genthree

I think the two-income household (two full-time paying jobs, specifically) is a lot of it, and seems to go along with "rich" countries.

Having all the stuff that could happen during the day if it were (if you will) someone's full-time job, instead get crammed into evenings and weekends when you're trying to also do non-chore stuff with your kids (or, for god's sake, maybe get just one measly hour to do something you want to do, alone... or spend time with your spouse, without kids...) and take care of things that have to happen each evening (dinner, bed time stuff) really, really sucks.

Not having chores piling up through the week to ambush you both on the weekend would be amazing. I can hardly even imagine how much more free we'd feel. With two working parents it's like neither ever gets any actual time off that they're not carving out by neglecting something they really ought to be doing (usually several somethings)

IME babies are the very easiest for almost everything.

It's way more work to travel with a 10-year-old than a 1-year-old. Then quadruple that difficulty for each additional kid of roughly that age...

Consider how many people are clingy and/or just have questionable judgement about boundaries with their friends, family, and acquaintances in general, usually with a healthy dose of neuroticism thrown in for good measure.

Consider that lots of these people have kids, and when they do, they tend to have a very friend-like relationship with them. Like, they aren't just magically better at this stuff when it's their kid.

These situations are a source of a great deal of this behavior, and the "I can't contact my kid-friend!" anxiety.

No, no, it's the parent.

Parents calling their kids in class isn't as rare as you might think...

100%. I had to drop about half my interests and hobbies after having kids, to remain sane (trying to continue juggling all of them was plainly just going to lead to never doing anything, really), and adjust all the others to fit better with kid-having.

If you can't hire "help", it's like losing 20 waking hours from your week, at least, just for the not-at-all fun or "quality time" parts of having a kid (extra housekeeping [so... very much more], extra shopping, taxiing the kids places, extra household planning, basic hygiene stuff, et c). And on top of that you need to spend "fun" time with them, too, like that part may be more enjoyable but it's non-optional and a lot of stuff an adult might want to do or accomplish doesn't integrate well with it.

Slice ~30-40 hours off the waking hours of both adults in the household, on top of 45-50 hours of work and other stuff necessary for work (commute, et c.) and... yeah this is just bullshit if you can't hire help.

[EDIT] Oh, this reminds me of a certain genre of LinkedIn post that I especially hate: the CEO bragging about how they find time for family despite having five jobs. The real answer to this mystery is that zero of those jobs are actually full-time work, and, the part they never mention, is that they pay others to do tens of hours of work per week that normal people have to do themselves, like lawn care, housekeeping, fixing broken shit in their house, shopping, keeping track of and making appointments and such, et c.

For a non-tech case of this, my wife worked at a place that fired like 80% of their writers in anticipation of huge speed-ups they expected from LLMs, a couple years ago.

They had to hire a bunch of them back less than two months later. The speed-ups were approximately nil and making the editors edit AI slop all day long had them all close to quitting.

They didn't even wait to see if there were any actual benefits, they just blindly fired a bunch of people based on marketing lies. I can only assume they're the same sorts who fall for Nigerian Prince scams.

I hate the AI assistants for ticket-writing. The beneficial use there would be to prompt for possibly-useful information that's not present, or call out ambiguity and let the writer decide how to resolve any of that. Coaching, basically. Suggesting actual text to include, for people who aren't already excellent at ticket-writing, just leads to noisier tickets that take more work to understand ("did they really mean this, or did the LLM just prompt them to include it and they thought sure, I guess that's good?")

[EDIT] Oh and much of your post rings true for my org. They operate at a fraction the speed they could because of organizational dysfunction and failure to use what's already available to them as far as processes and tech, but are rushing toward LLMs, LOL. Yeah, guys, the slowness has nothing to do with how fast code is written, and I'm suuuuure you'll do a great job of integrating those tools effectively when you're failing at the basics....

I think this is the result of a c-suite that has never actually done the work of the businesses they're running. The MBAificiation of management. Of course they constantly do brain-dead shit, they literally don't have a clue how anything actually works in "their" own business.

We're doing that in my office, forced Cursor use. A good chunk of the "edited by AI" lines in my history were just auto-completing about the same as a traditional intellisense-alike would do (and actually Cursor doesn't seem to supply that, which is frequently annoying and wastes my time, in particular when I need to make sure it hasn't hallucinated a method or property on an object it should be able to "see" the definition of, which it does constantly; IDK maybe there's a setting somewhere, but I don't have to fiddle with settings in vanilla VSCode to get that...)

It's actually kinda useful in some cases, but the UI is terrible and it needs to integrate much better with existing tools that are superior to it for specific purposes, before I'll be happy using it. I'd say the productivity gains are a wash, for me, so far. Plus it's entirely too memory-hungry, I'd just come to accept that a text editor takes a couple GB now (SIGH), and here it comes taking way more than that.

I hope for their sake they're using real metrics internally, and not whatever nonsense they're using to calculate stuff like "% written by LLM" in their dashboard, because that's... very wrong.

Incompetently repackaging. They started with VSCode so nearly all the work was already done, but still managed to make it leak memory like it's infinite. The power of AI slop! Their product is an anti-advertisement for the core concept of itself, which is kind of impressive.

