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jodrellblank

14,818 karma · joined May 18, 2008

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jodrellblank··on How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
Because not having dictatorial control doesn't protect anyone from anything; politicians take 'donations' (bribes) and then argue or enact laws for what the donor wants, no dictating involved.

Or in software terms, BigCorp sponsors you to develop an open source tool fulltime. If you make the tool more useful for them while making it more complex or worse or ignoring things for others, they might fund you next year as well. If you don't develop things that help them, they might stop and send that money elsewhere and you will need to get a normal job instead and drop your tool work to part-time. Even though they aren't dictating anything, what are you incentivised to do?

jodrellblank··on Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes
It sounds like I would like more personalised but I would like to know how you imagine it working.

Years ago the a custom shoe maker opened with a laser scan of the feet in their ‘shop’ (no products) and then choosing shoes online that they made to fit. They couldn’t fit my feet (I don’t know why). They no longer exist as a company.

I had some shirts from an online custom fit shirt maker, send your measurements and they make shirts. Taking my own measurements without the skill of a tailor is hard and the results were okay-ish but not great. Doubtless if I had kept doing it I would have improved - at great expense and waste.

I know someone who buys several pairs of the same jeans online at once, expecting that “the same” measurements will vary a lot because mass-manufacture of clothes doesn’t do fine tolerances, and has the intention to send most of them back. (And I stress this isn’t buying multiple sizes to choose the best, it’s buying multiple same-size expecting they will actually be noticeably different fits).

I can’t see that industry turning into significantly better ‘custom’ while still being ‘mass’.

jodrellblank··on Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes
> “Tailoring is mainly for fit, not looks. … every tailored piece of clothing will always have the best fit and comfort. That's trivial.”

It isn’t trivial; any time a piece of clothing pinches or pulls that is what makes it uncomfortable, and loose clothing doesn’t do that by definition. That means any kind of shaped or fitted clothing including tailoring can only be less-comfortable than loose clothing and approach being equally-comfortable as an upper limit, getting closer with a more skilled tailor.

That means tailoring is mainly for looks - I.e. the only reason tailored clothes exist at all is because wearing a looks bad; start with a super comfortable ‘bag’ and cinch it as close to your body shape as possible so it doesn’t look like a bag, and looks better, get as close as possible without losing that comfort.

jodrellblank··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
> or those stated goals are lies.

Yes, that's part of the point. If the stated purpose of a system is to "improve vehicle fuel efficiency" but the observed behaviour is to give car companies a way to avoid doing much of anything about fuel efficiency, or if the stated purpose is to "encourage EV adoption" but the observed behaviour is "funnel money to certain rich people" then you are better off assuming that the behaviour you observe is the intent, and the publicly stated purpose is marketing spin.

On the other hand, things change over time. Google started out organizing the world's information, and gradually turned into surveillance advertising. They got rid of "don't be evil" so there are no explicit lies. They aren't a dysfunctional search company, they are a functional surveillance-advertising company, that thing they do - update your expectations so you believe that's their purpose and don't believe that they are "trying to be good but misguided".

jodrellblank··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Are you kidding?

2025 November: "Trump’s peace plan is a demand for Ukraine’s surrender What makes this plan different from all the others?"[1]

2025 October: "Donald Trump Wants Ukraine to Surrender to Putin"[2]

2025 September: "Ukraine's refusal to give up territory to Russia stalls peace deal, Trump envoy says"[3]

2025 Feb: "Trump Gives Europe 3 Weeks to Accept Ukraine’s ‘Surrender,’ Says European Lawmaker"[4]

2025 January: "Trump says Ukraine should have surrendered to Russia and blames Zelensky for war"[5]

2024 September: "Harris meets Zelensky and slams Trump's 'surrender policy' for Ukraine"[6]

1. https://www.vox.com/politics/469993/trump-ukraine-peace-plan...

2. https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/donald-trump-wants-ukrai...

3. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/ukraines-refusal-terr...

4. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/47574

5. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

6. https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20240927-harris-meets-z...

jodrellblank··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
You can't drive the truck during that week? So you need to keep a spare car for the time your battery bank isn't mobile?
jodrellblank··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
Thanks, car company talking point.

Walkable towns and cities should always be a major consideration for human needs. Especially because most people go through stages in their lives of themselves being young children, sickness, injury, having young children, ageing and losing ability with age in a way that isn't traditionally considered 'disabled' but functionally is. Relying on being able to afford and drive a car as a neccessary part of life is a terrible idea.

jodrellblank··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
> "Just get the EV and skip the awkward half-way step that inherits the most expensive and complicated parts from both designs."

The recent Technology Connections video[1] on Toyota's hybrid drivetrain claims that people misunderstand the purpose, and I had. I assumed battery for stop-start city driving and engine for everything else, but no. Only the motors can move the car which means no gearbox or transmission, which is simpler and cheaper than I had imagined two drivetrains would be. It has a small engine because the battery assists when power demand is high (acceleration) which is cheaper than a pure ICE car and the battery is smaller and cheaper than a pure EV. It (sometimes) starts the engine after pulling away because it needs enough charge to keep power available.

Two extra benefits: regenerative braking reclaims some energy, and the engine can run on the Atkinson-cycle which is too gutless for an ICE car. Both contributing to much better fuel efficiency than an ICE car, while keeping the convenience of easy refuelling instead of recharging.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI - "It's a really good idea and everyone hating on it probably doesn't understand it"

jodrellblank··on When did Google get so weird?
And how is that a strongmanned version? Why can meat feel but Silicon cannot? Why can chemicals feel but electronics cannot? Why can processing analog signals feel but processing digital signals cannot?
jodrellblank··on Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
I don't need to remember it, here's my comments about Bitcoin on HN in Nov 2010:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943699

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060609

when they were valued around $0.30 each, or about $4 of Bitcoin then for $1M now.

jodrellblank··on Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
This is what boggles my mind. We're talking decades of arguments and discussions, dozens of different ways to do it, with dozens of tradeoffs that you could start listing with 20 seconds of thought, and still people just pop in like "why isn't it simple??" as if that's some award winning insight.

Come on, try! Start listing some of the core features of the different protocols/clients and answer your own question as to why it isn't simple! Presence. Chat history while offline. Threading. Mobile devices. Intermittent/mobile/cellular/wifi/CGNAT connectivity. Multiple clients on the same identity and presence. Identity establishing and confirming. Encryption. End-to-end encryption. Backing up and restoring chats, encrypted chats, group chats. Federation. Friends/groups/permissions/trust boundaries. Markup, markdown, formatting, images, emoji, unicode, code blocks. Audio, video, broadcast, multicast. Discovery. Extensibility. Federation. Store-and-forward.

> "We've been sending text over the Internet from the moment the Internet went online"

And IRC has RFC 1459, RFC 2810, RFC 2811, RFC 2812, RFC 2813, RFC 7194 and it does almost none of those things.

And you can still use IRC. But IRC is not good. At this point it's either wilfull ignorance of what people use computers for, or it's indistinguishable from deliberate trolling.

jodrellblank··on When did Google get so weird?
> Nothing more.

You can say that about everything in a human brain. Neurons fire electric charges in response to inputs, nothing more. Ion channels do this, this neurochemical level rises, this chemical bonds to that receptor, nothing more. It's almost a version of 'reductio ad absurdum' but instead like you're saying "if I can explain how it works then it doesn't work".

OK it's statistical. Instead it could be determinsitic, or random. What other options are there for a human predicting someone's response to a situation - certain, probable, random, and...? OK it's token predicting. Instead it could be another kind of pattern. We don't use tokens, but we either use <some representation of information> or we ... don't?

