This, but unironically
5,914 karma · joined January 10, 2011
Yes, especially for folks not at home. It’s common to see multicast used in places where internet bandwidth is constrained, but network maybe not so much.
For example, maybe you have an older hotel, or a cruise ship or a hospital or a retirement home. It’s expensive to just buy better internet backhaul, and it’s expensive to retrofit those rooms, and you can lose a lot of money for every day the room is down.
But, with multicast, you can use the legacy internet connection and the legacy wiring in the room, but easily/cheaply ensure every room has a working TV with full broadcast TV or satellite TV, and anyone watching that is not pulling 5mbps to 10mbps from your internet backhaul.
It also all works from a single remote control, and it doesn’t ask you to log into anything, it doesn’t need your cell phone for anything, etc.
It’s niche, but there’s a number of places where it makes sense.
Netflix shows often have a "house look" to them, because they enforce specific camera requirements and have a standardized / commonly-reused lighting setup -
https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a61878509/netflix-s...
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Marvel movies often reuse a particular pattern of color grading, that can give them a sort of 'similar grain' (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpWYtXtmEFQ )
I will say, if you use a Mistral model, and if you insist your CSS framework is Bulma (tell it, 'no tailwind', 'no preprocessor'), it does okay at staying away from Tailwind. (Not perfect, not great, but okay).
No LLM I've used can handle raw CSS well (yet). If you are carefully curating your own classes and styles, you might just be on your own for a bit.
I get it. The LLMs struggle most with state. They don’t have a real fix for that yet. People generally compensate by shoving everything into context, and making the context window as large as possible, which half-works.
Tailwind happens to be “stateless” CSS framework. Nothing uses anything else, nothing is shared, nothing is reused, nothing stacks. It’s super easy to write, since you don’t have to worry about anything else, and the styles are all duplicated dynamically and ‘compiled’ — to the point you can copy-and-paste a HTML block with tailwindcss classes from anywhere into your site, and it mostly ‘works’).
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Tailwind is uniquely suited for LLM use, because the problem Tailwind solves is the problem juniors (and now, LLMs) struggle with most. An LLM can happily write up a bunch of styles, without knowing any of the rest of the project state, and if it’s tailwind, it will mostly sort-of work.
It just also happens to be bad practice, this style of development is the exact thing we told everyone not to do for two decades. (“Inline styles are bad! Duplicate styles everywhere is bad! It’s bloated, it’s inefficient. It’s the mark of inexperienced front end. Don’t inline styles. Unless it’s a tailwindcss class, you can inline those styles, they get a pass I guess”).
We used to measure our JS and CSS in kilobytes, by 2011 standards this would be “far too bloated for production use”. For the old-timers, it can be hard to grapple with the idea that we’re just purposefully doing ‘worse’ front-end intentionally now. The calculation changes when half your content/styles/front-end is LLM-generated, and therefore completely disposable. Very “they don’t make them like they used to” vibes.
Yes that, and also, the more complicated the solution, the more likely no one reads or reviews it too carefully, and will instead depend on an LLM to ‘read’ and ‘review it’
Even ignoring token costs, there’s a high incentive for LLMs to generate complex solutions, because those solutions generate demand for further LLM use. (You don’t really want to review that 30,000 line pull request by hand, do you?)
When the economy got so bad for so many people, that every waking moment has to be either chasing fresh cash (or spent in recovery from cash-chasing, worrying about new cash), to the point they have to largely ignore their own long term goals or basic morals or principles.
You can blame all the new gadgets (phones/social media/tiktok/‘dopamine-things’) — but it’s a very much blaming the symptom, not the problem.
(It’s the meme. “Guys, this isn’t funny. Humans only do this when they’re very distressed”)
The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it).
The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it).
The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell.
(the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".)
(HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that)
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The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")
(The Honda Pilot and Honda Passport stare at you, with deep resentment)
A lot of us are in the US, where (except for SF and handful of specific cities) housing is legal to build practically everywhere, municipalities are handing out free money for any form of development, so people do build tons of new housing all over...
...and the prices still rise anyway.
