I can see that this refresh makes sense on Windows, but on MacOS it feels like a step backwards.
1,797 karma · joined December 7, 2015
So as of today, I’d certainly buy electric if I was worried about depreciation.
Then came Yamaha, who saw its potential, and made a fortune with it. So did Stanford. That patent became the second most successful patent Stanford ever had until it expired in 1996 (by now obv the university has had way more financially successful patents).
It secured Chowning his tenure; the university probably wouldn’t have prolonged it otherwise. Quite an incredible story the whole thing.
Maybe these incentives weren’t perfect. If we throw all of this away, we’re back at the original problem.
You imply that there was no original problem to be solved; I think that’s naive.
You're not dumb, of course, so your next step is to say, "if I give you the contract to build prime housing, you also must build affordable housing". That's not ideal for the developer, because the time spent on building affordable housing is time they don't spend on stuff where they make proper money, but at least they can make some money. They agree to take the deal. You think, problem solved, but turns out the developer outsmarts you: they structure the company in a way that they can chicken out of building the affordable housing. In real estate, it's very common to have every building project be its own limited liability company so that one failed project doesn't influence the others. In this case, you put the affordable and the luxury housing together in one Ltd, build the luxury housing, extract the profits by moving them to the parent company and then declare your Ltd bankrupt, meaning they unfortunately can no longer build the affordable housing.
As a mayor, you observe how you're being cheated, you get real angry but the walk through the courts is too slow, and your voters demand action now. Realistically, you do the court route in the background, but you learned your lesson and now you tell the developer "before I give you a high margin luxury contract, you must have completed affordable housing first".
Alternatively, you mix the buildout into the same building so that you cannot open the luxury flats/office space without having completed the affordable part. Either way, affordable first, luxury second.
That is basically the story of the London property market.
City development must cater to all its inhabitants, and if you have a prime estate like the Battersea Power Station, it's a failure, from the city's POV, if you burn that only on high margin development. From a negotiation standpoint, the city negotiated badly here. The city has to accommodate the needs of less wealthy inhabitants in other means now, but without the negotiation leverage that a high margin property can provide.
If you view it like this, the complaints "only luxury flats" are pretty rational. The city negotiated badly.
One of the instructions I've hammered into Claude is "Write like a human. I don't want this to sound like AI content. Your standard style of writing would fail miserably if it was reviewed by an English teacher. I want you to write prose that is nice to read. For example, write full sentences instead of bullet points."
It works wonders. Suddenly, my plan documents are something I actually understand, and something I'd be happy to share as an RFC. They still need iterating every time before they're ready to share, but I no longer have "the honest truth is" and other BS in my output. It's so refreshing for my brain to be able to actually focus on the content.
I've noticed this with my partner, too. She used Claude to draft a strategy document and felt completely overwhelmed. A classic moment of "AI did all the thinking for me, but now I don't know what I'm presenting". Once I helped her prompt Claude into writing the strategy in proper English, she understood what the AI was proposing, rejected large parts of it, iterated several times and ended up with a draft document where she edited the finishing touches herself and felt that it was truly hers. The AI was still incredibly useful: it helped her with the blank slate problem, and tremendously sped up her workflow.
So yeah, if you proofread and iterate on your AI's output until you feel you'd be proud if you had written it yourself, I'm happy to read it, too.
It’s just not the same child.
I know we’re gonna get there eventually, but still, seeing as this is their first demo image on the page I just can’t help but scream inside “HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THIS?”
It really makes me question whether the people building, or at least the people marketing this, actually understand their product. I love image generation for all kinds of use cases, but I find that particular example creepy.
It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.
- yt dlp has builtin support for tor
- write the retry logic using your favourite coding AI
- spin up a cheap cloud instance and let it run
And on the iPhone, you MUST use the Apple App Store, not just as a means to distribute your app, but as your payment provider. You can’t collect payment details yourself, use Stripe, Paddle, anything. You MUST use Apple.
You simply cannot enter business without paying Apple a share. That’s a monopoly.
I’m coming from a different angle. I grew up in Germany, and we banned any Nazi content - rightfully so! - to make sure that shit isn’t spread again. But the political left - to which I consider myself more drawn to than the right, just for the record - has increased the amount of things that cannot be talked about bit by bit. That’s dangerous.
Now, we have a situation where many people feel they cannot air their frustration without being labeled a racist.
Here’s DHHs core argument:
“In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third.”
Now, when I lived in London - 2016-2019 - London was full of people from all kinds of countries, and I LOVED it. It’s what made London so special to me. But as his numbers suggest, that’s been a fairly recent development, and how could I blame people who preferred the status before?
He then goes on to imagine how he’d feel if Copenhagen changed the same way, and shows that it didn’t. He says this is the result of more restrictive immigration policies. He quotes a Danish prime minister from a left-ish party to underline that point.
As a side note: Denmark is the only country in the EU, or at least the only one I’m aware of, that doesn’t have a massive problem with new extremist right wing parties is Denmark.
I think there’s a valid political debate to be had, and DHH has some reasonable arguments. We can’t be lazy and just shout “you can’t say that”. That doesn’t solve anything. His post is not a “Heil Hitler” manifesto. It may not be perfect, and he sure would be wise to choose different words when talking politics instead of technology. But he has reasonable arguments - reasonable as in, you can reason with them, they’re not made up or illogical. And they are worth engaging with instead or cancelling him.
And it can benefit from ORMs, because it means less tokens.
The biggest advantage of Rails is convention over configuration. Standardisation means AI is trained on lots of standardised codebases. So that still pays in AI land. The question to me is whether that’s such a big upside that it gives a real edge. Not sure on that; Python has way more code overall.
DHH has always been very outspoken in his opinions. That’s why he bashed Heroku so badly when he introduced Kamal. It’s what makes Rails such a clear minded framework.
In his political blog, he’s raising an issue that’s occupying all of western politics. And he’s very aggressive about it - just how he was very aggressive when he said “stop paying ridiculous amounts for stupid managed clouds”.
Instead of arguing where he’s wrong, people - including the blog post you cite - write “that’s hateful and racist” and refuse to engage beyond that. That is the very shut-up mentality he writes about.
It frustrates me so much to see this here on HN. HN is supposed to be a place to discuss, not blame others. This resistance to engage in a constructive discussion, even if the person with the differing opinion isn’t articulating them well, or has errors in their reasoning that upset you, is super harmful. It’s what gives all these far right parties their rise to power. They occupy the subjects then that their voters have on their mind, because everyone else doesn’t dare to talk about it.
We could have constructive discussions around such topics. But if we don’t, all that happens is that those who don’t feel heard - in this case rightfully so, because we chose not to hear them - will develop more and more extreme ideas.