What's the most significant, strongmanned, core difference that makes silicon doing number crunching "nothing more" and brains "something more"?

jodrellblank··on When did Google get so weird?
When it says it can read videos you don’t trust it.

When it says it can’t read videos you think that’s an accurate introspection on its abilities?

(Rather than a statistically likely continuation of a conversation where one side seems to be reading videos and the other side says the read is inaccurate)

jodrellblank··on The Mars Delusion
See also Idlewords’ essays “Why not Mars” and “The shape of a Mars mission”

https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm

https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

““”Twenty years of tinkering with the much simpler systems on the space station have brought them no closer to reliability. And yet to get a crew to Mars, we’d need to get this stuff working like a Swiss watch. Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it.“””

and his article l’affair siloxane:

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane

And Charles Stross’ “The High Frontier Redux” (2007)

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high...

“”” Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live.””””

jodrellblank··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
Basically everything collapses as far as it is allowed to, and the collapse is slowed only by:

- profit, if a system generates it, people will keep the system running.

- dilligence, usually driven by personal idealism, and unrewarded.

- legal or financial penalties, or insurance costs.

- it has collapsed to a temporarily stable state for now.

For another comment I was looking at the Grenfell Tower fire in the UK around 2017 and the people who lived there had been raising fire risks for years and the landlord (management organization) and the council had been ignoring them, and ignoring the fire department. The companies which replaced the cladding on the tower with flammable cladding were choosing the cheaper flammable option and pointing fingers as well. And during the fire, the fire service had never dealt with such a big fire and didn't have a truck with a long ladder, didn't have extended-breathing gear, had radio problems, water pressure problems from the local water company (who deny that).

This kind of backstory is typical for disasters, and for IT outages - and I've taken to believing that if something "should work" but wasn't tested recently then you should expect that it doesn't work. This is a common saying in backups (you need to test restoring), but it seems to apply everywhere. Backup internet connections that don't have enough bandwidth for the company to keep running. Disaster recovery sites that share resources with the production site. 'Disaster recovery' that recovered into a remote site, but they couldn't do CAD work remotely over their slow connection so it was still disastrous. Multiple power feeds but they were cross-wired so one failing still functionall took down everything.

If knowledge transfer "should be happening" but it's not critical to a job, or it's not profitable, or it's not legally required and audited, then it isn't happening. Subject to the dilligent idealist employee mentioned above who are temporary in the long view. Management's involvement seems not to arrange the larger system to effectively shoulder responsibility, but rather find ways to avoid personal blame while cutting costs beyond the point where everything that needs to happen keeps happening.

jodrellblank··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
> old outdated

Wikipedia's pages on Chernobyl say that construction started in 1972 and the problem with the control rods causing an initial spike of power was discovered in 1983 ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Accident_se... (search 'Ignalina nuclear power plant')

jodrellblank··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
But similar reasoning is why Canadian trams are worse than other countries, and it's not "good experienced engineering". In this nearly hour long rant by NotJustBikes[1] the section I've linked is about the technology and how the transit authority will not move on from 100 year old track technology which makes everything worse for customers. There are junctions where tram drivers have to stop and look at the track to make sure the junction is correctly set because the single-point switching is less reliable than modern designs. Or the driver has to stop the tram and get out to use a stick to move the track and change the junction because they aren't electrified. And then pass through junctions as slowly as 10km/h because the old track design has higher risk of derailment than modern designs.

The designs for the electrified track switches were made by one company which was sold, re-sold, and then burned down and the designs lost, and there isn't anywhere else to buy them because nowhere else uses such old track design anymore, so not only is Toronto struggling to buy parts to continue electrifying the manual junctions, it's struggling to custom-make enough replacement parts to keep the aging electric switches working faster than they fail.

