solatic

> only a concern if you're charging money

No, it's a concern if you care about impact. Improving commercial profits is one kind of impact that is relevant to for-profit corporations, but there is also impact like "improving user privacy" or "helping lower-income people manage their finances with a free-as-in-beer product". This impact can be measured and the feedback can be used to improve the product according to non-profit, non-commercial goals.

There are also people who build open-source software as a hobby and couldn't give two shits whether other people use it or not. More power to them. For those people, you are correct. https://book.iced.rs/philosophy.html comes to mind.

Then there are projects like Streisand (maybe a bad example, I see it has since been archived, but it came to mind) that want to change the world in some way. Those projects very much do need to care about metrics like, how many people are downloading the software, are people opening GitHub issues, are we obscure or is our target audience talking about us, hopefully positively but if not, how can we improve that? Value must always be worth the cost (even when the code is free, it must be worth the time to download, give it a try, give it CPU/RAM, maintain/upgrade the installation) - are we giving users value or are they churning?

It might blow your mind but even non-profits hire people with MBAs (and universities offer programs for MBAs that focus on non-profit management), precisely because some organizations focus on non-financial impact.

> Even if you RAID them, there's not a good way to move that VM to another host if there's a RAM or CPU or other hardware issue on that host.

This is the critical point. All hardware fails eventually. The CPU and RAM are, in a real sense, also ephemeral. The only relevant question is what the risk tolerance of the use-case is. If restoring from async backup is sufficient, then embrace ephemerality and keep backups. If you need round-the-clock availability, pick an architecture that lets you fall over gracefully to another machine, and embrace the ephemerality when you inevitably need to do so.

Quite the opposite: retirees will flee to low cost of living areas, taking the money that they spend in other sectors (food, health, entertainment, etc.) elsewhere.

There's multiple tools that generate architecture diagrams from text/code (Mermaid, LikeC4...). You start using one and tell the model to generate the text for the architecture diagram and it'll do it. Stuff like https://erode.dev tries to use LLMs to keep it in sync.

Considering that people expect literally the same thing, I can understand how even small regional differences can seem extreme. Like not finding any beef on the menu in India, or any bacon in the Middle East.

Your point isn't contrary to LLMs or LLM-powered robotics. LLMs have access to the entire human corpus, including documented regional specializations, as you describe. The LLM knows via sensors where it is and what local conditions are. The LLM could even hypothetically conduct experiments to try to find further hyper-local specializations, instead of just relying on monocrop agriculture.

It all depends on the agent harness and the system prompts.

> "post capitalist society" was the recognition that capital ceased being the primary factor of production. No matter how much capital you throw at a problem, if you can't retain people that know what you're doing, you won't get far.

This leads to the reformulation of knowledge workers as "human capital", and it's hardly post-capitalist. A capitalist society is one where people assemble different forms of capital to produce capital returns that are larger than the sum of the capital inputs, where the possibilities available to you depend on the amount and quality of capital that you have access to. This is all still very relevant when discussing human capital - access to human capital is determined by the quality of your professional networks, whether you decide to be present in geographic talent clusters (i.e. cities as centers of industry), and whether you have sufficient financial capital available in trade.

AI will not transition us to a post-capitalist society. Its promise is solely the ability to replace human capital with other forms: chips and electricity. It does not spell the death of human labor any more than computers and spreadsheets did for accountants.

Most commenters here: "Mythos is powerful because you can point it at a whole codebase, if you point the smaller models at a whole codebase and iterate through small sections of code, you'll get too many false-positives to handle."

This misses the point entirely. You pay $20k as a one-time fee to establish a baseline. Your codebase develops one PR at a time, which... updates isolated sections of code. Which means you don't need Mythos for a PR, just small, open-weight models. Maybe you run Mythos once a year to ensure that you keep your baseline updated and reduce the risk that the open-weights models missed anything.

Seeing this as anything but a huge win for open-weights models and a huge loss for Anthropic misses the point entirely. Mythos isn't something you can persuade Fortune 500 companies to spend $20k/day or even $20k/week to spend on, like they were hoping for. $20k/year is a lot less valuable, and it won't justify development costs or Anthropic's growth multiple.

> here, against much more numerous opponents, it no longer has the crushing advantage that it has in air power

Be careful not to compare absolute sizes of militaries (which matter in a long term, strategic sense) to the number of soldiers deployed to a specific battlefield (which matter in a short term, tactical sense, for that particular battle). Adversaries who deploy large numbers of troops into a small area make them vulnerable (to foreign air power, yes, but mainly artillery). Adversaries like Iran may have staggering military sizes on paper but their ability to deliver significant numbers of troops to a battleground, particularly when roads, airstrips, and paratrooper transports are destroyed first (by air power), is far more limited.

