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I have a relative who works in healthcare. The introduction of AI for medical notes has led her level+1 manager to ask folks to increase their patient numbers in response to the extra time saved not having to manually code charts.

The initial response was some grumbling about unionization of the doctor-class. But now they're just kinda going along with it while also complaining loudly. Profit Über alles.

I want to believe this. But it just seems like every generation of humans has their "would make very little difference" moment. When it comes to energy, it turns out there's just no such thing as a free lunch.

Don't worry. There's so much heat, we little humans could never affect any significant change /s

EDIT But seriously. I remember years ago going to a residential GT workshop encouraging private heat sink wells hosted by some boomer reformed hippies. When I asked if there were any studies on the effect of subsurface heat exchange on things like ground water temperatures or different subsurface materials one of the presenters waved it off saying it was probably fine and the other honestly admitted that they didn't know, and that that should probably give us pause before encouraging 200 homes in a square mile all sink wells.

Having recently dug an old iPad out of the electronics bin at the transfer station this is acutely felt. I actually found an android tablet at the same time. I appreciate the desire to thwart theft, but lord! Wipe the android tablet, log in with Google, good to go. iPad can only be ground up and added to the asphalt to help slow down the aging of road surfaces. Again, I get the anti-theft angle, but this is so far beyond that. You are literally leasing the hardware from the manufacturer until such time as they decree you should be done with it. Never mind the thought exercise of what Apple could do if they wanted to if you were found to have CSAM and the state asked them to remove your access. No thank you.

The tone here suggests deep misalignment of leadership and ICs. How can you end up enthusiastic about a direction at leadership level and have the ICs "not care," in a functional organization? That's a rhetorical question.

I think you missed the point. This isn't about which games we culturally care to keep. It's that even beloved games from 10 years ago are effectively gone to use because there's no way to break the DRM or resurrect live services to phone home to.

No one is saying the niche doesn't exist. The embarrassing part is that ever since Jobs' triumphant return to Apple their magic was making what looked niche blow up into an everywhere device. Since Jobs passed, Apple has slowly been losing that magic, and this headset is a beautiful illustration of Apple's inability to find those everywhere devices.

Honestly, at this point, if Jobs were still there we'd probably have no VR headset, but a TV with appleTV built in that also magically provides Atmos surround without any extra hardware and magically "just works" to find any and all content you'd want to watch from any service. The resurrected Apple used to be good at finding what people didn't even know they wanted. Now it's a zombie walking around hoping people see the value in what they make.

yes, because the alternative is to have kids who can't actually read being dragged along and dragging down kids who can read. What's wrong with a tiny elite remaining if it's based on actually being able to do the work?

The biggest red flag here for me is not that the tiny elite remain, it's that life circumstances will dictate that the majority of the tiny elite will continue to come from privileged families who have the time and resources to give their kids a leg up. BUT pushing kids into places where they objectively cannot compete intellectually or physically under the auspices of fairness is the devil's work. We need constant work at creating equality and to lower barriers to social services, not "fairness" and pretending everyone is already equal.

Language Transfer

Ironically, perhaps, but in 2025 I'd argue the Asian counterpart would probably be of higher quality, at least in the initial transition back to US manufacturing. AND it would be cheaper.

I can believe that its easy to bounce off software because of a million paper cuts. But the problem with them trying to address every one of those proactively is that GNOME is a huge undertaking and they do their best to move at a fairly slow pace (now, after the 3 transition, which was akin to ripping a bandaid off ... go fast, piss the person off, but then the bandaid is gone).

I don't know if the CapsLock -> Escape switch is on a roadmap somewhere, but that is a little bananas. That said, my partner comfortably uses GNOME every day to browse the web and manage some files. Has she EVER wondered how to remap CapsLock? No. The people who do want to? Google can give you the answer pretty quickly. Not saying it's good UX, but GNOME balances a lot of use cases, and as this thread suggests, I think they've actually (with a LOT of complaining from engineers and power users) kept that balance pretty damn well to the point where I haven't been surprised by GNOME is a long time, and seems to slowly and progressively get better.

And yes, whoever jumps in here with their own papercut story, I know there is pain in not being the primary audience for software. But honestly, at least I'm in the same Venn diagram with my partner. The primary audience for macOS or iOS now appears to be ... I don't even know anymore. Used to be content creators, now it seems like even Apple doesn't actually know who uses their computers.

Animojis really feel like peak corporate board asking, "What do the kids like these days?" and dumping that shit into the world. Honestly ... AVERAGE age of the Apple board is 68!! This is a company that's reached some sort of corporate red giant stage where it's influence is massive but it's ability to grow is over and it's only real purpose is to generate heavy metals and seed them throughout the rest of the universe after it's eventual explosive death.

Default keybindings have Shift+Super+Tab doing reverse window cycling in GNOME. Just tried it. Also, which unified button masquerades as two icons?

Keyboard layouts are a pain, but there are some solid extensions that clean the flow up and may be upstreamed into GNOME at some point.

It's all opinions, but boy, compared to the mess that is macOS and iOS regarding discoverability ... I'll take GNOME any. day.

Honestly, after being a gentleman farmer for 15 years or so now, I've come to realize that farmers were the original hackers. In this sense, there's almost a coming-home aspect to software developers wanting to do farm work.

