kelnos

I can also wish for a higher-trust society where we don't need to blast light everywhere at night in order to reduce crime. It's possible, but the political will to remove/reduce the things that drive people to property crime just isn't there in many places in the US.

The irony is that usa.gov already exists, and is also a website dedicated to where to find information on various government services. But there's no AI on it, so it must be bad.

What a waste, though: two completely separate government websites with the exact same purpose, going about it in different ways. Maybe DOGE should have been more interested in stuff like this, instead of cutting things that ended up hurting people.

At any rate, the demonym for people who live in the US is "American". That's just how it is, has been for decades, and, frankly, arguing against that is what's making it political.

You do realize that California is a huge state, spanning nearly 10 degrees of latitude, and not all of it is a dry desert like much of inland southern California is, right?

Some of the best and most versatile farmland in the US is in California, and the northern half of the state is flush with water. Before the current system of watersheds was built, there was regular flooding. Some of us in NorCal get to experience some of the tastiest, cleanest drinking water in the country.

What an uninformed take...

A somewhat drier climate is actually a plus when it comes to growing grapes, at least of the type that wine is made from. Sonoma and Napa are also somewhat dry (though not as dry as SoCal), and get most/all of their rain in the winter, so it's easier for farmers to control how much water their grapes get.

> (and have been sorely mistaken)

It's a little hard to feel bad for these people when they already saw how Trump didn't actually push their interests during his first term, and yet they voted for him again.

Meanwhile, the Project 2025 handbook was there for everyone to read, and Trump's rhetoric was based on cracking down on immigration (bye-bye, seasonal labor), beating up our trade partners (need to import farm tools? pay more!), and slashing federal government spending (haphazard and largely a failure to actually save money or tackle deficits or debt).

The 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act was a fine preview for more of the same in 2025, so I'm not sure what these voters were looking for when it comes to tax policy.

Land use is generally a state-level concern, so I'm not sure what they think Trump would be doing for them there.

Most grapes good for winemaking are not good for eating. (And vice versa.)

It's both. We got older, but COVID hastened a change in behavior and helped lock it in (if you'll excuse the expression).

I don't think anyone's making anything into a wedge issue in this discussion, except perhaps you.

I know several people who started drinking less and used pot more back when they were able to get their medical marijuana card. Now that it's legal here, I expect more people have done the same.

Not everyone is a hardcore binge drinker or an all-day-every-day pothead. There are lots of occasional-to-moderate users of both, and legalization of weed has increased availability for the casual user. There are many casual users nowadays who have never interacted with the illegal side of things, and never had a relationship with a dealer.

Weed is not a direct replacement for alcohol, but it can be a preferred alternative sometimes, for some people, and legalization has made that more attractive.

Alcohol is a mind-altering drug! And I expect it has worse long-term consequences than quite a few of the other drugs that have become more mainstream recently.

> I think there is some appetite from dario, musk, and sam for broad and strong regulation so that everyone has to slow down instead of just one lab doing it voluntarily and everyone else scurrying past them

Sure, they're basically asking the government to make laws that exempt them from anti-trust and anti-collustion laws.

Meanwhile, if such laws come to pass, other countries will surpass the capabilities of the US companies, and open-weight models will be banned in the US, to the detriment of us all.

I'm not saying that we don't have a big problem with AI safety, but regulations inside one country that only bind locally-headquartered businesses is a hilariously bad way to do it. I don't know that there is a good way to do it, though.

I don't think less of a CEO that has an EA, but I do think less of a CEO who doesn't know his own phone number or ZIP code.

Not sure where you're getting your numbers or data, but that's just false. At least 60,0000 innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza, and Israel is to blame for this.

Hamas starting it is besides the point. We are capable of holding two different ideas in our heads: that what Hamas did to kick this off was reprehensible, and that what Israel has done since then has been horrifying.

I would personally argue that what Israel has done is far worse than what Hamas did, but it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with that. Israel has gone far far far beyond your notion of "fighting back".

> should work to destroy Hamas who are responsible for turning Gaza into such a hellhole.

Israel seems to be doing a good job of that on their own. And had been even prior to the current conflict.

I'm a little confused by this one, because if you hit the "Show historical imagery" button, and go back through the prior years, I don't really see much or anything of a playground there.

And on top of all that, sales were not what they hoped, and with that we lost any chance of an official remaster of DS9 or Voyager, since the same work would have to be done as for TNG.

Would you put up a quite from Hitler on your website endorsing your product, even if the quote wasn't about his views about anyone who is not a part of his "master race"? How about Pol Pot? Maybe Stalin?

If the answer is "yes", I think maybe you're a little out of touch with how people tend to view stuff like that.

Sure, DHH is not literally any of those people, but he certainly seems to really like Hitler. I just don't get why someone would want a quote on their website from someone who thinks minorities are pests to be exterminated, regardless of the content of their quote. Like, seriously, this is the hill you want to die on?

There wasn't dogpiling at first. The maintainer was the first person to reply to the initial issue report, and they were dismissive, defensive, and accused the person who opened the issue of bad faith.

