quasse

> Not the op but I guess the idea is that questions of life and death should not primarily be economical questions.

Sure, but as an American life and death is already an economical question *above all else*. The quality of medical care that I receive is already directly linked to how much money is in my bank account and how much my employer is willing to pay for a medical plan.

End of life care in the US is designed with the primary goal of vacuuming every asset out of you and then letting you die once it's gone. It seems unethical to say "sorry, you don't get to opt out of this. Everyone's got to go through the whole process."

OTOH, it's interesting that you and the parent comment are basically saying "We, as a country, are failing our pensioners so badly that death has become the more appealing option for many of them. Therefore, we must trap them here with us until we improve the conditions that lead to them making that bargain (which we will never do)"

Taking away someone's right to assisted dying because you live in a society that has made death preferable to living for many seems like a totally orthogonal leap of logic. That doesn't reduce net suffering one iota.

> At some point that net loss must overrule the individual's autonomy.

I'm curious why you think of this as such a concrete fact. It is hard to understand that you would consider it your right to override such a core component of human autonomy (the choice to continue living) because they owe you/society something.

If someone's suffering is so great (be it physical *or* mental) that they have reached a point where they personally would trade human life for non-existence, who are you to say "Sorry, we own you. You cannot make that choice"?

I am sorry if my comment sounds judgemental because I am genuinely interested in your opinion about who would ever be qualified to make that decision and decide "No, this person is bound to us."

Did you test your course on any elderly people as you were developing it? What did you learn from that, if so? Did it require changes that were surprising?

> A lot of what comes from China might be low quality

This is also Western boomer mentality and it's alarming that people haven't realized it.

I work in manufacturing in NA and America is rapidly falling behind China on the ability to manufacture quality high-tech goods. It's not something that's on the horizon, it's something that's already happened. We still have an edge in semiconductors but even that is eroding (just look at the hollowing out of Intel in the last half decade).

> It's still pretty good at making cutting-edge software, but that's about it

Chinese software engineering seems to be catching up extremely fast in this regard too. I'm surprised how often I find an interesting new open source tool or library on GitHub and the comments in the code are all in Mandarin.

> Perhaps conservatives began rejecting science and driving scientists away

There isn't even a "perhaps" about this. My parents (both physicists at a research university) voted Republican my whole childhood. The last 15 years has changed that despite the fact that they are still fairly conservative.

Why would they align with people who are vocally anti-education, consistently work to undermine trust in the scientific process, censor research and constantly try to shift schooling away from being a public right to a private good?

Yes, and we can (somewhat humorously) reference Wikipedia's own page on the "argument from authority" page to dig in to the fallacy. [1]

Quoting Wikipedia: "scientific knowledge is best established by evidence and experiment rather than argued through authority". The author of this post has collected evidence, presented it, and had it reviewed by a domain expert (Larry Signani is the person who first surveyed Rainier using GPS in 1998).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#Use_in...

Kagi is not a panacea unfortunately. I pay for it and daily drive it to support a Google alternative, but I still have real trouble with my results being full of AI garbage (both image and text search).

As mentioned, product comparisons are a big one but another worrying area is anything medical related.

I was trying to find research about a medicine I'm taking this week and the already SEO infested results of 5 years ago have become immeasurably worse, with 100s of pages of GPT generated spam trying to attract your click.

I ended up ditching search alltogether and ended up finding a semi-relevant paper on the nih.gov and going through the citations manually to trying and find information.

> We also see the same cultural issues that we saw with American shipbuilding more broadly. There seems to be a lack of motivation to take maritime issues seriously or treat them as important.

This is the meat of the article in my mind. The US has globalized away its maritime industry in general and we now lack the institutional knowledge, infrastructure, and labor force needed to operate even semi-independently on the maritime front. Just look at our domestic shipbuilding capacity vs. China: https://www.americanmanufacturing.org/blog/chinas-shipbuildi...

WA state has the same problem trying to get ferries built for the Puget sound. Every decade the fleet gets more dilapidated and the replacements get more expensive and farther behind schedule. The legislature has ditched the requirements that the boats be built at a WA shipyard and they still can't find builders.

I don't think this is an unfair perspective.

When I started programming professionally (post dotcom crash mid-2000s) you could really achieve results that were considered game-changing for businesses as a solo contributor writing all your own code from the ground up. The field as a whole had not been really mapped out all the way, so even someone of moderate intelligence like me could feel like they were creating new useful things (especially on the web).

Modern software development frequently feels like gluing together towers of shit from other people's towers of shit. Additionally, the parts of the industry where the business case is "a computer could markedly improve this process and make people's lives so much easier" are pretty much saturated. The high paying career opportunities that are left generally seem to trend towards either value extraction or rent-seeking behavior.

ReCAPTCHA absolutely hammers Firefox compared to Chrome for me. On sites that use it for login I rarely just get the "check the box" challenge anymore, and am instead being asked to train their CV algorithms by picking 5+ images of stoplights or motorcycles. Punishment for avoiding the Chrome universe I guess.