But you're alluding to a separate concern, which is whether the US military has enough manpower for long-term strategic purposes, particularly since we can't do much about the size of adversary militaries before wartime, but can do something about the size of our own.

> significant US military loss, e g. the 2 scuttled transport airplanes

If the loss of two measly planes is ever enough to be a "significant" military loss, then God help us. The military wastes far more, even in peacetime. We should be so lucky that the enemy continues to hurt us less than we hurt ourselves.

Your analysis presumes air power alone. Assets are seized by cavalry (in modernity, APCs and tanks) and held by infantry. Nothing new under the sun.

The only reason anybody is thinking of destroying civilian infrastructure (wealth) is because everybody took off the table the prospect of sending in cavalry and infantry to seize and hold it.

The cost of building all the tunnels is astronomical. Making tunnel boring cheap, fast, and resilient to different soil types + rock would also pay huge dividends for urban mass transport (subway lines).

Certainly economically. NIS-USD exchange is now 3.09 and continuing to drop, reflecting optimism.

Strategically, it remains to be seen what will happen to the nuclear material in the peace talks. If Iran emerges from the war with an intact nuclear program due to a lack of American stamina to carry through and achieve its war goals, that would be an enormous strategic defeat for Israel.

mv /Users/beepbooptheory /Users/snappy

You're correct, but your assertion needs a qualifier: it's hard for small investors to make a long-term bet that a stock will go down.

Large investors do not need to purchase index funds, instead they can direct index and purchase the underlying stocks directly. If you're a small investor, the index funds offer diversification but without the ability to divest from individual stocks covered by the index; large investors that are direct indexing can just decide to exclude meme stocks and not buy them, and in so doing make a long-term bet that those stocks will underperform the rest of the index (and without needing to pick a specific date by which that underperformance will happen, unlike a short).

There's an argument to be made that there should be a maximum share price (stocks that reach the maximum trigger an automatic stock split), and that stocks should be allowed to trade for fractions of a penny (after all, what really prevents this in a day and age where all trades are electronically settled? Nobody needs to cash out for literal copper pennies...). Much smaller individual share prices would make it more feasible for smaller investors to build direct indexing strategies.

> I've never seen Iran care one bit about influencing or bothering any country outside of its sphere of influence

Its sphere of influence includes Israel, Gaza (Hamas), Yemen (Houthis), Iraq (various Shia splinter groups), and Lebanon (where Hezbollah refuses to accept the sovereignty of the Lebanese government). You are being willfully ignorant.

> What makes you think they will give nuclear weapons to terrorists or use those weapons at all?

a. They have armed and financed their terrorist proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and others), who used those arms and capital to commit acts of terrorism against their regime enemies (the US and Israel).

b. Witkoff literally offered them free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes and they turned him down, bragging that they had enough highly enriched nuclear fuel already for nuclear weapons

c. I can put 2 and 2 together

In what universe does having nuclear weapons protect you from getting schools and hospitals bombed? Israel very likely has nuclear weapons, but Israeli schools and hospitals are getting bombed by Iranian missiles. So what?

People repeat themselves saying "JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was better than nothing", as if JCPOA would have prevented Iran from getting nuclear weapons. It would not - it only delayed Iran getting nuclear weapons, and so by that line of thinking, it only delayed the onset of war.

Delaying the onset of war is not worthless, but it is not the same as arguing that war could have been avoided, which is what people who roll out that claim are really trying to argue. It's only true in a universe where Iran would have collapsed from within before the expiration of the sunset clause, and that clearly was not going to happen.

Author seems to not care about the prospect of the Iranian regime developing nuclear weapons, putting those weapons into the hands of its terrorist proxies, and sitting back while those proxies turn Western Europe and Palestine into radioactive wastelands (yes, Palestine, because it is not possible to restrict the fallout to just Tel Aviv, and the regime has shown itself to be far more anti-Israel than pro-Palestinian, the prospect of Palestine being a radioactive wasteland for a century is an acceptable price for destroying Israel). The US and the rest of the West should, apparently, just accept this as inevitable historical destiny, because $5/gallon gasoline or putting boots on the ground are apparently so utterly reprehensible.

Author's analysis, as critical as he is of American presidents breaking their promises, is completely absent of analysis of what would happen if American presidents broke their promises to never allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Never mind that JCPOA had a sunset clause that would allow Iran to resume nuclear enrichment to weapons-grade after the sunset clause.

The author's analysis pretty blatantly exposes reality: the West is losing because it does not have the political stomach to win. Instead of deciding that maybe society should try to develop that political stomach, instead of paying attention to a Trump who got elected in large part on mantras about how America was losing and it needed to start winning, no, Author says this was all a horrible idea and implicitly we should just sit back while our enemies progress along the road of putting nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.

