8,457 karma · joined January 22, 2011
https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-boring-theory-of-the-populist...
without convincing the people (winning their hearts and minds, and so on) it'll continue to be a profitable political strategy, unfortunately
Sort of. It's "all of the above". So basically low demand for labor.
* Looking for a job.
* People who don't work full time but want to.
* Poverty wages. (below $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes)
So yes, just as with depression, where we have only very crude understanding of how SSRIs work. We have the RCTs, cohort studies, and we know that it's better than placebo.
Some people fight with depression through their whole life. Just as with ADHD.
As with Alzheimer's we are painfully in the dark with regards to etiology, prevention and treatment, but that doesn't mean it's not real.
There's multiple Alzheimer's (there's the early onset familial version, and it has something to do with APOE4 / amyloid, but there's the rest which is a big question mark), it's also not real yet, because the biomarkers we have are almost useless. Still we try what makes sense, and try to help people who are suffering from it. Same as with ADHD.
And just as the heritability of any complex behavior (intelligence and susceptibility to depression) is not a simple thing it doesn't mean it's not real.
They are already paying the price for not being de jure members. (Currency exchange costs, rate hedging is also costly, and they don't benefit from EU unified foreign policy - the current Trump scare for Greenland could come for them too - hence the argument to join.)
ADHD is not great. and in many cases it's so bad people die from "not paying attention", and Ritalin (methylphenidate) is visibly helping people avoid those early deaths.
there are so many people just phoning it in, or even worse being (both) socially and technically incompetent.
by what OP said we don't know their usual M.O., and just because they said they can and do cut through bullshit in meetings, does not mean that they are not compassionate with the people who are aligned with the outcome that management wants.
simply because OP does not achieve world peace we shouldn't assume they go around sloshing kerosene everywhere and giving out free hand-held sparklers.
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and probably the reality is much more mundane and boring. usually technical people have absolutely reasonable concerns , yet most of the time they misjudge the cost-benefit ratios.
the things you mention all exploit this loop for monetization. I agree it's great that HN is not, but that doesn't mean it won't tickle our brains.
For example after an hour of process of elimination it finds the bug, reproduces it, then it recommends a ~1 line fix. Then that's where one should spend their attention budget, and think through the consequences, weighing positives and negatives, and then either asking for a different fix, not merging, or accepting it. This is a lot more productive IMHO.
but let's say friends sending links to group chats (or through direct messages) and you open it, and uh you see you got messages from other people on Instagram, or on Facebook you see that someone had a baby/wedding/whatever, and ...
also I see that people install these limiter apps on their phones, and then just override them many times a day.
and of course if every few days you spend 30 minutes giggling while looking at funny cats/dogs, sure, great. but on bad days you end up doing it for hours and escaping into it, ignoring something else, or using it after stressful meetings to "clear my head" (which becomes a coping mechanism for anxiety)
the problem is obviously (right?) that this happens to everybody. kids are probably more susceptible, but in general we withdrew into our screens and do our flight/fight/fawn/freeze responses online (videogames, outrage porn, porn porn, food porn)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-bowling-alone-to-scrolling...
just because someone doesn't have the "manager" in their job title they might still do a lot of supervision
apparently there's some kind of automated differential fuzzer to discover Node.js incompatibilities, but probably that's behind the curtain.
We might never know the exact dollars and cents amount, but we can make pretty well calibrated guesses.
the problem is that introduction of any new technology usually happens with so much emotional baggage, that when there's an error (human or otherwise) some humans will understandably see their biases confirmed in them, and will signal boost everything to the Moon.
OSI is not clear on this either. ("Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, [...]")
for me it was already "don't run in prod" quality before. (at least after this I'm considering adding it to the CI to see how it fares.)
segfaults. I don't know. I looked at their CI and GH issues over the past few weeks. (though now GH is down so I can't do a search, but I didn't see thousands of segfaults.)
by all accounts and measures it seems it made their house of cards more manageable. despite the frankenport, no?
they already had a zig compiler fork, wanted to upstream it, but the zig maintainer(s) said it's low-effort. now they don't have to maintain their compiler fork. (or wait for the zig team to deliver the features they wish for.) no need to maintain a hybrid codebase. (though it has C++ because of the embedded JSC.)
also I have no idea what's the zig-rust FFI status, but getting over with a rewrite faster is usually better, even if you are left with non-idiomatic code.
the point is that it's a quite obvious opportunity that was just some pipedream years ago.
by the time v8.0 comes around we'll have more data on the bun rewrite. also we'll see how LLMs will affect the productivity of kernel developers, and the overall stability/maintainability.
because for the same effort you get a better result if you can and do use a better tool?
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how so?
let's say Linus opens a branch, rust-temp, and in 2 weeks pushes ~15 million lines of code deleting most of the old C code. and then it gets merged in a few weeks. and then there's still a few months of the "merge window" and RC process. and each day folks report bugs, and automatic fuzzers make sure that both versions "behave the same".
I was pretty skeptical (still am), but what the Bun team did is pretty great so far.
https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust details the process, we see the results (Node.js compat [0], more than 3 thousand of issues fixed since since 1.3 [1], more than 900 issues fixed in ~24 hours [2], and it's live/in-prod [3])
> 50 dynamic workflows in Claude Code run continuously over the course of 11 days.
so let's say 500 workflows could do something similar for the kernel. the reported cost is 165K USD, so let's say this would cost 1.65M USD, plus CI costs [4] (which is ~200K/year for bun, so let's say it's 2M USD for the kernel)
How much the world is spending on kernel bug bounties and various security programs each year? (rough estimate says that just the visible kernel testing programs cost at least 15-30M / year)
The bar is not perfect. The bar is something better.
[0] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2087436767054213517...
[1] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2082298681223680002...
[2] https://xcancel.com/bunjavascript/status/2080882189663907859...
however, AI doesn't really influence this. already there's a lot of problem with things like Ticketmaster, Apple's walled garden, abuses of IP law (patent trolls, DMCA trolls), etc.
the insurance industry is a prime example of this. the suffering caused by power imbalance is incomprehensible, and yet there's not enough political will to address this.
sure, it's easily possible that some important aspects of our everyday lives will be worsened by bad AI regulation. but IMHO this is wholly an upstream problem, it's a symptom of bad politics. (a byproduct of the Zip2 to Tesla to "democracy with roman salute characteristics" pipeline.)
that said, obviously the foundation to have any chance of a nonpatological market to exist is that self-hosting has to be legal.
Are you self-hosting Google or Bing? No, but we have quite a huge ecosystem of full-text search tools with PageRank, with options to scale to almost Google scale (if you have the money). After all LLM training starts with the same crawl mechanism.
As long as barriers to entry is not too high (ie. it makes sense to take the risk to start a business that provides something similar - usually for a niche) market forces work.
We have the classic empirical chart reproducing microeconomics.
https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res...
And setting up a pharma plant is also very capital intensive.
Here the obvious barrier to entry is completely artificial. (Which provides an incentive to spend a lot of money on R&D -- though it naturally raises the question of Pareto efficiency.)
there was a nominal price bubble (especially visible in the rent vs buy graph) but rents did not show the same spike, there was no general shortage (as seen in vacancy rates), and since interest rates fell nominal prices went up, and the central bank overcorrected.
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/the-2000s-housing-bubbl...
... the obvious problem is the low productivity of suburbs. spending a lot of money on building them is good for short-term GDP growth, but long-term it's a poor investment compared to the usual recommendations.