80% of the buildings within a 1 mile radius of me did not exist at all 20 years ago. There's almost 5,000 new units around. Half of the new apartment buildings are only at like 70% utilization. We barely hit 1% population growth year-over-year.
Prices are at 40 year record high prices anyway (yes, even after factoring for inflation).
I don't know that it's a fairy tale. Certainly, it helps nations project more influence than they really have. But it's not nothing, commonly-shared philosophy is useful. It matters, because it differs, and that impacts things.
(as an American) America definitely does not share this philosophy. The idea that "Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome." is not something most Americans would ever say about America as we struggle with mostly-unchecked corruption and fraud, and have zero enforcement over the consequences of such. It is absolutely effecting the final outcomes of the US, and in a massively negative way.
> Material conditions shape history
Sure, but not just material conditions. "Hope for the future" plays a bigger role than many people give it credit for.
If you pine for the days of Java and Maven, you can still do that. It’s all still there (Eclipse and NetBeans, too!)
If you don’t like using Node and NPM, that’s totally valid, don’t use them. You can spin up a new mobile app, desktop app, and even a SaaS-style web app without touching NPM. (Even on fancy modern latest-version web frameworks like Hanami or Phoenix)
If you don’t want everyone to use JS and NPM and React without thinking, be the pushback on a project at work, to not start there.
Yeah, but that's just because Netflix streams are ridiculiously over compressed -- they use extremely low quality encodes. It's technically a "4K" stream, sure, but at a bitrate only realistically capable of 1080p.
An actual 4K stream (one capable of expected resolution at 4K) is around 30 to 40mbps.
In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?). In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text callback or whatever, for the 'next available table') and you can make a decision. (is it worth the long wait, or not?).
DoorDash and the like, knows about (but intentionally hides) whether a restaurant can actually handle your incoming order -- they never admit if a restaurant is busy or falling behind, because then a human might use that information to decide not purchase.
So, DoorDash implies to humans that restaurants are open and ready, orders stack up indefinitely far beyond what a real-world restaurant normally would take, and real-world restaurants have to magically 1.5x to 3x their capacity out of thin air.
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It's not a systems-based issue -- no combination of "moving orders" or "separating orders" or "more apps / AI" could solve it. It's a fundamental capacity issue -- restaurants (especially drive-thru places) don't staff enough people to handle making more than a certain number of orders at a time, and shuffling that capacity from window to counter to drive-thru is just obfuscating that fact.
Might as well wait in line in a comfy/cosy car where a barista will hand you your drink, than walk inside into a hot, loud, crowded environment and stand around awkwardly in a tiny corner, listening for a mangled version of your name to be yelled.
Starbucks in 2025 isn't Starbucks of 2010. There is no 'premium brand facilities' anymore, just premium pricing.
I'd go further than common, I don't know any major data center built in the last 6 years that didn't get them. 36 out of 50 US states give away public money to privately owned data centers right now (see https://www.naiop.org/research-and-publications/magazine/202... )
It's not always property taxes (sales tax and/or use tax and/or waived utilities costs are also common). But property taxes are also waived in various cases.
> Most data centers almost certainly pay property taxes, as well. It is still a deeded plot of land, after all?
Not always -- they often waive property taxes too.
I'm told Nevada, West Virginia, and Wyoming all have waivers on property taxes for data centers specifically, and at least 12 other states (including Illinois, New York, Texas, and many others) also waive property taxes for data centers through indirect means.
Locally here, data centers get to skip out on paying 100% of their property taxes for 10 to 20 years. They do this by getting a county to label their property as a 'Renaissance Zone' (more commonly known as an 'Enterprise Zone').
Rules for that also vary. As one example, Connecticut has 'Enterprise Zone' distinction as well, but theirs is only an 80% tax abatement, and only for 5 years.
As you might imagine, this quickly becomes a race to the bottom, on which state is willing to give away the highest amount of public money to these private companies. See https://goodjobsfirst.org/enterprise-zones/ for more details.
Data Centers do not work like this. They don't generate any new sales taxes, they don't really generate much in the way of new jobs, and they often don't even pay property taxes at all (our biggest data center here, for example, got a sweetheart deal on a massive property tax exemption -- they literally don't have to pay any property tax at all)
Data Centers also don't pay standard price for their power -- they get 'industrial' power rates (locally here, our industrial power rate is much lower than what a home would pay for equivalent kwh usage, even after factoring in transmission differences).
