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jonathankoren

4,795 karma · joined November 24, 2008

Downvotes aren’t a counter argument. All it means is you made someone feel bad for some reason.

Social vote counters are just sentiment thermometers.

-- Me (-4, flagged)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21539167

submissionscomments
jonathankoren··on California approves final high-speed rail link connecting San Francisco to LA
There’s no single answer to why infrastructure is ludicrously expensive in the United States. It’s too easy to delay, so the costs go up. (Especially in California with its multiple rounds of public feedback.) Laws requiring American contractors, mean no one has experience building large complex projects, so things get delayed. Add in contractors along every link in the chain charging a government job premium, and the fact that government agencies have been gutted so whose left is easily bamboozled by the private grifters, or forced to hire expensive consultants to do jobs that used be done more cheaply in house, it’s no wonder everything is expensive.

It’s simultaneously too much regulation, and too little government oversight.

https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...

jonathankoren··on Fast Crimes at Lambda School
I do not care. People fuck up all the time. It’s not anyone’s job to bail them out from their actions.
jonathankoren··on Fast Crimes at Lambda School
It’s not about picking. It’s about doing it at all.

Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash.

In all my decades of dealing with public forums, I have never seen this as something done in a reputable forum, outside of a court order.

It’s a betrayal of trust. The fact that you’re not defending it on the merits, but rather that it’s supposedly open to all that knew about the secret door is just the chef’s kiss of abuse of power. If I was asked to do this, I would quit.

Dang, every time you do this, it shows contempt to everyone on this forum. It’s absolute trash. It is bad, and you should feel bad. But of course, you don’t feel bad about doing it. You feel good about it.

jonathankoren··on Fast Crimes at Lambda School
This is a trash policy. It's reputation laundering as a service.
jonathankoren··on Lists
Nah. You just set the prize at top 10.
jonathankoren··on Fast Crimes at Lambda School
yOu cAn'T tRulLy bE fReE iF yOu cAn'T sELL yOuRsELf iNtO sLaVeRy.

I remember this take. It's the kind of thing that only makes sense in a dorm room full of financially secure people that ignore that this is simply creates a slave class of economically disadvantaged.

jonathankoren··on Fast Crimes at Lambda School
Equity in what property?

Equity in what property?

honk honk honk

jonathankoren··on Fast Crimes at Lambda School
Loans are a payment. These were a percentage of earnings. They are very different.
jonathankoren··on Fast Crimes at Lambda School
ISAs were indentured servitude. That's literally what they were. It was the single most scummy concept that Austin came up with and PaulG endorsed.
jonathankoren··on Lists
Can’t help but think making a list of people by karma just encourages karma farming
jonathankoren··on FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations
Are you sure you read the article? The very first sentence of the article is, "Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products[.]" (Emphasis added.) If the quality remains the same, or improves, it's by definition not decreasing, and therefore not enshitification. Furthermore, as other people pointed out, this is a reference to two sided marketplaces.

Just because there's a new buzzword, doesn't mean it applies. In fact, it usually doesn't.

jonathankoren··on Trading cards with e-ink displays (2023)
It reminds me of the old West End Games / Legends description of the game sabacc in Star Wars. Instead of being played with normal paper cards as seen in Solo, the players received cards with screens on them At certain parts in the game, the cards would randomize. '

A completely baroque way of playing, but fits with a world where actively powered antigravity technology has replaced wheels.

jonathankoren··on FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations
It's not. The quality stayed the same, even improved. It's run of the mill monopoly pricing.
jonathankoren··on DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate
Your questions are right, but the conspiracy theory is dreadfully wrong. If you want a motivating force for banning, but not actually competing by leveling the field, it’s ideology. The US government doesn’t do subsidies (except when they do).

The saddest thing about these decline of American manufacturing, and the fragility of supply chains is that all of this was predicted 30 years ago, but Wall Street and the billionaire management class did their typical shortsighted profits taking instead of sustainability, soured on by ideological capture of both parties.