Ukraine is a poor example here because we've been poor allies to them. Drones are manufactured in factories that can be bombed, stockpiled in warehouses that can be bombed, transferred to the front lines in trucks that can be bombed. But Ukraine doesn't have the air force assets to achieve that. The Israelis do, and the amount of drones that have been launched at Israel has dropped considerably over the last three weeks.

Defense budget is an abstraction. At the end of the day, there are only so many factories with only so many raw inputs producing only so many interceptors per day. You cannot simply increase the defense budget in the event of a war of attrition and then attempt to outspend your enemy. And this is beside the political unpopularity of high defense budgets in peacetime, when they would need to be higher, to build the industrial capacity ahead of when it would be needed.

The math and economics on missile defense are broken.

If your adversary uses nuclear-tipped missiles: within hours if not days, you are virtually guaranteed to suffer impact. Congratulations, New York is under a mushroom cloud. Lose.

If your adversary doesn't use nuclear-tipped missiles, you have a war of attrition whereby the cost of interceptors is greatly more expensive than the cost of building the conventional missiles. Congratulations, you wrecked your economy, if you can even keep up production of interceptors for long enough. Lose.

The only winning moves are to either use ground troops to invade and dismantle your opponents' missiles to prevent that risk from being realized, or to play mutually-assured destruction games trying to convince the other side that you're just an insult away from doing it anyway. And a Western world that seems desperate to keep boots off the ground is not playing that winning move.

The ban is on reporting the exact locations (i.e. coordinates) of where missiles land, because it's information that is useful in helping the enemy to calibrate where missiles will land. Reporting on other details is perfectly acceptable.

I think you're the one confusing something here. Wishing for "juicy corporate customers" - why? You might as well say that you wake up in the morning wishing for an ocean of money to flood your accounts and become Scrooge McDuck. I'm not sure what site you think you're on, but this is Hacker News, you know, the site of YC where PG wrote his famous essay telling people, "make something people want"? https://paulgraham.com/good.html

Well guess what people told you they wanted? They wanted XYZ-123. And you're not going to find success until you learn to get obsessed about making something people want.

Arguably, only Apple is able to pull this off, due to huge investments in their supply chain and fully ordering out entire factories.

It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.

Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.

> Not a single founder wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves: "oh I wish I could make my company XYZ-123 compliant!"

Somehow I doubt that you are in the B2B/Enterprise space. When you're pitching demos and you hear from people "we really wish we could buy your product but we can't because Finance won't approve the expenditure unless you get XYZ-123", and you hear that over and over again because that is the real-world industry that you live in, then you better believe that there are founders who wake up in the morning wishing that.

You clearly have no understanding of what compliance does. Compliance does not "shift responsibility". Compliance is you demonstrating to your customers that you give enough of a shit that you're willing to pay the table stakes to sit at the table. You can complain that the game has table stakes, but all worthwhile games have them.

> a lot of companies that need their own package repositories

Every company needs its own package repository. You need to be able to control what is running on your environment. Supply-chain risk is very, very real and affects anybody selling software for a living.

This is besides the point that in the real world, not every risk is addressed, at least in part because available resources are diverted to address larger risks.

Both Artifactory and Sonatype have somewhat restricted open-source options, which is part of their "get a foot in the door" product-driven sales strategy.

There are no competing open-source projects because such projects would need to provide more value than Artifactory/Sonatype OSS, which are both already huge projects, just to be considered.

Rent control is literally the removal of the right to evict a tenant who refuses the otherwise-uncontrolled rent increase you request. The inability to evict them for refusing the rent increase is what de-facto keeps the rent from increasing beyond its controlled limit.

> 'adversarial tenant/landlord' is that the theory doesn't line up with reality

So disconnected from reality that it beggars belief.

Anytime you put two or more adult people into a relationship together and at least one person feels like they do not have the option to leave if things get bad (e.g. landlord feels like the tenant is wrecking the property but has no right to evict, tenant feels like landlord is not taking care of maintenance but feels pressured to stay due to artificially low rent), the result is toxic suffering.

> it's the notion that 'homes are markets' that is 'warped'

A market in this case isn't a literal street market with vendors hawking their goods. The word "market" describes the relationship between people who have more than they need selling to people who need and would prefer to exchange their money (or vouchers etc.) to acquire it.

Housing can't not be a market anymore than food or labor could not be a market. It's like saying it's warped that water evaporates and becomes clouds and turns into precipitation. It's a word that describes one of the natural systems of how the world works.

Even in communist societies where the State owns all the land and all the housing and decides how to distribute it, you still have a State-owned-and-directed market between citizens who need housing and a State that has excess housing and provides it to citizens.