If you just charged equivalent access (if industrial users had to pay to-the-penny exactly the same prices as a residential user, identical transmission fees, identical per-kwh prices, identical time-of-day usage surcharges, etc), it would go a long way to making the data center setup more fair for everyone.
Well yeah, the Midwest USA is full of drastically under-employed individuals holding advanced degrees who still can't find any decent work, and yet still have to pay $2,000/month rental costs, while also paying back $100k to $200k+ student loans for all that "more learning" they did.
I think much of HN still thinks of "college grads" as entering a market similar to how they had it back in 2002 - 2010. But it's 2025, the market is far far less forgiving on the low end than it used to be.
AMD kind of has, the "Max 395+" is (within 5% margin or so) pretty close to M4 Pro, on both performance and energy use. (it's in the 'Framework Desktop', for example, but not in their laptop lineup yet)
AMD/Intel hasn't surpassed Apple yet (there's no answer for the M4 Max / M3 Ultra, without exploding the energy use on the AMD/Intel side), but AMD does at least have a comparable and competitive offering.
Unfortunately in my experience, many, many people do not see it that way. It's very common for folks to think of philosophy as "not useful / not practical".
Many people hear the word "philosophy" and mentally picture "two dudes on a couch recording a silly podcast", and not "investigative knowledge and in-depth context-sensitive learning, applied to a non-trivial problem".
It came up constantly in my early career, trying to explain to folks, "no, I actually can produce good working software and am reasonably good at it, please don't hyper-focus on the philosophy major, I promise I won't quote Scanlon to you all day."
The main problem I'm seeing, is that a lot of the tooling doesn't work as well "agentically" with the models. (Most of these tools say something like 'works best with Claude, tested with Claude, good luck with any local models'). The local models via LM Studio already works really well for pure chat, but occasionally trip up semi-regularly on basic things, like writing files or running commands -- stuff that say, GitHub Copilot has mostly already polished.
But those are basically just bugs in tooling that will likely get fixed. The local-only setup is behind the current commercial market -- but not much behind.
I strongly agree with the commenter above, if the commercial models and tooling slow down at any point, the free/open models and tooling will absolutely catch up -- I'd guess within 9 months or so.
The problem with this, is that people sometimes really do, objectively, wake up and device to be irrationally evil. It’s not every day, and it’s not every single person — but it does happen routinely.
If you haven’t experienced this wrath yourself, I envy you. But for millions of people, this is their actual, 100% honest truthful lived reality. You can’t rationalize people out of their hate, because most people have no rational basis for their hate.
(see pretty much all racism, sexism, transphobia, etc)
And - while there are rare examples otherwise (like iD software), many of their studios haven't made a well received game in over a decade.
It's not necessarily a great thing for the industry, but Microsoft leaving gaming entirely would not be that terribly tough. If anything, it would probably have the least amount of impact now, then it would have at any other time since 2001.
In fairness to the Wachowskis, they do literally explain this in the movie, in literal dialog, in the third Matrix film.
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Neo: "Tell me how I stopped four Sentinels by thinking it"
Oracle: "The power of the One extends beyond this world. It reaches from here (i.e., the digital matrix) all the way back to where it came from (i.e., in the real world).
Neo: "Where?"
Oracle: "The Source. That's what you felt when you touched those Sentinels"
The sentinels are networked (in the real world) and Neo has god-like access (superuser). Superuser works inside the matrix, but it also works on anything connected to the Matrix or networked to the matrix (like the Sentinels are, like most of the machines are).
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Most people just tune out the dialogue about philosophy in these films, and then complain that nothing was explained. (when like, most of it was explained, folks just got bored and stopped listening)
That's fine in Matrix 1, because Matrix 1 works as a film even if you ignore the philosophy dialogue. Matrix 2, 3, and 4 are pretty good too, but they only work if you are also paying attention to all the philosophy dialog.
Disliking some papers is not really a fair or relevant metric by which to judge academia.
