michaelteter

Most day to day apps and websites should be boring and usable, not truly unique or mind-blowing.

In fact, humans waste countless hours trying to figure out what is what and how things work, just because there's always some designer trying to do something nifty. And by "designer", I don't necessarily mean professionally trained designer - although the pros can be given to trying to make artistic rather than functional interfaces.

Some people are just really good at leveraging others. Leverage enough other people, and you can get rich and or powerful.

And the more you leverage, the more you get.

A lot of current powerful people got lucky at one key moment (often involving imaginary money and hype applied to the stock market). And once they got their big level up, they suddenly became visionaries. That includes some of the more outspoken people that many HN readers idolize.

Many of those people believe their own bullshit, partly because they naturally are insulated within a group of sycophants (who are either groupies or usually looking for a lift up to a level of stature they don’t deserve).

Those of us unfamiliar with Bevy can deduce what it might be, but it would be really nice if your introduction included at least a link titled "Bevy game engine" which links to bevy.org.

Then your unfamiliar readers can first hop to bevy.org to see what it's all about.

But how would any of those activities increase the wealth of the decision makers (in the short term)?

This is normal business. Suppliers change due to all kinds of reasons. If you are planning any major build and you haven't also planned contingency cases, including alternate suppliers, then you are not qualified to be in charge of such a build.

And it's not like you cannot find good alternatives outside of China. They may be more expensive, but they exist (and are high quality - Germany).

> In Europe, right?

Germany makes a lot of high quality solar panels.

But whether you like China or not, buying their panels and equipment to make yourself energy independent is a reasonable option, especially if (when) their products are good quality and priced well.

Your independence is only at risk if China decides to stop offering you the things you need. In that case, your future supplier will have to change. But not only is that unlikely to happen, it's irrelevant to the NOW. In the NOW, you could be buying tons of what you need to become self-sufficient.

It's not that government has no idea, it's that around the world, too many "leaders" are directly or strongly indirectly being enriched by the fossil fuel industry and their support industries.

So politicians have a choice: do what's right for the people, or gain more power/money for themselves. Not every one of them chooses poorly, but enough do that it is difficult for real progress to be made.

We are all better off going to war with (against) the people trying to send us off to unjustified wars.

Hegseth doesn’t want women in the military.

If you’re being drafted, chances are you had no desire to be joining the army.

If they want to draft any significant number of people, they will have to greatly lower the fitness standards.

Doesn't matter whom you elect, at least not as far as righting wrongs. You might prevent more egregious wrongs from happening, but convincing Congress to return to rule of law is impossible when Congress is almost entirely funded by the same powerful interests who chose to put a lunatic in charge.

You're also up against a large population which has been brainwashed, and even if someone deprogrammed is still not intellectually capable of reasoning beyond their own immediate interests. In other words, a democracy where ignorant people can vote is ultimately doomed to look quite like what we have now.

Sometimes there is no justice. You just have to accept that bad people get away with bad stuff, usually at a significant cost to others.

She was sent to prison for lying and trying to cover up her insider trading. If she had just admitted and accepted the punishment, it would have been just a financial penalty.

Her blunder was thinking she was too special (or too rich?... she wasn't really that rich) to have to deal with the laws, so she tried to scheme her way around the punishment.

As I recall, her insider trade only made or saved her something like $64k. That's laughably small, and the final punishment to her would have been little more than a slap on the wrist had she not blown it up by lying and cheating to avoid the original punishment.

If you look at this as market manipulation as a method of generating (investment) returns, then it doesn't matter if your public lie only causes the prices to change for a day or two. As long as your people get in in the right direction before your announcement, and then get out right after the big swing, you win.

Who cares what the real price is, right? - especially when you've never pumped you own gas into your car, and you are so out of touch with normal life that you think life insurance costs $15 or $20 (I believe those were the numbers he threw out a few years ago on an interview.)

The comment text could be replaced with (deleted), and the poster name could be as well.

And while other sites mirroring HN might keep the original, that’s a separate issue.

And note that HN does not allow you to delete your comments after a short time passes.

If you contact them and ask for your data to be deleted, they will directly refuse.

I think what you will see is what happens in the body when it becomes starved - it will start eating itself.

We have already begun to see this. The middle class is no longer expanding, nor is the poor (by meaningful terms). Worse, the poorest class - largely made up from immigrants - legal or otherwise - are being driven away.

Life in the US has been relatively comfortable for a few generations now. So current healthy (age-speaking, not fitness) generations have no idea how to revolt. Ironically, we may see change come from the southerners with guns who eventually decided they had been deceived by the people they voted for. After all, both sides cowered on Jan 6. Just imagine if "representing your constituents" was a do or die scenario. The US is mostly far from that scenario if a supreme leader is not directing the masses.

Unfortunately, as with many other fallen empires, I think it will take a LONG time for things to recover. The idealistic principles which the US claimed to be founded upon are largely not present now - the freedom from oppression, the freedom of/from religion, and the concept of fair representation.

I may be misinterpreting your comment, so forgive me if I am.

