mancerayder

If we compare California Chardonnays to the Bourgogne wines - I'm comparing price points, say, in the 20-30 range. In local wine stores and also in restaurants. They're the same price or more, unless you get something with a pirate or a dog or something on the label (although those are luxurious too oftentimes now).

I fully agree it's half the price in France. Even a 20 euro supermarket Bourgogne is worth 30-40 here.

My point is that the California ones should be much cheaper - there's no tariff.

How badly was the sleep messed up, is the trade off? Sometimes two beers is useful as a social lubricant or just a relaxing aid. Stress at work and spiraling rumination does a terrible thing to my sleep as well.

I think there's optimization culture and then there's excess. Drinking 2-3 drinks every night for 15 years probably was excessive for me. But one or two nights where sleep is affected per week is tolerable. Life is short, and deprivation might make it a little longer but life's not supposed to feel long (as in living life means doing a little bit of harm here and there).

I had a great English red at a winery, I don't remember what it was unfortunately, and I was shocked when they told me the price of the bottle. It was 35 pounds a decade ago. I think it must be due to input and manufacturing cost efficiency that English and American wines that are equivalent are so much pricier than established old world wines.

For some reason California wines are significantly more expensive than French (Bordeaux and Bourgogne regions I'm mostly interested in) and Spanish (Rioja) wines that are arguably more reputed, older and more experienced wineries, and I'd argue higher quality.

Yet California wines are VERY expensive. My uninformed hypothesis - French and Spanish winemakers make good wines with cost efficiency, whereas America's wine makers don't. So all things being equal, input costs are higher. I see the same with cider - compare Spanish cider to New York cider, the latter being 50 percent more expensive.

Could anyone corroborate or refute this?

How much of this is due to famous podcasters? There's the Huberman obsession with alcohol being poisonous, the looksmaxxing, and then you can argue, good science that shows it's bad.

It's influenced me - I was drinking probably 2-3 drinks every night for decades, and lately I've cut down by 60-80 percent weekly. That's still poisonous though, if you ask the GenZ social media world.

Is Kagi the solution?

Duckduckgo and brave search are definitely not. It's always g! after a wildly fuzzy first pass.

What do you mean? Google disabled the more complicated operators that let the user (your "normy") refine their search. They did it on purpose. And the other day I noticed the date limiter in the results (last X months/year) got buried.

Surely you're not going to defend Google for these - they've been transitioning from an engine that's a tool to an engine that uses your attention as their tool for years now.

I think they're training their models using us correcting them repeatedly. That's my tin foil hat theory and I'm sticking to it!

After all, why would Google do anything for free when it comes to AI?

If you wanted to tease customers with one AI shitty free search box in order for them to then decide to upgrade and pay for Gemini, well, this isn't the way. And so either Google are idiots, or we're helping them for free. I'm going with Occam's Razor on this one - we're the product.

It's interactive. As in, we write and talk, often about articles posted. That's completely completely different than passively absorbing content spoon fed by Silicon Valley algorithms and sweetened with graphics, attractive people and sudden music and sounds.

> “I come into the office to be on (Microsoft) Teams meetings,” Schuyler Waldeck-Myers, a fiscal analyst with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, previously said.

Sounds about right. RTO is all about control, not collaboration. RTO brings executives comfort.

How do you know these are bots and not Redditors? There's an HN sub on Reddit, and one of the hallmarks of Reddit are the 'mic drop' big pivotal one liner comments that get upvoted or cause lots of replies or engagement.

But I do feel, to reply to you, that crypto was a lot more critically received on HN than AI is right now. We're too busy debating humanity's end rather than if this crap actually works.

For those of us who actually work with technology (not product managers, executives or salespeople, this stuff doesn't work well at scale. It might in a research department at Google or a hedge fund, less so in the messy corporate world.

Maybe Gemini is loosey goosey on purpose so we angrily correct it - then feed something on the back end that trains a different model?

It's so abysmally bad on Google search... and it's free. Isn't Google the great pioneer of the product is us?

Reposting something I wrote on the topic of AI reducing not increasing domain knowledge in companies:

I'm seeing it at small scale around me. I view it as a Dunning Kruger enablement - AI gives confident answers and long-winded explanations on domains distinct from the person asking, making it hard to verify. The user of AI now feel they have replaced someone's advice. I see it in Technology at work (particularly in architecture) but also in non work things like plumbing, law, medicine. We're all doctors and physical therapists now, for example. Also we don't need psychologists, either. Everyone is obsolete. Just upload the MRI report to Claude and let it tell you what you should do.

When people talked about AI being a catastrophe to befall us, I thought people were picturing killer robots. What's happening instead is something else - the enablement of stupidity.

I think it helps to live in a city. The cities have their problems, they're expensive and dirty, but there are loads of older single adults, and even an introvert can sit at the same bar once a week and meet people, or go to meetups or a weekly class and slowly meet people. Hell, in bad times even chatting with a bartender was nice.

Being in your shoes in a suburban setting surrounded by families and neat little houses (or huge fields in a country setting) I imagine is hard. I'm only making assumptions.

Have you thought about traveling long weekends or abroad longer? Perfectly doable solo.

This Internet experience has convinced me that intelligent people need a safe place separate from everyone else. I grew up on BBSes as a kid, a sort of hateful misfit, and learned to write, code and made friends I still know today. Local message forums and meetups, and FIDOnet and other distributed message forums for the wider reach. It took effort to even learn what these were, much less use them. As a kid computer nerds weren't running billion-dollar companies yet (Gates being the first obvious one in the late 90s), were made fun of at school, and were even the butt of jokes (if you remember from those 80s American movies).

The early commercialisation of the Internet killed BBSes but there were web forums. But more people could access it, so more problems. More stupidity, noise.