GAO and CBO are under Congress directly, fortunately.

They're both awesome. Anyone who starts talking about all kinds of obvious ways to cut waste in government and isn't dropping references to GAO and CBO reports all over the place, is almost certainly bullshitting you (glares at Elon Musk).

The GOP has hated them for quite a while because they consistently tell them that no, of fucking course cutting taxes won't "pay for itself", but they haven't yet had the votes to get rid of them. Trump can't, they're some of the few government functions that fall under Congress (possible because they don't really administer government, they just issue reports, largely on request, so they're more like research librarians than administrators)

In recent history (last few decades) the scoreboard shows them already being more fiscally conservative than the only viable alternative.

The closest thing I can see to direct monetization of HN is that YC uses it as a captive advertising platform.

They don't serve 3rd party ads, but they use it as a job board (with closed comments on those posts, LOL) for their companies, and to announce product launches and such. All that stuff gets boosted, nobody's organically up-voting a comments-disabled job post from some mediocre startup.

[EDIT] The less-direct part, yes, is stuff like brand awareness and community goodwill.

I used to deliberately not block ads on sites that worked directly with advertisers and didn't use big spying malware- and scam-filled ad networks, and only served (more or less) static, non-animated and non-pop-up ads. I also didn't block the early "see? We're doing not-evil advertising!" well-marked text-only Google ads (remember those?)

None of those are really a thing any more, but if those were the only kinds of ads around, I might not bother with an ad blocker at all.

Except Google ads or anything else from a big multi-site ad network. That's all spying crap, I'm never going back to allowing those through, no matter how unobtrusive.

> The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on

Depends how you use it, I guess? The close and zero-effort integration and syncing with iOS is pretty key to my desktop (well, laptop) still having enough utility-to-effort to be worth having around at all. Probably still won't save it when my M1 Air gets a bit dodgy in a year or two and I start thinking about an upgrade (I'll likely upgrade my aging, last-pre-M-series-model iPad Pro instead) but if not for that it'd already have become inconvenient enough that I'd likely have forgotten about it in a storage bin somewhere.

All the vibe-coded webshitware these companies are putting out seems too be doing the opposite: it's all even more memory- and cycle-hungry than the webshit we were lovingly pooping out by hand for the last decade.

I've seen actual people (mostly this year) who write stuff like, "sure, I can't deny that this is fascism now, but you've been calling lawlessness for the rich, concentration of power in the public and private sectors both, militarization of the police, the war on drugs, free speech zones, surveillance capitalism, voter suppression, pushes to roll back civil rights, and many of our wars, fascist, for decades! It's not my fault I didn't realize it was for-real this time."

They're so close to getting it. So very, frustratingly close.

At least one of them got published somewhere recently, might have been The Atlantic. You just wish you could smack them with a clue-stick.

To be fair, he’s a much, much drier read than Plato.

To me, the LOC claims in the original are such egregiously obvious bullshit (“while being a CEO” LOL) that an extremely blunt, even mean, response is extremely warranted.

Even pre-AI, it was common to “massage” genuine quotes like this so they read better.

Hell, anyone who’s been interviewed by a journalist can tell you they do it, too, sometimes to the point of changing the substance of what you said.

Vibe-coded websites are the new Frontpage website, being 10x as heavy as one made by hand would be. But 10x as heavy… on top of a modern Web that had already bloated to 100x what was reasonable. Now we wish the only problem were that the html is 10x as large and complex as it needed to be.

The coming years will see the current RAM shortage followed by a war between local AI models and vibe-coded shitware “productivity” software for memory on our devices. Especially fun will be when vibe coding crap hits corporate security software, which is already often so bad it looks more like sabotage than security. Imagine when it gets, from both angles (using models for threat detection; vibe-coded shitware) another large multiplier on its resource use.

Semi-on-topic: Anyone know a way to get a good alternative UI on top of Cursor?

My company’s tracking how much we use the damn thing (its autocomplete is literally less-useful than standard VSCode, only time it’s consistently good is when it sees me do one thing to a line, sees repeated similar lines after that, and suggests I do it on the next one too, one at a time, and that’s only useful to me because I’ve never actually bothered to learn how to properly use a text editor) so I can’t avoid it, but even on codebases in the hundreds of lines it’s OOM killing things on my 16GB laptop (it, plus goddamn Teams, were eating half the memory by themselves the other day… with Cursor sitting at almost 6GB alone. JFC. On the plus side if this is what software from a company that should be full of experts at using these things looks like, guess our jobs are safe from them… though not from recession and ZIRP unwinding)

Sixteen year olds? Sure, mysterious Forest Porn and the older brother who'd give you skin mags have always existed. And Cinemax at night, catching the odd frame that somehow gets thought the scrambler. Whatever.

But we can't realize all the supposed glorious promise of all this tech bullcrap for education and free exploration of younger kids if we can't at least come pretty damn close to guaranteeing that an eight-year-old won't stumble on Rotten.com or hardcore porn if an adult isn't looking over their shoulder constantly. And whatever that solution is needs to work for parents who don't have the know-how or time to be sysadmins for their household.

