jemmyw

Great article. I prefer the react model over the other models. Now it'd be good to know, with every framework, which of these it implements.

From that point of view nothing that requires human input is free. Which is true in a sense, people are using free to mean free to use, not free to improve.

Not really an anecdote, strictly, just a single point of evidence.

It can't be that good, I gave it some posts I wrote before llms were a thing and it gave them all 60%+ of the content as written by AI.

There are no toy stores close to me in New Zealand any more, or even a long drive away. There used to be two small ones, they were both great but never really that busy.

The local cash and carry also used to have a toy section - it was great because they had a deli where they also made coffee, a grocery section, bulk food section, and warehouse section that included toys. So we'd send the kids to the toy section, get a coffee, grocery shop. The building was a bit rundown, but that was part of the charm too. They upgraded it, it looks fancier but the toys are gone, the deli is gone, we only go for things like bulk flour now. I wonder if businesses like that have real trouble understanding loss leading sections like that.

All democratic capitalist societies have had wealth redistribution, including the USA. Sharing wealth doesn't necessarily mean communism. It can be larger share of profits to workers, or post profit via taxes. It seems like a lot of places did this better from the 50s to the 80s and then wealth disparity soared as the rich started to asset more control on the political system again.

If this were true then Russia would have won the war in Ukraine already.

I like your take and ideas. Not sure about capped income because that seems like a reward for the capital owning class.

I've seen the phenomena of people moving and redoing the same tech idea multiple times. I'm pretty convinced that is a negative for the industry. The seem to move on to get another chance at their idea after it becomes contaminated by reality at each employer, destroying a string of organizations with some "pure" vision of some architecture or another.

I'm very surprised that fb took you on but nobody else would. Why do you think that was?

The article is a lot more nuanced than the title or what most folks are discussing in comments. France has politicians voting in both directions and thus far the "keep encryption and enshrine it in law" side is ahead slightly.

> Senator Olivier Cadic, of the Centrist Union, secured an amendment to a separate bill on critical infrastructure resilience and cybersecurity that would do the opposite, writing encryption protection into French law and prohibiting any obligation on messaging services to install backdoors. The Senate adopted it in March 2025.

I admit I don't know a huge amount about the history of sanctions. I would think it's a relatively modern phenomenon. In any case, yes I'd agree that people aren't going to cite them as a direct cause. Retrospectively they won't say that sanctions directly led to a political change. They add additional pressure.

I don't see the people in Russia overthrowing their government either. It seems more likely that internal public pressure would embolden a political change. It only takes the second layer collectively deciding it's politically expedient.

That doesn't necessarily mean the war stops though. Russia has been reshaping itself into a war economy to keep going, that might be hard to unwind.

The mistake that we seem to see repeatedly is blindness to adaptation. Russia's economy would have collapsed had the Russian government carried on exactly as things were before sanctions. No economy will really truly collapse while the people in it need an economy: they will make changes.

At some point those changes might include stopping the war and getting rid of Putin.

I don't think all commentators fall into this trap, but more thoughtful predictions get overwhelmed by those expousing more impactful ideas.

It does seem that Putin has lost something recently, a grip on the hearts and minds of a subset of Russians that previously backed him come what may. The war has been quite static this year, Russia still losing a lot of men, and hardening domestic policy on Internet use. I doubt it's enough for violent protests.

> In NZ roads are paid by taxes earmarked for that.

It would be better to say that all of the money from road use and petrol taxes are spent on the roads. Those taxes don't actually cover the cost of maintaining the road system.

At which point it kind of becomes moot that those taxes are ring-fenced for paying for roads. Since I've lived here people keep repeating that ring-fenced fact like its some kind of special thing. General taxation and council taxes are subsiding just the road maintenance, and completely paying for new build roads.

New Zealand appears to be missing from the map. Hard to know in this case if we're missing for the usual reason or because we have no food production gap.

As a millennial, the TV show with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry was played when I was a kid, and I've rewatched it several times as an adult and read a few of the books. Our kids have watched the show with us too. I'm currently trying to learn the theme on the piano.

I'm sure it'll continue in some niche, much like Agatha Christie, where I've seen some recent youtube vids by younger people discovering how well they're written. I like it when they say "follows the old trope of ..." and then in the comments you get "doesn't follow it, invented it".

My first job was VB6 and I really enjoyed working on it. It was pretty late in it's life - .NET had just come out when I started. The existing program I was working on was pretty complex though. I spent a year rewriting the database layer (well, it wasn't a layer when I started but it was by the end) from an old cursor / file based system to use SQL server. That extended the lifetime of the product by quite a margin as it had been struggling with bigger customers.