The dumbing down has fully transpired. Violence, anger and salaciousness are not only the noise in the noise to signal ratio, they're the investor's friend - the engagement hook that we pattern everything after.

Instead of nerds we have plastic faces with big fake lips posing for pictures or recording selfie videos in public.

I have painful nostalgia when I see an old VGA screen with an old operating system or Sierra game on it, and I wish I could find through the slop where the nerds went.

>It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?

It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful stuff just an inch over on the side. What about a video that jumps over the text with a tiny X that I need to concentrate just to find (the X has no border, either). I'll tolerate ads in a newspaper. But not like this.

I can promise you ranty political one-liners about Israel (your mic drop Reddity comment) violates guidelines about bringing politics unnecessarily into the picture. I'm not insinuating you're astroturfing or shilling; I would say you're unfortunately real.

Comments like these I'm willing to bet are because of the Reddit sub that's bringing Redditors with drop-mic comments in here. A ton of these things, usually but not always down voted. I think when they start hitting the top it's time to find threads without any possibility of Israel, Trump or Epstein possibly being brought up. I almost miss the old new-JS-framework complaint posts.

I'm seeing it at small scale around me. I view it as a Dunning Kruger enablement - AI gives confident answers and long-winded explanations on domains distinct from the person asking, making it hard to verify. The user of AI now feel they have replaced someone's advice. I see it in Technology at work (particularly in architecture) but also in non work things like plumbing, law, medicine. We're all doctors and physical therapists now, for example. Also we don't need psychologists, either.

Everyone is obsolete. Just upload the MRI report to Claude and let it tell you what you should do.

When people talked about AI being a catastrophe to befall us, I thought people were picturing killer robots. What's happening instead is something else - the enablement of stupidity.

I'm very senior and in a HCOL, relatively booming city. It's never been so hard to find a job despite never being so qualified. I can code, run infra, scale startups, do hands on, manage, present, I can do anything. But that's not what they are looking for. Dozens and dozens of my applications are rejected, with no first screens.

The same resume, just with a few less years experience at the same place, just a few years ago got recruiter pings.

It's insane and I'm very worried about the future of our jobs. I also don't think AI is legitimately replacing people, as at work people are producing terrible slop and having my team review it. That's not less work, that's more work.

Has Idiocracy reached our industry?

What do you use when you switch between Netflix, AppleTV, etc? Some of those platforms won't even show you HD unless it's through HDCP compliant hardware and OS, which Linux isn't. That happened with the World Cup.

After researching a new TV (where it only needs an Apple TV, no so-called smart features for spying purposes) the three contenders were Samsung, LG and Sony Bravia (the higher end models). Samsung was the least trustworthy, having played games with firmware updates and adding telemetry, LG was medium trustworthy, and Sony seemed the least likely. It looks like that heuristic was correct. For the Bravia, I put it on wifi just once temporarily to upgrade the firmware when I bought it, and I'm leaving it disconnected.

It can't just magically connect to an openwifi and update its firmware to start telemetry. It would need a new firmware to even try that.

Folks, never update a TV firmware unless it's necessary.

>We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development

In other words, live a privileged person's life in an expensive city, risk malnutrition with a complicated diet, and don't ever leave the country (on a plane).

As if the sources of climate change are you and me, and not industry in any way. It feels more like a way to say, live like me or almost literally burn in Hell.

Is there some mock input one could calculate to actually verify that? That many modern Mac Pros is no small potatoes when it comes to compute power. Someone must have a pre made formula anyone can use to do closer estimates?

>In my experience, people who make fun of AI's ability to eliminate white-collar work are exactly the same people who are white-knuckling it, hoping they can make another $300k next year to buy that Rivian.

In my experience, people who believe that some white collar industry can easily be automated with AI usually don't work that same role or even that industry, and suffer from Dunning-Kruger bias. In my line of work, I'm desperate for Claude to actually do a better job at not producing a big mess, and it's failing terribly.

I don't work in law, but I feel like I barely need a lawyer if I can ask an LLM to interpret a contract for me. I don't work as a physician, but why can't I just cut and paste an MRI report and ask Claude what to do. I'm no plumber, but it I take a picture of some fixtures I am thinking about replacing, Claude will give me some items to add to the shopping cart from a plumbing supply store.

In all cases Claude was super confident and it wrote what felt really rational.

But in my experience it gets things right, in some amazing ways, but it gets things wrong, in shocking ways.

Everyone thinks it's someone else's job that it'll automate.

I love Brave's seemingly easy and automatic ad blocking, but turning off shields for important things like banking and government sites is a chore. I struggled with domain whitelisting (if I'm honest I gave up on it some time ago as the recipes I found online didn't work). So I can't recommend it for less technical people. It's a step away from being the easiest way to control all that annoying content that comes at you when you're trying to do something else.

>Luckily, we have no load bearing AI.

Is this a subtle joke?

It seems like HN got more 'Reddit-like' in the last year or two, at least it resembles that platform in the way people use voting not as a way to encourage good argument style and punish bad (eg. ad hominem) but rather to vote with their feelings.

There are also a ton of one-line comments now, some that get upvoted to the top. That's 100 percent Reddit and 0 percent intellect.

Well, it's science if you consider the patient to be the subject of an experiment. But the point I was trying to make is - they don't directly measure serotonin or anything else in the brain. They can't see thoughts through a machine or measure 'chemical balance', whatever that is. They leave it to correlation - give drug, report result given by patient. It's like nutritional science, but even worse, because at least with nutritional science you can measure blood sugar or cholesterol. Psychology involves the outside world - relationships, financial security, social stresses, physical health, etc. Habits of mind. Traumas. So much more.

By the way - turning off scripts allows the original to load without paywall. (Probably not using Chrome.)