And they were using trolley poles to connect to the overhead power lines instead of Pantographs until 2017, 50-100 years after everywhere else, which meant a) they couldn't get enough power through them to run air conditioning, and b) they are more likely to fall off the power line and the tram stops and the driver has to get out and reconnect them, and c) their newer trams now have to have custom dual-power connections to go through older parts of the network, and d) the carbon shoes on the trolley poles wear out quicker which means the trams are dirtier and taken out of service for maintenance more often in the wet which is when people want to use trams more.

[1] https://youtu.be/HhQxNHrD6fA?t=2311

jodrellblank··on Two-tier encryption in the UK
> "whether the state should have a role in controlling what private individuals share amongst one another."

The state has a century long history of answering that in the positive; under the Criminal Law Act 1977 a person agreeing with another person to do a crime is guilty of conspiracy to commit that crime[1]; section 5 talks about "the offence of conspiracy at common law" which it replaces, including when it does/doesn't apply to "conduct which tends to corrupt public morals or outrages public decency".Further back, the Offenses Against The Person act of 1861 says that encouraging, soliciting, or proposing to any person to murder another person is a misdemanour punishable by imprisonment for life[2].

AFAIK the UK doesn't ban the classic film The Towering Inferno which is about people dying in a burning tower block. The Titanic has no remaining survivors to be offended where the video here was <2 years after the Grenfell Tower fire, and your joke about the Titanic isn't mocking the dying, it's mocking the builder's hubris. So it's more about the "outraging public decency" part.

Even the most free-speechy places have arguments about what free speech is acceptable (classic example: yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theatre) and have ideas about free speech, with consequences.

I would rather the UK government had put that effort into earlier holding the tower management company to fixing the problems reported by the fire brigade and the Grenfell Action Group in the years before the fire, and knocking the Council for trying it silence that group for repeatedly reporting fire problems, and of course for the excellent business decisions to save money by using flammable cladding.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/45/section/1

[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/section/...

jodrellblank··on Two-tier encryption in the UK
What is this country coming to when you can't post a social media video laughing at families from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, burning to death while saying "all the little ninjas getting it"?

It's political correctness gone mad.

> "By 2017, Grenfell Tower housed a remarkably diverse community. Up to 600 people lived in the building’s 120 flats, representing a rich tapestry of nationalities, ethnicities, and generations. Residents hailed from countries including the UK, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, among others." - https://grenfell.soton.ac.uk/week-1-who-lived-in-the-tower/

> "The Grenfell Tower fire inquiry "must not ignore" the impact of race and poverty on the disaster, a lawyer representing survivors has said. .. The inquiry returned this week after a four-month break due to coronavirus. "The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum," said Mr Thomas in his opening statement. "A majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people of colour."""" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53320082

jodrellblank··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
Indeed, but they neither explain nor cite what they mean for it to be "highly regulated" or how/why that means toxicity is largely impossible.

If you take "the cleavage of provitamin A carotenoids" and Ctrl+F for 'cleavage' or 'carotene' in that paper, the only other mentions are this:

> "An acute elevation of retinoids other than retinyl esters—eg, retinoic acid—occurs after the ingestion of a large amount of vitamin A, possibly because the intestinal absorptive capacity is overwhelmed, which leads to the oxidation of retinol to retinoic acid by the intestinal enterocytes (30) and to the rapid formation of retinoic acid from retinol in certain cells (5). Whereas retinoic acid can be produced from excentric cleavage of β-carotene in humans (31), it is generally considered a minor contributor to circulating concentrations, at least in normal, healthy persons."

That is, they only seem to be talking about excentric cleavage and not central cleavage. My limited understanding is that beta-carotene is roughly two retinoic acid molecules chained together, and cleaving them in half is what makes two retinoic acid molecules, and that non-central-cleaving would be different. See skeletal formula on right for these two pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%92-Carotene

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

(You can also wonder if beta carotene can produce 90% of circulating vitamin A in developing countries, whether getting lots of beta carotene in developed countries can raise the base level in the body, which then leads to easier overdose from preformed vitamin A)

jodrellblank··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
I have read somewhere that losing a limb naturally (e.g. tearing, biting) stretches and closes up blood vessels in a way that cutting with a scalpel doesn't, and that natural limb loss has less bleeding than surgery/stabbing/Hollywood suggests.