Sector67 - run by Chris Meyer. They used to rent a building on the east side off Winnebago street (now demolished). They purchased an old warehouse off Corry St. in 2017 and did a really extensive renovation (almost entirely performed by members): https://isthmus.com/news/news/sector67-finds-new-home/

I spent a lot of hours welding, using the wood shop, and working on my car there.

I work in a different industry (but still manufacturing) and it's mind boggling how much brain power and employee time is devoted to "correctly" interacting with the customs and importing system. I wouldn't be surprised if 30% to 40% of the total man hours at some companies are spent directly or indirectly related to the HTS system. This includes products built in North America - you still need to do a huge amount of accounting to show that you're meeting [one of the] the definition[s] of substantial transformation.

I can't really frame this as a global criticism either, the system has clearly evolved around the fact that importers of cheap overseas goods are constantly trying to game the rules to pay lower tariffs than competitors (see Ford with the Transit Connect).

The most frustrating part is political, and two parts:

* US politics have destabilized so much in the last decade that the rules are constantly changing, exceptions being granted and taken away, etc. This has dramatically increased the amount of brain share devoted to tariff engineering rather than product engineering.

* The tariff exclusion process (especially the recent Section 301 tariffs) is heavily lobbyist based. Small players are basically crushed while larger competitors are granted exclusions.

As another very insightful HN commenter said [1]:

"In a way, meeting those people was liberating. I will never be a world champion at anything, so I might as well play for the love of the sport."

It stuck with me and has become more meaningful as I get older and a bit slower.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40557491

Oh nice, the access to a professional quality sewing machine is a cool feature. I do some hobby upholstery and using my homegamer Singer is a real limiting factor.

Yeah, the cost of facilities is real. The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one. Unfortunately that would be pretty much impossible here without support from a huge tech company or something.

Out of curiosity I looked at the cost of a rental industrial space in SoDo and the prices absolutely blew my hair back.

Looks like covid to me, the meetings just stopped being scheduled and never came back afterwards.

I made that exact move two years ago and I've gotta say, I actually miss the Madison tech scene.

Seattle is basically a great place to work for a satellite office of one of the tech behemoths, but the actual hacker / enthusiast scene seems to have pretty much dried out. Seattle's Linux user's group died in 2020 and never came back, as an example.

Madison had much better makerspaces and more of them, despite being a much smaller city. Madison was also small enough that you ended up connected to a lot of really smart people coming out of the university's CS / biomedical departments which seemed to sustain a pretty vibrant med-tech startup ecosystem.

Edit to add: If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.

My high school had several years worth of programming courses available, and that was in the 2000s.

Now days American high schools are becoming much more focused on teaching technical skills again (thankfully). There's a renewed focus on teaching things like CNC machine programming and robotics alongside traditional computer science courses.

> it's clearance, strong tyres and suspension travel that’s more important.

> A Subaru has none of the above.

Maybe you and I take different meanings from the phrase "none of the above". My intended meaning was that a Subaru has "some of the above".

I still don't think you're following what I'm saying.

When you go to the grocery store, what is the DEFAULT option available to you? Is there a corral of hundreds of wheelchairs with one waiting for every shopper?

Just because something should be available does not mean it should be the default.

I say this as a Jeep owner; it's ridiculous to claim that Subarus are not appropriate for punting along fire trails. The average obstacle on fire trails in the PNW is mud or large potholes, both of which a Subaru is perfectly appropriate for. A Crosstrek has 8.7in of ground clearance which is plenty compared to say, a Prius.

That being said, the trail from the linked article is not an average fire road. They have genuine rock hazards, steep slick rock climbs and descents, and deep sand. I'm sure the national park service is extremely tired of people getting stuck and setting off their emergency beacons because they drove inappropriate vehicles into the park.

I'm actually boggled that it's not illegal in things like food containers and eating utensils. I'm generally not a "trust the government to get things done" type of person but this seemed like such an obvious and easy political win considering how much air time PFAS has been getting in the last decade.

I'm not an anti-straw crusader but I think this is a bit of a bad faith argument.

People with various disabilities or age related also frequently require lots of other assistive devices but that doesn't imply that they need to be used as the default for every single consumer. My grocery store doesn't hand every shopper a wheelchair instead of a shopping cart just because some percentage of the population requires them.

> This perplexes me as “the government” already has scans of your face. So these devices aren’t used to collect data.

Citation extremely needed. Why would the government have a preexisting scan of my face?

I'm just a lowly outsider to the AI space, but calling these open source models seems kind of like calling a compiled binary open source.

If you don't have a way to replicate what they did to create the model, it seems more like freeware than open source.

> In this case even dockerized environments would allow you to redeploy with ease.

Not if the CIO mandated that your bare-metal OS hosting Docker has to run a rootkit developed by bozos.

> "Designed & Built a Redis Replacement"

Huge red flag right there as someone that has done hiring.

> At least now I no longer have to argue with ‘inflation is good for us’ people.

Who has been arguing this?