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An alternative to the current top level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor

rcarron Instagram's head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm

The middle ground is to mandate that there must be an option to toggle infinite scroll in the settings, preferably with it set off by default.

rcarron A formal degree and algorithmic problem-solving is the answer. Always has been

I don't doubt it, but it is also only the past 15-20 years or so when tech became a prestigious career with higher salaries than law and investment banking and not just a "job for nerds". To some extent, the latter is still the reputation it has in the UK/EU where the salaries are nowhere near US levels.

At the minute I would agree that I am going off a broader definition extended to friends and past colleagues but I strongly suspect in the next 10-20 years more traditional family nepotism will seep in as the kids of millennial coders who got their break at FAANG start graduating and using family contacts to land jobs. Yeah engineering will always require a baseline of knowledge but if the basic competence is present there is nothing to suggest that tech is immune to the nepotism which exists in every other industry. The "don't be evil" days are clearly long gone.

rcarron A formal degree and algorithmic problem-solving is the answer. Always has been

You're missing nepotism from the equation. The salaries available at American Big Tech have made it so that graduates see a dev career as more desirable than traditional prestige industries like investment banking and law. The same nepotistic hiring practices common in those industries will also become entrenched in tech and already are to an extent.

rcarron AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

Does adding an old book risk making the model worse? Off the top of my head:

- Reinforcing outdated, disproved or otherwise incorrect information.

- Reinforcing outdated forms of communication e.g purple prose.

You could counter both by giving more weight to recent text and I suppose the extra data may help for tracing references and the evolution of ideas through history. If this is what they are resorting to it does feel more like "marginal gains" territory rather than ASI imminent territory

rcarron A US military exercise to launch a satellite on short notice

Here's a Ken Livingstone quote from the foreword of "Drama Games: For Those Who Like To Say No":

> In the early 1980s, when the GLC (Greater London Council) was trying to save and create jobs to mitigate the impact of Thatcher's recession, we discovered that the most labour-intensive form of public spending was the arts, and so during the five years from 1981 to 1986 we increased spending on arts and recreation from £l6 million to £160 million. Virtually every actor, painter, poet, sculptor and, in particular, community artist was in work, and it made London a much more exciting city to live in. As well as taking orchestras from the Royal Festival Hall to play in the canteen at Ford's Assembly Plant in Dagenham, we particularly tried to reach disaffected youth. It's against that background that I was able to understand Chris Johnston's book. (Oh, and by the way, if you want to know which is the least labour-intensive form of public spending, it is the military.)

Maybe if we stopped pushing insane amounts of money into fossil fuels and the military industrial complex, and instead redirected it into the arts and sciences then, just maybe, we might actually end up with a happier, more employed, more fulfilled, and more equal planet.

rcarron I moved my digital stack to Europe

How many in your estimation are moving to EU owned vs just EU hosted?

rcarron Gen Z Resentment Toward AI Grows as Adoption Stagnates and Workplace Fears Mount

The thing is what is the alternative option? If you don't build it, then your rivals do. All of your electronic and military systems then become compromised because your rivals can exploit or negate them one way or another via AI. So you have to build it regardless. It's a suicide pact the same way nuclear weapons are a suicide pact but if you don't have them then you're at the mercy of anyone else who does.

rcarron What British people mean when they say 'sorry'

You definitely shut up quickly when you said something as a kid and grandma whipped this one out

rcarron Claude for Creative Work

So basically artists are cool with developers not getting paid so long as they do...

rcarron AI Won't Replace You, but a Manager Using AI Will

Sometimes I wonder if what will actually happen, is that we will have very small startups, essentially a C-Suite but with actual coding skills and domain knowledge, who build new companies using AI that end up gaining an advantage over the incumbents and force them out of business. Indirectly you're replaced by AI. I could see the drasticity of the changes to culture and workflow that AI demands being too much for most legacy companies to handle. For instance, there are still a shockingly large number of companies relying on seriously dated software and paper based systems.

rcarron EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

In my opinion, Cloudflare are coming at this from the wrong angle. WordPress is so popular because back in the day it was the easiest way to get a website built. So it got a network effect of engineers behind it which is why it persists at 40% of websites today. Same thing happened with React - majority of Typescript sites are written in React and NextJS because of the network effect around it.

Yeah the security aspect is important, but how many of those Wordpress engineers are going to jump ship to this because of security when they've been fine with the risk so far? My money is not a lot. If someone is a WordPress dev in 2026, they're probably not the type of dev that likes to upskill and learn new tech. Similarly, if you're looking to target the average joe looking to build a fresh website, would that consumer really choose this over Wix or Squarespace? It doesn't look easier to use so I wouldn't count on it. So where is the network effect going to come from to make this the new WordPress?

I could see Vinext being successful if they keep at it— I think there are a sizeable amount of people who would like to move away from Vercel (and who will probably migrate to Tanstack when the ecosystem is more stable). But I'm not sure people on WordPress really want to leave. If they really want to make this successful I think they need a better angle which in my opinion would be making it easier, quicker, cheaper and more flexible than Squarespace/Wix/Shopify etc

rcarron Show HN: Email.md – Markdown to responsive, email-safe HTML

https://github.com/remarkjs/remark-directive

https://talk.commonmark.org/t/generic-directives-plugins-syn...

rcarron The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

The author's conclusion is fucking astonishing. Don't respond with bitterness - focus on your hobbies, friendships and love. Exactly how are people meant to do any of that exactly when, as you've just laid out, they are not going to have any ability to keep a roof over their head?

> And critically: part of what made the present possible was that some of those hundred billion people pushed, slowly and painfully and often without reward, against the legal structures that governed their time.