I have no idea of the truth of this, but there are anecdotes of farmers losing limbs and walking back to their tractors, driving back to the farm, then driving themselves to hospital, and the like.

jodrellblank··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
I'm past the comment edit window, but incidentally these two Harvard pages[1,2] say that:

- the recommended daily vitamin C is 90mcg for men and 75 for women, the upper limit is 2000mcg. That's a safety margin of 22x, and exceeding the upper limit may cause diarrhoea and gastrointestinal distress.

- the recommended vitamin A is 900mcg for men and 700 for women, and the upper limit is 3000mcg. That's a safety margin of 3.3x, and even that upper limit has "some evidence that this much preformed vitamin A might increase the risk of bone loss, hip fracture, or some birth defects".

- "Sometimes people take cod liver oil for vitamin D but may not be aware it is also very high in vitamin A, beyond the RDA at 192%"

That is, even without any alternative views on it, it's much easier to go above the safe levels, easier to do accidentally, and the risks are more serious.

[1] https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/vitamin-a/

[2] https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/vitamin-c/

jodrellblank··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
Your Wikipedia page references a paper in footnote 21 which says:

> "In developing nations, however, 70–90% of vitamin A is obtained from provitamin A carotenoids in plant foods"

and

> "Whereas retinoic acid can be produced from excentric cleavage of β-carotene in humans (31), it is generally considered a minor contributor to circulating concentrations, at least in normal, healthy persons"

Google tells me that "Two pathways have been suggested for the conversion of carotenoids to vitamin A in mammals, central cleavage and excentric cleavage".

Carotene conversion cannot both be "a minor contributor" to body levels of Vitamin A and also the main way billions of people get Vitamin A. So my guess is the Wikipedia page has mistakenly taken 'excentric cleavage' to be the only conversion method. Still, ignoring carotenes entirely, the referenced paper also says:

> "observational studies suggest that more than 75% of people may be routinely ingesting more than the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for vitamin A"

jodrellblank··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
Vitamin A is in eggs, dairy (butter, milk, cream), in meat fats like pork and grain-fed beef, in salmon, in liver, in cod liver oil. Vitamin-A precursors (carotenes) get converted into Vitamin A in the body, they are in red and orangey fruits and vegetables such as carrot, tomato, chili, chili-powder spice, bell pepper, sweet potato, apricot, mango, butternut squash, grapefruit, watermelon, papaya, passion fruit, cantaloupe, pumpkin, also in dark greens like kale, collard greens, spinach.

Carotenoids are used as a natural food colouring, beta-carotene is E160a, e.g. I've seen it in Red Leicester cheese, yellow custard powder, red jelly, in glace cherries. American law requires vitamin A fortification in reduced-fat dairy. Companies optionally fortify it in things like wheat flour, or breakfast cereal. Retinoids are in beauty and moisturising skin creams and sun tan lotions, and sometimes used as extreme acne medication.

Things that have been promoted for "good health" for decades, such that someone who wants to avoid it needs to deliberately choose an awkward diet of non-colourful foods like potato, rice, onion, parsnip, coconut, apple, pear, cucumber, zucchini, black beans, white beans, lean meats or carefully chosen meat fats, breads made from un-fortified flour, avoiding many restaurant, take-away, or processed foods and "eat the rainbow" variety of fruit and veg.

Grant Genereux has proposed that overflowing the liver's ability to store and process Vitamin A / retinoids leads to them circulating in the blood, that they can enter cells bypassing the normal methods, can cause damage which makes cells denature and burst, which triggers an immune system response to try and find an attacker, which gets misdiagnosed as the immune system causing the damage. And has proposed this as a mechanism which explains some of the 25 - 50 million Americans having unexplained auto-immune diseases.

