Proton may be the lazy way to develop for Linux and might not give people the coveted title of Linux exclusive gamer, but it's working really well if all you care about is playing games and not installing Windows.

I can put a kilo of cocaine in my trunk and drive on the highway, that does't mean the roads are unregulated.