sangnoir

> Some people don't like protectionism because in the long term it's worse for both countries. You have a short term benefit of protecting a handful of jobs in exchange for vastly more expensive goods for everyone as well as more expensive inputs to your other products undercutting other local industries

Expensive goods only result from half-assed protectionism. When governments go the whole nine yards, such as with China's PV and EV industries, or the US with agricultural subsidies, it results in very cheap products and inputs to other products. Corn syrup is an ingredient to a lot of American food items because it's a cheap sweetener due to all the subsidies as the government decided, many decades ago, that American farmers should be shielded from competition. Some decisions make sense in the realm of national strategy and geopolitics, and not pure economics. The US would be very different if it had started to import the bulk of it's corn from Ukraine in the late 1990s

> how many of you who say that they can't find the job any more, have considered manufacturing?

If one wants a skilled job in manufacturing, they have to earn a qualification first, or go through a period of apprenticeship. The wages for most manufacturing jobs are much lower in the west than for knowledge workers, and openings likely fewer - it's only recently that new manufacturing sites got spun-up after decades of continuous decline- thanks to 2 pieces of legislation from the Biden administration; the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act

> Humanity will just have to relearn the lessons of the 1920s-1940s again, if it learns anything at all that is

Every 3rd generation, the cycle starts over. It's the circle of strife. The last generation that saw war on an industrial scale has almost completely died out.

Despite his best channeling of Russ Hanneman, he is one comma short of the tres comma club. Maybe his new passion in life will be getting his net worth to a billion dollars.

Can you come up with "non-evil" ways to cut 2 trillion, while you wait?

America has tried giving robber-barrons free reign before. How did that turn out?

Championship-winning 12th grade soccer captains probably have decent leadership skills, but that doesn't mean they can automatically succeed as M&A advisors at a multinational. We don't need a blitz version of the Peter principle where people skip n-levels at a time.

Not just rebranding, but it's going to provides useful decision-laundering political cover, similar to what McKinsey and other consultants offer management. They were going to do it anyway, but the public reason becomes "It's not our idea, but DOGE (or the consultants) recommended it."

You mean the lives of NPCs - as he'd call them? I doubt the thought even crossed his mind

The whole post is Hannemanesque, isn't it? It could easily be a flashback episode (or prequel spin-off) of Russ' struggles after selling his Radio on Internet startup. For timeline purposes, he'd briefly work for VP Cheney's task Force on Iraq, until he gets bored.

Not surprising for someone who describes post-acquisition colleagues as NPCs. They do have a modicum of self-awareness around wanting to be Elon, so perhaps there's hope. I'm only realizing now how empathy goes a long way in giving a sense of purpose.

It reads like the first act for a movie that can go in one of many directions: a drama about a middle-aged, coke-fiend Miami "baller"; a tragedy about a bad Ayahuasca trip that leads to a psychotic break; or a heartwarming romantic comedy about an asshole with a heart of gold who finds themself (and true love) in Hawaii, with a quirky, doe-eyed British tourist as the love interest.

Edit: curious to know that the DOGE has ramped up and staffed with SV geniuses to be set loose on complex systems with long feedback loops. The next four^w few years will be interesting.

I have my doubts you'd take any such arguments seriously, if you are set on the idea that productivity universally requires a 14-hour battery and a 2.5k screen.

I was traveling recently and got a lot done on an 8-year old tablet. I was very productive, I suspect the combination of being offline (no 5G modem), no random notifications, just me, the terminal and a Bluetooth keyboard. The compact size & weight, and not having to worry about losing or having an expensive iLaptop stolen made for a worthwhile trade-off. Any productivity gains would have been marginal at best, and not worth the cost.

> I dream of someone taking the internet archive data, capping it at 2010 or so, then making a search engine out of it

It sounds like you're describing CommonCrawl.org, and yes, it's already popular with AI companies.

Linux had this for more than 10 years with KDE Connect phone app. KDE connect has a bunch of other neat tricks, like letting you phone act as a touchpad for your computer .

> Also, given that this is the author's work laptop, what's the economic justification for not investing in the primary tool you use for work?

Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the obverse - Why should one buy a new laptop when an old one will do? Your framing sounds to me like a post-hoc justification for consumerism. Why not "invest" in getting the absolute best in the primary means of transportation, or couch, TV or random product category?