This would be like saying, "programmers are elite people, because they never have to test their work. Just look at the thousands of broken, shoddy-programmed repositories on GitHub full of junk code that's been abandoned! Half of it doesn't build, and isn't even testable. Why are we paying for hackathons just to get this garbage. Why do we hire interns and new CS grads, if they won't be seasoned veterans on day one".
A paper can be seen as kind of like the "pull request" of the academic world -- not every PR gets merged in, and a PR isn't always a waste just because it didn't get merged. Some number of bad papers does not mean "science" is "elite".
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> That's how you get papers like the famous "feminist glaciology" paper [1]
That's probably a bad example, because the feminist glaciology paper isn't even bad or wrong. (Did you actually read it? Or did you only read the "feminist" and "glacier" and then get outraged?).
A quick scan of the actual paper, and Carey's argument seems to be that geologists and historians have been neglecting or ignoring how glaciers impact women (both the women in science doing these studies, and the women whose lives have been impacted by glaciers, or melt flow, flooding, disaster recovery, etc).
That's...like objectively true? And very well sourced. This isn't some crackpot theory, this is 100% a "validated idea" whose "results match reality".
Carey is an Environmental Historian and Professor of History. His papers are research and recordings of history, they won't be "testable" (under your definition of rubric) because he's reporting on things that have already happened. And this title specifically represents one (1) single paper that focuses on the impact to women, out of the 25(+?) he's published on Glaciers, Climate Change, and Societal impacts, over the past two decades.
If you want to remove Sociology and History from Science, so be it. (That would be Wrong, but I won't argue the point). But it should probably be expected that if you fund an Environmental Historian, you're going to get a lot research on Geological History and its societal impacts -- that's kind of the whole point of History as a discipline.
I don't think this is true. I think academia is still pretty good (not great, but pretty good) at not taking sides. I don't see a ton of overly-ideological academics (if anything, Academia skews unnaturally conservative, simply out of fear).
I think the 'problem' is that science is moving forward and settling debates that previously weren't settled, and therefore lived in the realm of "political opinion". But because people don't like the mostly-objective scientific results, and because it's being debated politically, they're simply accusing academia of 'taking sides', because that's how they picked their political views.
Examples exist with things like Global Warming, or Human Rights, or LGBTQ+, or Vaccines, or so on.
Global Warming is an obvious one -- while there's always more to learn, and we can't perfectly predict everything -- the base science has been 100% settled for decades now -- the earth is warming, human pollution is the primary cause, we know what we're doing to cause it, and our refusal to stop causing it is changing environments. We can argue about how much, or how long, or how badly, or the accuracy of models and projections and so on -- but there is no factual argument that Global Warming isn't happening, or that humanity isn't directly contributing to it.
But people simply don't like that answer, despite it being true, so they debate it anyway -- and then flip around and accuse academia of 'picking a side' when Academia didn't pick or choose anything.
If any academic could, in good faith, prove "yep, air pollution isn't causing global warming, in fact, Earth's orbit is falling into the Sun at a rapid rate, we can prove this with astrological/radiological measurements" or whatever, they'd be rushing to demonstrate this. They aren't, because they can't -- it's simply not true.
I'm not saying it never happens, or that no one abuses academia to push political views (it does sometimes happen). But most academics aren't "picking" their stance on these issues, science and research is uncovering facts or evidence on a continuous basis, and academics usually just stick to what's been discovered or observed (and -- for the parts still unknown or missing -- make theories or educated guesses that are supported by science and do not contradict the objective discoveries. If new results or evidence arrives, they revoke or adjust their theory to fit with the new discovery).
Some humans simply refuse to accept the things that have been discovered or learned through science. It requires a person to be willing to change their mind based on something they have learned, and a lot of people simply hate doing that ever (so much so, that their answer to hating objective results of science, is to simply defund all the science)
In general I'd agree -- but academic researchers (and the projects previously funded by the National Science Foundation) are not this. By definition, they are testing "if the ideas actually work", that testing is what the funding is paying for.
These folks aren't really "elite" -- not in perception, nor in class or wages. (they usually make less than the average programmer or CS graduate).