When Trump began the trade wars (tariffs), it caused many countries to reconsider their alliances and operations. What you can see is a great shift away from the USD in many areas. This is not temporary, or at least not short-term.

Once trade alliances are formed between parties that exclude the US, those groups seek financial paths which are more stable and unrelated to the volatile path they previously took.

As for the EU, they have an insane task: trying to provide fairly equal voice to a large number of stakeholders. EU was a very idealistic concept, and I'm surprised it made it this far. But they should not be discounted. They may be slower to react to situations by virtue of their necessary processes, but they will eventually get it.

If you stop and think, LLMs seem to operate very much like humans.

Go to any human and ask it a question, and it will answer either from direct specific experience, or from estimation based on its experience.

We highly value humans who have a lot of direct experience and also can extrapolate that experience or apply it to new scenarios and generate believable answers.

In other words, unless a human has exact knowledge, they are "hallucinating". It's very normal.

The point is, whether LLM or human "expert", if the question is of great significance, get a second and maybe third opinion.

At the end of the day, this is all an experiment. And nothing matters, because it will all turn to dust.

Life moves much faster now.

You should review this - CO2 per capita by country.

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

If one removed the country names and just looked at where investment (focus, planning, and money) was, we would see two greatly different pictures.

One country is disincentivizing or even blocking renewable energy production, rolling back climate protection measures, trying to revitalize the coal industry, slashing investment in scientific research of all kinds, demonizing higher education, and spending vast and rapidly increasing amounts of public funds to create direct, physical conflicts.

Another country is increasing their renewable energy generation capabilities dramatically each year, encouraging EV adoption, investing very heavily in scientific research, and also investing in military (although without initiating direct physical conflicts).

One of these two countries is riding on momentum, but the drag from waste and mismanagement of resources is increasingly slowing it. The other country is building momentum while reducing drag.

The difference in these approaches will be obvious in a decade, and in two decades one of the two countries will be just another chapter in a book about the rise and fall of empires.

She’s more likely to develop an unfortunate health problem before being released.

She will forever be a walking timebomb for a lot of powerful people. That’s too much risk for some of them.

Obviously you should also use Claude to consume those 50 pages. It sounds cynical, but it's not. It's practical.

What I've learned in 2 years of heavy LLM use - ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, is that the significance is on expressing and then refining goals and plans. The details are noise. The clear goals matter, and the plans are derived from those.

I regularly interrupt my tools to say, "Please document what you just said in ...". And I manage the document organization.

At any point I can start fresh with any AI tool and say, "read x, y, and z documents, and then let's discuss our plans". Although I find that with Gemini, despite saying, "let's discuss", it wants to go build stuff. The stop button is there for a reason.

It is phenomenal.

I have a lot of experience, low and high level. These AI tools allow me to "discuss" possibilities, research approaches, and test theories orders of magnitude faster than I could in the past.

I would roughly estimate that my ability to produce useful products is at least 20x. A good bit of that 'x' is because of the elimination of mental barriers. There have always been good ideas I had which I knew could work, but I also knew that to prove that they could work would take a lot of focus and research (leveling up on specific things). And that takes human energy - while I'm busy also trying to do good things in my day job.

Now I have immensely powerful minions and research assistants. I can test any theory I have in an hour or less.

While these minions are being subsidized in the wonderful VC way, I can get a lot of done. If the real costs start to bleed through, I'll have to scale back my explorations. (Because at a point, I'll have to justify testing my theories against spending 2-300$.)

To your questions, I'm usually a solo builder anyway. I've built serious things for serious companies, but almost always solo. So that's quite a burden. And now I'm weary of all that corporate stuff, so I build for myself. And what a joy it is, having these powertools.

If I were in a company right now, I could absolutely replace a team of 5 people with me + AI... assuming the CTO wasn't the (usual) limiting factor.

If you fully measure the output (benefit) vs cost, the numbers don’t look so bad.

For example, it is known that nutrient value in produce drops at an astonishing rate over time; so having locally grown food that you can pick and eat immediately means you’ll get vastly more benefit, beyond just calories and fiber.

Also, when supply chains get disrupted and your grocery has empty shelves, you still have good, healthy food.

You’re also reducing transportation effects, which is to say you are having a less negative impact on the environment.

Most of what we put prices on are ignoring real costs.

Bringing necessities (water, food, energy) local is worth subsidizing. For those who doubt, just look at current events. Two morons with the right levers can upend countless critical processes.

Hey, “Gulf of America”!

I have no idea how that person is doing it, but I suspect it could be using osascript. Here's how I do it from my homegrown Go bookmark tool:

  const fetchTabsScript = `
  tell application "Brave Browser"
      set output to ""
      repeat with w in windows
          repeat with t in tabs of w
              set output to output & (URL of t) & "|||" & (title of t) & "\n"
          end repeat
      end repeat
      return output
  end tell
  `  
  
  func GetOpenTabs() ([]Tab, error) {
   cmd := exec.Command("osascript", "-e", fetchTabsScript)
   output, err := cmd.Output()
    // ...
  }