The sanitization is for commercial considerations. Getting a PG13 rating maximizes number of box office ticket buyers, so no blood after stabbings, no gore, and a maximum of one swear word.

> Is grinding code at a FAANG really that different?

On paper, code is code. In reality, grinding code at a FAANG has a lot more "performance anxiety" and is generally more competitive, and likely worse mental health but pays way more. YMMV by company, vertical, team and manager.

Product and profit limiting too, if you're deleting profitable code for aesthetic reasons.

The idea of the fediverse as an agglomeration of private forums is a half-decent mental model. Each instance has its own rules and community, and some of them really hate each other.

I understand all that - my point is the price is nowhere close to being too high for what's (allegedly) at stake according to AGI zealots, not to mention where the Chinese government sees the role of China world affairs in the coming decades. Hell, I even ball-parked the all-in landed price to at most 2x Nvidia's MSRP.

> I wish there was at least a way to delete ones profile here.

Not that will help much, because all 1013 of your comments[1] are likely archived in at multiple indexes: search engines, hn.algolia.com, the internet archive and half a dozen AI project by HNers

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> This is the kind of scale the sanctions make a lot harder to achieve

Harder and more expensive, but far from impossible. I doubt they pay more than doubles Nvidia's sticker price, all told. My comment was inspired by recent real-life events; Nvidia got into legal trouble in the last couple of months for turning a blind eye to questionable transactions - if you're curious about the mechanics of GPU sanctions-busting, read up on the governments accusations against Nvidia, and this was for low-hanging fruit.

The article has one analyst speculating they used tens of thousands of H100s (50,000 IIRC) instead of the 10,000 A100s the Deepseek CEO owns up to. They can afford to pay exorbitant markups for the logistical nightmare of importation through 3rd party countries at scale.

edit: AFAIK, the sanctions don't prevent Chinese AI labs from renting GPUs from any cloud provider. To simplify logistics, a shell company could avoid shipping the cards to the mainland by simply settings up a data center in not-China and give the parent company full access. I suppose the US government has to balance sanctions against Nvidia's share price, so they can't be too aggressive, there are just too many loopholes for demanded shock not to have been a consideration.

> if it prevents large scale transaction then it it is achieved its goal.

It doesn't prevent the transactions, it only makes them more expensive than they would have been otherwise. If the the US was able to covertly buy enough titanium from the USSR for the SR-71 program, China can buy the latest GPUs if it believes AI competence is in its national interests.

Oh look, there's sudden demand for H100s of by dozens of small companies in Brazil, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. I better not look too closely at them or I won't get my sales bonus for this quarter.

Yes or No: Can the US singlehandedly defend all those bases without the help of host country? If the answer is "Yes", then China has a long way to go to achieve that capability. If answer is "No", then the bar is much lower, and gp's point is that China can "buy" similar arrangements without too much effort. More directly, is the bottleneck on funding, personnel/matiriel, or diplomacy?

China is building up a lot of soft power with infrastructure projects all over the world - most of them are aimed at improving trade - ports, rail lines and the like. In the next decade or 2, they can reasonably make requests to place a few PLA/PLAA personnel and equipment on bases in strategic places, bases they may have been built using Chinese money.

> 1. To start, if decentralization does not "solve the problem" then what do all AP platforms bring to the table? There was already a decentralized facebook before mastodon - it used to be called a "web site". You could get a feed with just what you wanted by subscribing to rss feeds, which were also decentralized

Personal websites still soundly lost to the Yahoo, MSN and AOL home pages (remember those?) Pareto distributions are everywhere, even with systems whose decentralized nature is as unquestionable as websites - I'm probably sounding like a broken record now, but it's clear as day to me.

You mention of old-school websites crystalized some inchoate thoughts I had. The fediverse is the spiritual successor to Web 2.0 / the blogoshpere in the age of social media and mobile apps. Instead of RSS feeds, loosey goosey comment and pingback implementations, everything is in a fairly well-defined spec that allows the conversations to be viewed on one web application or app by simply scrolling. What AP brings to the table are:

A. the ability to own the platform as an individual, or as a collective of like-minded people. There's a qualitative difference between r/math and Mathstodon, even both are on on the surface self-moderated Math communities. Even if such communities are blocked and defederated from the rest of the world, I think there's incalculable value in the community self-reliance as an end to itself without being mediated by a profit-seeking entity. I acknowledge this is an ideological proclivity, YMMV.