All of that was uncalled-for and unnecessary, and then the dogpiling started.

The social media mob descended because one of the neovim maintainers was immediately actively hostile and defensive in the github issue, accusing the person who opened the issue to be making "demands" and "threats" (when there were no such demands or threats).

If the first reply on that issue was, "sure, you're right, could you submit a PR to remove it from the website", or even "this isn't important to me but I can see why this might turn people away, let's remove it", then there wouldn't have been any kind of drama.

AFAICT neither has any default for `undodir`; the user must set it explicitly. I think a user could be forgiven for assuming that it was fine to use the same value when trying out a migration from vim to neovim, and that neovim wouldn't actively delete vim's state data.

Sure, maybe they should have backed it up or used a different directory, but I think it's reasonable to expect that many people wouldn't. If a software developer is only going to consider the scenario where their users are thinking/behaving exactly as they are, then they aren't particularly good at what they're doing.

Ah yes, the "I've never had this problem so obviously no one else could have possibly had it" argument.

One silly example: sometimes I'll open up source or config file to make a quick, temporary change in order to test something. But then instead of ctrl+z backgrounding it, I'll accidentally quit vim. Then I start it back up to undo the change, and find that there's no undo history.

I didn't know about persistent undo until seeing this posted here on HN, but now I've enabled it! Of course, turns out it's an unreliable feature on nvim... maybe I'll consider switching back to the original (for that and other reasons).

That's the wrong place to store it. Data like that should be under $XDG_STATE_HOME (~/.local/state/ by default).

I would consider deleting my persistent undo state, which would be something that I would have specifically enabled, to be "severely impacting".

What about everyone else using your code? You are going to ask them all to update their code as well? Many of them probably won't realize, and will get stuck on an old version that never gets updated, even to fix bugs and security issues.

Yup. I've been using Kagi for a couple years now and haven't looked back. If I'm on someone else's computer where I don't have my Kagi login, DuckDuckGo is usually sufficient.

Paying for search isn't for everyone, of course, but I like being the customer and not the product, and I think the quality of the experience flows from that.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that it's not fine to eventually look up the answer to the question. But chatting about it before it gets to that point, and exhausting your guesses is much more fun than someone looking up answers to every question someone poses that doesn't have an obvious answer within a few seconds.

I feel like that's selection bias at work. When you're traveling, by definition you aren't going to see or interact with the people who aren't there, who might be at home, feeling lonely.

And I'm not sure interacting with customers as someone who works in a coffee shop or a food stall is really a sign either way. Many (most?) of those relationships are surface-level at best, and while some people might get to know the person who makes their coffee on a more personal level, and actually see them outside of the context of their job, you can't really tell that just by what you see as a traveler.

I'm not saying these workers don't derive satisfaction from any of this, or that it's not meaningful interaction, but these people could still be lonely in their personal lives.

> The looks I get from American friends when I tell them that yes I do see my (local) friends nearly every day, are quite funny.

How old are you, though, and do you and/or your friends have kids?

When I (an American) was in my 30s, I did see my local friends (nearly) every day. Now into my mid 40s, it's a lot more intermittent, with some people having moved away (and I've failed to make new friends faster than some have moved away). They are still friends, and we communicate over chat/phone, but I only see them at most a couple times a year. Then there are others who now have young children and have become a bit more inward-focused. Not that I don't see them anymore, but I see them less often.

I of course see others on a daily basis: people I know/recognize at my yoga studio, service workers in my neighborhood, the neighbors themselves, but most of them are acquaintances, at best, not friends.

Regardless, I wouldn't say I'm lonely (though I do feel lonely on occasion), even though I can sometimes go a week or more without seeing any of my friends in person. I do worry about it being more difficult to maintain in-person friendships as I've been getting older, and the difficulty in making new friends.

To relate to the topic at hand: I cannot imagine talking to an LLM and thinking of that as a substitute for interacting with friends. Feels super weird and kinda creepy.

This is why I love working on open source (not as a part of a job) so much. No one is going to be upset with me that I took a week instead of a few hours to implement something. No one is going to pressure me to use an LLM to work faster.

On one hand I'm really afraid that in a few years, developers won't actually know how to develop software anymore, and the LLMs won't actually get good enough to make up the gap.

On the other hand, if that does come to pass, my still-sharp skills will be in even higher demand than they were pre-LLMs.

> Ok. It’s not really a question. The ‘is that ok’ isn’t really seeking permission; it’s giving the candidate a few seconds to prepare for what’s coming.

Oof, what the hell? I'm not a big fan of people who want to offer feedback but don't genuinely ask first, and accept that the person might say "no". (And then honor that!)

Some of the feedback the author described wasn't really feedback, it was more like they didn't fully ask the questions they wanted to and should have during the interview, got the wrong impression, and then thought that offering feedback was the way to get that fixed up. No, the right thing to do is immediately ask a direct question about what you're looking for, at the point in the interview when you aren't getting it.

Often that's exactly what scifi is: using futuristic situations to talk about present-day problems.