It was really stretching the VB6 runtime by the time I left - plenty of direct win32 calls to do various things - foggy on the details now but VB6 was single threaded and some of that was around keeping the interface going while it did more intensive tasks, drawing some complex controls around scheduling etc. I recall it got a bit unstable in development.

Website for the software is still there too not sure if its still used, I left in 2007. https://www.redrabbit.uk.com/oli/oli_overview.htm I drew those little pinball people in inkscape.

I used it for the Azure credits. My "startup" only needed a single instance so I really didn't spend many of them. I tried to get into the longer program but the form was broken in typical Microsoft fashion and kept looping over business verification, telling me I had to input my DUNS number and incorporation letter, then forgetting and throwing it back to that step.

Back in the early 2000s the company I worked for was a small IT shop and MS software reseller and the MSDN subscription included everything. I remember setting up Windows 2000 advanced server as my home network's router.

What I've suggested is the alternative. What we're going to get is kids banned from social media altogether. And I'm not 100% against that because my kids didn't really use it because we introduced it gently while talking about it a lot with them.

But when I say not 100% against, maybe 75% against it. The idea of age checking operating systems and browsers I'm very much against. Ban devices in schools: fine, it's a place of learning and there are always specific rules in shared environments.

Engage with your kids. Don't give them personal devices until they're a bit older. Monitor their usage properly with your own senses, not with "parental controls". Talk to them about what they do.

If they're minded to bypass all that then they're going to bypass any technical block you put on anyway.

Titan:

> According to Cassini data, scientists announced on February 13, 2008, that Titan hosts within its polar lakes "hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth." The desert sand dunes along the equator, while devoid of open liquid, nonetheless hold more organics than all of Earth's coal reserves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_and_rivers_of_Titan

After reading your comment I did read up on the Gripen. Seems very interesting. Procurement is about the same as the F-35 but the running costs are about 1/4 so over its expected lifetime it'll be considerably cheaper. On the procurement front though Saab seems to offer factory set up as part of the deal, so you make back some of the cost into your economy. Being able to build and maintain them yourself seems like a big plus.

Capability wise the gap isn't as large as I thought either. The latest Gripen-E has similar radar, possibly better software, and they can be kitted out to fire the same air to air weapons. What they don't have is a stealthy airframe and they aren't designed for some of the same mission profiles. If you're a country that doesn't make your own aircraft then having access to both, or just the Gripen for interceptors would make some sense.

We don't need to take sides though. It's fairly easy to find some of the papers and whether they were referenced in the Benn Jordan video or not, and whether they say what he says or the article author says.

I have generally enjoyed Benn Jordan's videos, but I have also been skeptical about the infrasound / hum stuff. It seemed like amplifying a fringe pseudoscience, much like the wireless and 5g stuff. So not that surprised to see a debunking article.

Ok? My point wasn't that they don't exist, I was just pointing out that anecdata from one person who is deeply into a group where it's a thing has large counter points. And I thought my example worth mentioning because my group is into it but nobody amongst it has made a success of it.

I don't think numbeo can be a good source, it seems to be self reported metrics. I asked it for comparison of NZ to USA and it told me that NZ was about the same or worse on most numbers. But actual crime rates are lower in NZ. The murder rate is 5x lower.

I don't know any. I know a couple of people who had ideas that became bigger startups, but only 1 who was a friend rather than via networking. And I know a few people who did try the small saas or other small software based business but they all failed and now have jobs.

The question it raises is if this is the fake surge, the one we see, what is the real one we don't see? Renewable energy comes to mind. Robotics too but maybe that's too tied up with AI.

I went to Bin Inn in Masterton NZ because it was supposedly where you could recycle a certain brand of glass jar. The guy running the place clearly had no idea what I was talking about but took them anyway because he was nuts. I was looking around the place a bit as I'd never been there before, not realising he was following me. I paused to read a bottle on the shelf and suddenly he was talking very loudly over my shoulder:

You shouldn't buy those, terribly expensive. Oh I don't really drin... Used to be a chap in here all the time, made his own, beautiful stuff. Ok well like I say I'm not rea... I can sell you everything you need, you should make your own gin, much cheaper. Oh, so did you drink his stuff too? Nah I'd never touch it. What but you said it was beau... Yeah he drank it and died.

Definitely up on the list of bizarre interactions I've had here.

A lot of folks here will be startup types though, and while there is the idea that you'll make it big, I think day to day people work at startups for the satisfaction.

We have a similar style of react state manager that we use at Aha! https://github.com/aha-app/mvc

I think the intent is very similar even though there are some structural differences: move the state and state logic out of the view to classes.

Mine was about $1500NZD. That didn't seem like a big outlay when redoing the whole kitchen for nearly $60k.