I often think about how the world would be different if the people actual won the Battle of Seattle.

jonathankoren··on U.S.-Saudi petrodollar pact ends after 50 years
You’re going to have to eliminate first past the post for that to work. Both parties are essentially coallitions. Christian nationalists and big business, and their apologists on one side, and everyone else on the other.
jonathankoren··on UFO civilization could be on Earth: Harvard researchers
I’m honestly surprised it wasn’t Avi Loeb when I saw, “Harvard researcher”
jonathankoren··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
It is that easy. Employee 1 is getting paid below market. That’s why they offer 0.9% equity. Meanwhile, the founders are also getting paid. No one is working for free. One of the first things VCs tell you is to make yourself comfortable so you can concentrate on the company. That’s literally one of the reasons why VCs tell founders to sell equity early, to make up for lost income, while Employees 1+ has to ride the rocket into the ground.

It’s Baby’s First Labor Exploitation.

jonathankoren··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
Yes. Because you’re literally the same as the founder, but getting waaaay less equity.

First employee is always a sucker

jonathankoren··on Elon Musk drops suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman
I'm sure Elon does get involved. The question is, does he get involved in a constructive way.

All signs point to "no". We know this, because of what the Tesla and SpaceX people he brought on to Twitter in early days after the acquission said. I believe the words were, "babysit", "distract", and "manage".

I'm sure some fanboy will mark me down, but this was discussed on this very forum when it happened.

jonathankoren··on Elon Musk drops suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman
Yeah but the emails with Elon show that the "open" and "nonprofit" part was always a fucking a scam.
jonathankoren··on Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac
That’s not what happens.

What happens is if you don’t need junior people, you eliminate the junior people, and just leave the senior people. The senior people then age out, and now you have no senior people either, because you eliminated all the junior people that would normally replace them.

This is exactly what has happened in traditional manufacturing.

jonathankoren··on Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards
You're just making things up. Nothing you've said is true.
jonathankoren··on Own a weather station? We want your data
I don't know how much this costs, but it's only a meter, 65 kg, and runs on a 110 volt outlet. I'm thinking high ones of thousands of dollars, maybe low tens of thousands.

https://www.furuno.com/files/Brochure/448/upload/WR110_EN.pd...

jonathankoren··on Own a weather station? We want your data
My dad and I both have Davis Vantage Pro 2s.

https://www.davisinstruments.com/pages/vantage-pro2

His has been working for 20 years now with no problems. There are cheaper ones no doubt, but the ability to add senors like a UV and solar wattage are nice. They also have sensors for soil moisture, and leaf transpiration, but it doesn't rain enough in norcal for those.

At some point, Davis changed the data logger, so I had to buy some USB adapter from some guy in Australia to unlock it, but it works fine. I don't remember the guy's name, or if it's still needed.

I use weewx and a raspberry pi to log everything. Integrated my PurpleAir into weewx and calculate AQIs as well.

http://weewx.com/

jonathankoren··on Own a weather station? We want your data
> So let's start talking about these people in the first person, not in the abstract.

Here are two: Rick Santorum and Jim Bridenstine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

jonathankoren··on Feynman’s Razor
I get the feeling that there’s an inverse correlation between the number of people that think the military is a competent meritocracy and the number of people that actually served in the military.

It’s a giant government bureaucracy, with plenty of stupid internal politics, and gross incompetency. No better or worse than any other large organization.

jonathankoren··on Boeing Starliner launches first crewed mission
> [I hope an LLM made it polite enough]

Engage in self harm.

jonathankoren··on Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards
> RealID requires a social security card and is mostly about making it difficult for poor people to vote.

Bruh. If you don't have a social security number, you can't even work legally. Also, 99% of people born in the US[0] get them at birth.

What are you talking about?

[0] I on the other hand, didn't get one until I was about 8 years old, because my parents wanted to hide me from the draft, but that's now the draft works, and you need a social security number for all sorts of stuff now, like tax deductions.

jonathankoren··on Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
Look, you really like to talk with confidence, but every time you bring up a a point, you pull a whatabout. Have you even looked into what the people you’re so very concerned with want? That’s the most relevant part of all. It’s not your feelings. It’s what the people you say you care about want. It doesn’t appear they want what you want for them, and you’re big mad about that bro.

Keep carrying that white man’s burden.

jonathankoren··on U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
They should lose. As I said in another comment, SCOTUS just ruled that APIs weren't copyrightable, and there's a HUGE parallel with Microsoft and Sun Microsystems over Java. In the end, Sun settled for Microsoft to stop saying "Java compatible" and $20 million. The community on the other hand got OpenJDK four years later.

Just do it. Fuck the lawyers. When you win, you toss some cash and they'll ya for it.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/sun-microsoft-settle...

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