Proposing that retinoic acid builds up inside body cells over years and decades even whan taken ordinary 'safe' levels, not enough to trigger hypervitaminosis A or acute symptoms but chronically accumulating until the body has so much of it stored that cell damages releases retinoids into the bloodstream which enter nearby cells, denature some of them, releasing their stored retinoids, causing a domino effect which we know as an auto-immune flare-up. And that it's a matter of luck where the concentration is higher whether that makes a skin rash or a kidney or joint or thyroid inflammation, or just generally high "inflammation".

It's an interesting hypothesis with a lot of specific testable claims and specific proposed mechanisms, mixed with quite a lot of conspiracy theorising and less-testable claims.

jodrellblank··on Ask HN: Is it impossible to disable Siri on macOS 27?
You should make use of Cunningham's Law[1]. Instead of posting an "Ask HN" asking if it's impossible to disable, post a "Show HN" claiming that it is impossible to disable.

Then people will flock to tell you how it can be disabled by XYZ.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

jodrellblank··on There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
Or a different way around, Asimov's The Machine That Won The War, 1961: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/machine-that-won-the-w...
jodrellblank··on Fuck it, make it anyway
Now take away the chore of 'focusing on riding'. Genetically or chemically calm the horse so it does not get flustered or moody. Metabolically tweak the horse so it does not get tired or thirsty. Robotically till and smooth the ground so there is nothing to trip over. Notify everyone in the vicinity where the horse is going, so there are no obstacles to avoid. When you can't crash or fall off if you try, when it doesn't matter if you're focusing or not. Maybe dynamically adjust that so you know the AI overlord is pampering you to keep the difficulty 'just right' and this is not a real challenge it's elaborate wireheading.

Your point 2 is where my onion metaphor comes in. When you fix a problem you improve a thing. When you fix all the problems you have taken all the life away from living. Maybe that works for what to do today - Ostrich head in the sand and solve problems - within our lifetimes, or even several lifetimes, but if AGI really does spawn and solve all problems immediately the head has to come back up. If AGI never spawns, we might still effectively solve all human-scale problems with the assistance of sub-human AI and brute-force within a surprisingly short time.

jodrellblank··on Fuck it, make it anyway
And if they liked optimizing transport, but now the box is self-driving and the logistics are planned by machine? The farm is automated and humans get in the way. The vet is a robot. Also any other suggestion you have is automated - AI is now better at everything. Nobody needs or wants anything the human can do. AI is a more fun friend, a better singer, a more engaging teacher or entertainer, a better movie creator, a better cook, etc. All that's left is Postel's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", from cradle to grave nothing the human does matters or can matter. Then what?

Perfomatively going through the hollowed-out motions of human life like a toddler playing with a plastic kitchen, wishing the ghosts of meaning and fulfillment would come back into them? Enjoy!

jodrellblank··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
In the analogy where a “world ending nuclear bomb” “did already go off” and someone could cover it up and nobody noticed, in what sense is it a “world ending” nuclear bomb?
jodrellblank··on Fuck it, make it anyway
If we strip away all the layers of onion, we are not left with a Platonic ideal onion, we're left with nothing. Removing every chore, task, craft, friction from life does not leave an ideal perfect life, it leaves nothing. Some people are feeling closer to that nothing than others.

A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather, riding them through the fields, tolerated mucking out the stables, is not just biding their time until someone invents the city bus so they can free up all of that timewasting labour and sit in a box turning a wheel left and right for the rest of their days, and then the self-driving taxi, so they can finally "be free". You can say that they can still care for horses today, but if mansions don't need stables and horses, if deliveries don't use horses, then it's no longer a tangled up job, life, part of a community, way of earning money, way to get some respect, feel useful, it's just standing in a field stroking an animal.

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