I've never been so proud as when I figured out how to rig up the water nipple in a way that the pigs wouldn't rip it off the wall for the umpteenth time. And my solution probably wouldn't work for most other farmers. It's a design of circumstance and an appreciation of material and the brutal-ness of animals. Livestock are 10x worse on your designs than your average web site user.

I think this is it. And I suspect most of these folks don't honestly believe they want to actually run acres and acres of farmland as a commercial enterprise.

But speaking as someone who has a small herd of sheep, a few pigs every year and processes his own 50~ meat birds on the property every year. I know how much it sucks to watch a lamb and mother die in childbirth. I know the itch of thousands of hay cuts after clearing a field of bales and putting them up.

And I also have a 2g fiber line to my house and work a tech job remotely for my primary income. My desire to do the land things is not based on mythology. It's because the food tastes better when I helped raise it. It's a slight independence from some of the modern just-in-time food conveniences. It also means I have to work with my neighbors, cause who else is gonna help you cull a dying sheep in a pouring rain and put it down and get it in the compost?

I don't do these things because they're easy. I do them because I feel a little more alive once it's over and I've shared a difficult moment, or a delicious meal with a friend or my children.

That's a facinating obsevation! I hadn't consider the side effects of calling a common phone and interacting with other people rather than exclusively the one person you wanted to talk/text with. Probably distances you from (or never allows you to know) those adjacent to the person you already know.

Yes, if you can pay off any witnesses.

Don't attempt to anthropomorphize Donald Trump. He's more like a lawn mower with daddy issues.

Because the Chinese Communist Part is not stupid enough to just exploit their leverage over sovereign nations for shits and giggles. You don't need a smoking gun to understand how corporations in China operate. They operate with the blessing of the CCP, and regardless of whether they've ever done anything, the scale of what they could do if they wanted to would be some spectacular lessons in modern propaganda.

I don't know how old you are, or what your lived experience has been. But the US did not invent the idea of democracy, nor did anyone promise us that democracy could actually work.

What the United States has accomplish over the last 200 or so years is remarkable, but it's colossally myopic to believe that the US has never curtailed the rights of it's citizens in the name of security. The OSS was never legal. The CIA definitely should not be legal. And lord only knows what the NSA does. But I promise you that restricting access to a Chinese mobile app is not the most egregious thing the United States Government has ever done.

I'm sure there's case law all over the place, but effectively the Surpreme Court unanimously decided that the US definitely has a right to protect itself from foreign influence. This is diplomacy.

And for anyone living in North Korea who ever has a chance to read your comment, I'm sorry, this person has no idea what it means to live in a police state under a belligerent dictator.

Not to derail, but when I was in Switzerland, I found the German Swiss to be far more elitarian about NOT learning French, than the other way around. And French Swiss being a minority, they kinda got treated as other or less-than in the bulk of Switzerland. But all German Swiss are at least willing to try English, while the French Swiss tend to avoid English, so maybe that's where the vibe comes from?

An excellent point. Most modern germ theory says all bacteria is bad. This, despite the fact that our guts are full of bacteria and that you simply cannot avoid ingesting bacteria. Nevermind that plenty of wood cutting boards are full of beneficial bacteria that keeps listeria and e. coli at bay.

Edit: Also there are literally some forms of cheese that you cannot make in sanitized stainless steel. The combination of bacteria you need needs to be impregnated in the wood.

Which creates shallow artists who just want it to "look pretty now." Not saying there isn't a place in the world for that, but there are always trade offs with tools that manipulate your human vision of art, and to say "there are too many denoise filters, just pick one for me" will be severely limiting when you realize that what you really wanted was grain removal, but that's not how your AI denoise filter works.

Again, there's room in the world for all manner of software uses. But to argue that Darktable is bad because it gives too many options, misses the goals of a great many artists, which is to understand what's happening to the pixels they captured in the field.

Yeah, funny how the divisions appear when it comes to folks who have dependents (not just kids, adult dependents count too), and those who are el solo lobo.

I will add to your note a (hopefully) friendly reminder that parenting does not need to be as involved as some folks make it out to be. Some of the best parts of my kids days come when I just leave them alone in their room, ignore their "i'm bored" whinging, and do my own thing. It's not selfish, it teaches them to find their own motivations. My 8 year old fell back asleep on the couch for 20 minutes this morning after breakfast while complaining about being bored and is now building a marble run with a toy we had to dust off together this weekend.

It's still chugging along. I suspect, but do not know, that it went the middle road of solid growth with reasonable return on investment as opposed to the pop-up monetization shit hole that is Medium.

Haha, I thought this looked like an awesome idea, then I looked through the supported services and realized I already don't use any of them anymore!

And meanwhile these posts keep getting flagged, as though HN is not the right place to talk about disruption of the thing that will likely lead to the downfall of American exceptionalism, if not America itself.

We are taught that American democracy and free markets are special, unique, unparalleled prosperity and progress. But even the founders knew the tree of liberty had to be periodically refreshed with blood from time to time. January 6 is not a strange blip, and at some point it wont be the fringe crazys on the steps, but everyone who thought their 401k was equivalent to generational wealth. Ownership is generational wealth, and the majority are going to find out they don't have much of it.

There's something endlessly humbling about looking beyond a human lifespan. It's at least one of the reasons I find the Long Now Foundation so intriguing.

Pretty sure the CT is not really a truck in the way an F150 is. Plenty of folks still get trucks to use as cars, but everyone I know who got a CT replaced a large SUV and use it mostly as a car with a big trunk.