Rather than mincing words how about we state plainly how most of those pushes were made: through violence, death, and war.

rcarron Vibecoders Can't Build for Longevity

I agree that AI today over-engineers. However with the rate that everything is improving, do people really think that it's also not going to be able to refactor and optimise the code in a year or two from now? It can already do a decent job at it today if you prompt it to.

rcarron “Your frustration is the product”

> The reader is not respected enough by the software.

The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a product is digital then it should be free which is maybe fine if we are going to live in a world with Universal Basic Income but in our existing system is absolutely ludicrous.

We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay. Outside of governments who have failed to take the necessary action against corporations and promote a power balance between investors, business and workers, the main cause of this is the lack of courage in middle management.

The executive suite have not tolerated this degradation and their salaries have risen accordingly. In contrast, middle management attain a level of safety/comfort and then coast - they don't want the hassle of looking for another job so they don't risk pushing for a pay rise. They just accept whatever meagre rise is offered because they think "well at least I'm still better off than the guys lower down the chain". This then filters down as the ceiling for the lower ranks can never be higher than the management. Over time this becomes a gigantic issue, particularly in countries with a strong minimum wage that rises every year as the gap between the worker and management closes every year. Management then start blaming the government rather than actually looking at themselves and the fact that they are not pushing for bigger wages out of fear of rocking the boat.

I literally saw this play out at a billion dollar revenue international non-tech company where I used to work a few years back. Directors were on £125k. Department heads on £75k. Tech leads on £55-65k. Seniors on £40-50k. Intermediates £27-35k. Juniors £25k. Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.

rcarron Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student

There is a case to be made that teaching improves the understanding and insight of the teacher which in turn can increase their research ability. For starters, it provides a less boring way of drilling fundamentals. But more importantly, having to answer questions from students which very likely will be coming from odd and unexpected directions, helps the teacher clarify their thinking. It could well be that one of these odd questions, the answer for which the teacher takes for granted, may actually hold some insight or raise questions into what they are working on outside of class.

In a similar vein, it is recommended that if you are in a business meeting you hear what the junior positions have to say about something first and work your way up the chain of command rather than the other way around due to the junior positions being less familiar with internal processes and thus more likely to flag or suggest something completely out of left field that the higher ups might miss.

rcarron Ray Dalio: I fear we're entering the most dangerous phase of the 'Big Cycle'

You might be better off with this Youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

Or his articles/newsletter on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/raydalio/recent-activity/newslet...

rcarron MacBook Neo

TIL, very cool!

rcarron MacBook Neo

Everyone seems so focussed on the price and the RAM that noone is talking about the fact that macOS is now running on the A system chips which makes me wonder how far away from an iPad that can swap between iOS and macOS when you dock it in the keyboard are we...

rcarron Don't become an engineering manager

This does remind me somewhat of military command structures with L1-L5 being enlisted ranks and L6-L10 either being NCO or Commissioned depending on your view of how much gatekeeping is involved.

rcarron Claude's Cycles [pdf]

Not an expert but surely it's only a matter of time until there's a way to update with the latest information without having to retrain on the entire corpus?

rcarron 'Probably' doesn't mean the same thing to your AI as it does to you

Something I noticed recently is that Claude Code interprets "or" as inclusive or (or at least it does when writing function names). I suspect that this must be due to it's code specific nature considering I would expect the majority of or use in written language to be exclusive or.

rcarron A beginner's guide to split keyboards

This looks awesome. There's also the R Go Split, drops the curvature but you gain in portability: https://www.r-go-tools.co.uk/r-go-split-break-version-2/

rcarron AI is a business model stress test

In my opinion, governments are going to have to tax the big tech companies hard and distribute the money to funding bodies like Arts Council. I can see a future "Tech Council" for open source software organisations to apply for funding. It'll get to the point where every OSS developer has their own Community Interest Company or join with a few other devs to create a CIO in order to acquire funding.

Of course, now you're opening a whole other can of worms. In the UK, only 1 in 9 Arts Council funding applications is successful.

rcarron Exercise can be nearly as effective as therapy for depression

For a long time I used to be able to manage my exercise with depression. Eventually, it stopped working. I literally climbed a mountain, got to the top and felt nothing.

What got me out of that place was improv comedy lessons. Highly recommend to anyone. Improv schools and theatres should be as ubiquitous as gyms.

rcarron USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

We almost got that with Bretton Woods 1.0:

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

rcarron Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

https://youtu.be/7MkAs99O1LQ

rcarron Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

Replace the word US in this paragraph with Nazi Germany and the issue with this statement becomes apparent. If the only way you can maintain power is via physical force over others then you're a bully and it won't be long until others unite against you. The US may have the best military in the world but it does not have the ability to take on the entire globe. It's previous status actually came from the fact people used to look up to and admire it - something that has been steadily declining for quite some time now. Growing up, I used to think the US was the coolest place on Earth. Yesterday, I felt sick watching a video on YouTube about how an estimated 1500 people are living in the flood tunnels of Las Vegas and routinely die whenever there is heavy rain. Every place has problems, but you can't just shout "We're the best country on Earth" anymore and have people believe you when on a daily basis the world is seeing so much evidence to the contrary.

rcarron OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030

The thing is, it is not 2007/2008 any more. The US government is holding record amounts of debt and countries around the world are now trying to become independent of it. This includes its bond markets on which the dollar relies upon to give it its reserve currency status, which in turn is what gives it its power to print money and bail industries out. If something happens that requires Big Tech to be bailed out and international bond holders decide the US is no longer reliable, it could very well end up triggering the collapse of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and the downfall of the US as we know it.