I did it for my kids to have accounts and I do not understand how anyone who hasn't built a Gentoo from Stage 1 has a prayer of managing to buy Minecraft Java Edition for their kid, and making it actually work.

Then you've got the hell of overlapping permissions systems on the console and the Microsoft account, to get any amount of online play working on a console if you also get Bedrock. On the Playstation, especially, the error messages also love to not tell you which of the two systems is blocking you, so you get to guess. And Microsoft's site for managing those permissions is so confusingly-laid-out that even after doing it three times in a row I still felt lost on it.

I never did solve the problem of getting Minecraft Java Edition to run on a kid's MacBook with allowlist-only Web access. It wants to contact ten or so apparently-randomly-selected-from-an-enormous-pool IP addresses on every launch. I never did find documentation of which IP blocks I needed to allow, and couldn't guess at it from the IPs themselves. If they'd just used domain names... I must have manually hit "allow" a bunch of times during twenty separate launches, and it was still presenting me the same number of prompts every time, because there was no overlap in the IPs contacted (adding insult to injury is that I'm sure all but at-most two of these were spyware horse-shit that had no actual generously-necessary role in running the software, but it'd fail if it couldn't reach them)

I haven't seen it in a while (perhaps mostly because I'm in Google stuff way less than I used to be) but for years multiple Google sites would get in a state where its auth would route me through about twenty redirects in a loop and never actually finish authenticating me. Clearing cookies and re-logging-in from scratch was the only fix.

Youtube was always involved, somehow, for some reason, even when what I was doing wasn't connected to Youtube at all or the account I was using had never even been intentionally used with Youtube. It'd route me through a few Youtube domain names.

(Microsoft's is indeed even worse, on some of theirs [Azure Devops, looking at you] I can't use them in pinned tabs because somehow they manage to get into a totally broken state where the page won't load due to whatever's happening with their auth flow in the background, and no method of reloading the tab fixes it, and it does this every couple days—but copy-pasting the same URL to a new tab does work)

"Their lives seem to have revolved mostly around musical concerts—not so much listening to them, as recording the audio from them like trophies to share for prestige among their peers. Mostly some kind of status-jockeying activity, as the art—such as it was, and if you've heard some of these recordings you know what I mean—seems to have been incidental. It's unclear whether anyone even listened to these recordings, but one acquainted with the material must suppose: no, not often. We speculate these concerts must have been difficult or trying to attend (again, one must agree that they were surely trying...) and so obtaining a recording of them as proof of one's attendance, and endurance of the entire trial, took on an almost hunting-trophy-like role in society.

Most of their highly-prized leisure entertainment seems to have been British and Eastern European television, plus something called 'Battletoads'."

Is it any better than Google's or the one in DDG? Those things are wrong most of the time for questions that couldn't have been answered by looking at a few words in the summary of the very first search result anyway. I find they only save me time if what I was searching was so trivial that it doesn't matter at all if it's wrong ("How old is such-and-such actor?") and I didn't really even need to search it in the first place. Otherwise, if it actually matters, I still have to check the sources, because no matter how confident the answer looks, it's wrong way too often to rely on it.

(Gather 'round, kids: used to be, questions of utter trivia like the exact ages of actors or whatever didn't even take root in our minds in the first place, we didn't even feel the itch to answer them to begin with, because it was far more effort to answer them than it was worth, unless it was a topic you cared enough about to have a bunch of books about it on-hand, so such questions would usually fall out of our brains before we even consciously engaged with them. Our heads were a lot less noisy then. It was very nice.)

Every PC I’ve ever tried to repurpose as a gaming console of any sort has had way more jank to it than I’d ever tolerate in a console, in the 25ish years I’ve been hooking computers up to TVs. Even the Bazzite box I’ve got is pretty bad by comparison. Hell, my actual Steam Deck has a lot more undesirable “enthusiast” behavior to it, let’s say, than I’d want out of a Nintendo product for example, even though it’s just about the best I’ve seen (the actual best is Retroarch with a skin mimicking the PS3’s menu, on a dedicated distro that could take it from cold boot to interactive in like three seconds flat even on an rpi2… but that won’t play actual modern PC games, just emulated consoles and such, so it’s not a fair comparison)

A common failure is the controllers. It’s hard to get a combo of OS stack, Bluetooth chip, and controller that Just Works like they do on consoles. Something always needs fiddling-with.

Video or audio out are also often a problem. Glitched audio or audio mode-switching, trouble switching video modes, screwed-up HDR, all kinds of stuff. Maybe fine on your monitor with headphones. Not fine on a TV or projector with 5.1+ audio receiver.

The UIs also bug out or crash more often, and usually aren’t that great at being a TV UI in the first place (even Steam IMO is worse than most consoles, as far as the Big Picture UI)

It also gives devs a stable target with a known market, which is nice for both the devs and the owners of the devices.

How is this the first I’m hearing of it? Looks like I finally have a reason to own an x-box, aside from the best version of Perfect Dark (the HD release of the original with modern controls, I mean) being on the 360.