B. gives more editorial power to users over what they see (though this is woefully underspecified, but apps can and do fill the gap)

C. Better aggregation and discovery than websites. Closed and centralized social platforms are inherently great at this, but RSS feeds, not so much. If you find a website commenter particular insightful, you can't "subscribe to their newsletter" - you can with AP.

2. why not bring something new to the table? eg anonymity of nosr.

It's good to have many approaches tried out and available to people. I want the balance of power to be shifted more towards people - protocols are just implementation details. Id people choose to fo with the megacorp-hosted implementation of an interoperable standard (like Threads is claiming to aspire to), so be it. The existence of AP does not preclude nostr or AT, or Wordpress or Ghost

3.If "decentralization is not the solution", how come other protocols - eg mentioned above - claim (convincingly imho) to offer an actual improvement if not solution

I suppose everyone has well-reasoned and well-intended bases for their opinions, even when we disagree. I don't believe any protocol can counteract economies of scale without detrimental effects to smaller players, which is why I don't they can solve it - it'd be fantastic if they pull if off - I don't think they will - but I'm glad someone is trying. I wish nothing but the best to each project

> 4. You claim "decentralization is not the solution" then define some ad hoc line in the sand regarding what is "decentralized" and then make some bold claims based on that. Decentralized could mean many things: could be like ssh keys, could be like gpg keys with directories and web of trust, could be like dns or certificate authorities. Could be like email. Like torrents or like i2p, or kad

I don't know what kad is, but most of the things you list on your spectrum of decentralization had dominant players, whether it's DNS, gpg keys, CAs, or torrent trackers. I'm not going to split hairs on whether the dominance of keybase meant gpg is not really decentralized.

Indeed, that's why it's one heuristic/signal among many others

Unless organization policy forces you to, you do not have to put all resources behind a CDN. As a matter of fact, getting this heuristic to work requires a non-optimal caching strategy of one or more real or decoy resources - CDN or not. "Easy" is not an option for the bot/anti-bot arms race, all the low hanging fruit is now gone when fighting a determined adversary on either end.

> I personally have never seen such approach and doubt its useful for many concerns.

It's an arms race and defenders are not keen on sharing their secret sauce, though I can't be the only one who thought of this rather basic bot characteristic, multiple abuse trams probably realized this decades ago. It works pretty well against the low-resource scrapers with fakes UA strings and all the right TLS handshakes. It won't work against the headless browsers that costs scrapers more in resources and bandwidth, and there are specific countermeasures for headless browsers [1], and counter-countermeasures. It's a cat and mouse game.

1. e.g. Mouse movement, as made famous as ine signal evaluated by Google's reCAPTCHA v2, monitor resolution & window size and position, and Canvas rendering, all if which have been gradually degraded by browser anti-fingerprinting efforts. The bot war is fought on the long tail.

Speaking as a person who has played on both offense and defense: this is a heuristic that's not used frequently enough by defenders. Clients that load a single HTML/JSON endpoint without loading css or image resources associated with the endpoints are likely bots (or user agents with a fully loaded cache, but defenders control what gets cached by legit clients and how). Bot data thriftiness is a huge signal.

> You wind up having to use things like tls fingerprinting

...and we've circled back to the post's subject - a version of curl that impersonates browsers TLS handshake behavior to bypass such fingerprinting.

> With email, if gmail decide to ban you, you are unable to communicate with 90% of people with no recourse

To reiterate my point (and perhaps what you said in your first sentence) this is completely unrelated to the decentralized nature of email, and is proof that decentralization is ill-suited to avoid that problem: legislation and oversight are what works for banking. "Decentralized" has never meant "there are no dominant players"

Edit: when it comes to tech platforms or protocols, the ability to decentralize is binary: it's present or absent. There is one Twitter/Instagram namespace with no other instances, there are countless email MTA and MDA and standards for interoperability defined in RFCs. That GMail is dominant is not a fault of the protocol - it happened to be a superior product for reasons not included in the protocol like generous mailbox storage quotas, and superior spam identification.