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Auberon Quinn, is that you?

svieiraon If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/resources/galileo/histori...

You are one of today's lucky 10K!

That's the short version. The LONG version is https://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2009/03/galileo-affair-1-pr...

svieiraon Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

And when these AI companies are slurping up $30 trillion of the annual wages ... where does it re-enter the human economy? Or does it just disappear into NVIDIA and never come out again?

svieiraon Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

I went through one the other day which was a nest of Go code which boiled down to a 10 line shell script.

svieiraon Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

> I certainly wouldn't want a non-clause enabled developer on my team now.

You only want to work with people who are hip with the North Pole?

svieiraon Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

> I delivered more work that I was less confident about, making me more miserable in the process

Don't leave the kicker out of the story

svieiraon Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

Every single crew member of the Endurance was selected based on Shackleton's vibes on them, sometimes before they even said anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Trans-Antarctic_Exped...

svieiraon If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

Fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is almost literally a millennium old at this point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fides_quaerens_intellectum (and much older if you take it back to Saint John's response to the resurrection John 20:8-9)

svieiraon A True Life Hack: What Physical 'Life Force' Turns Biology's Wheels?

Doesn't "irreducible complexity" here mean "it wouldn't function in any reduced form", e. g. "it would not be possible to build this up in tiny parts useful for other things and then have those things transformed into these things by tiny accretions and removals over the course of the lifespans of these creatures."? The article doesn't cite anything that would suggest that this argument is any less relevant now that we understand how the system works than it was before we understood it at this level.

svieiraon OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”

> I was becoming the kind of consumer we used to love. Think about smoking, think about Starrs, light a Starr. Light a Starr, think about Popsie, get a squirt. Get a squirt, think about Crunchies, buy a box. Buy a box, think about smoking, light a Starr. And at every step roll out the words of praise that had been dinned into you through your eyes and ears and pores.

Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants

svieiraon Troubleshooting Email Delivery to Microsoft Users

You've got it - subdomains are sufficient (IIRC). Something like notifications.mycompany.com for the important stuff and news.mycompany.com for the more marketing stuff (and of course someone.else.entirely for the the cold email list "well, surely this one little list couldn't hurt" ... nah, who am I kidding, never use those)

svieiraon Write less code, be more responsible

Why is it using a temp file? Is there really no more elegant way to pass around pointers to images than spilling to disk?

svieiraon Show HN: Tired of logic in useEffect, I built a class-based React state manager

Is this because Elm forces you to separate the model computations from the view computations, which then lets you compose the model shape in one place and the view shape in the other, or some other property of the framework that I'm not aware of?

svieiraon Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original

This was in 2006 - digging around, I find things like https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA452289555&sid=googleS...

> Abstract:

> Several Italian judges, including the members of the Supreme Court, have defined begging with children as a "Roma cultural practice". In response, the Italian Parliament enacted law no. 94/2009, which severely represses the practice. The article contests that begging is a Roma cultural practice and claims, instead, that it is an economic practice which may sometimes connect to other elements of Roma culture. The article critiques both the cultural argument put forward by Italian judges, and Italian law no. 94/2009, neither of which serves to defend the rights of Roma children. It concludes by suggesting a different kind of legal approach to child begging, more respectful of the constitutional duty of solidarity and protection of the family, and based on social policies rather then criminal repression.

and references to Article 669-bis C.P. talking about this 2018 law "re-introducing" limits to begging, so I suspect that the "impersonating a gypsy" bit was a mis-understanding and it was really "impersonating a person in need".

> If I’m wrong, a sum that doesn’t matter to me was grifted.

"Give to anyone who asks" is a fine approach, one that I follow too.

svieiraon Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original

> To me the difference is, there seems to have been way more freedom of thought in the pre christian societies.

I see you're one of today's lucky 10,000! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletianic_Persecution#Great...

svieiraon Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original

The beggars are professionals almost every single time. To the point where they have licenses from the state to beg (my friends were filming an amateur film in Rome and were stopped by the Guardia because they thought my friends were breaking the law by impersonating a Gypsy.)

svieiraon LLMs as the new high level language

Note that the prompt wasn't fed to another LLM, but to the same one. "I wrote a program in C and gave it to GCC. Then I gave the same program to GCC again and I got a different result" would be more like it.

svieiraon We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

Enron

svieiraon A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

ItisevenbetterwhenyoudropthespacesthatREALLYforcespeopletoengagewithyourcontent. FormaaimxlgarbteihratttenionandHLODitscrmblaetheintreiorofwrdos! /s

svieiraon I miss thinking hard

So today are you doing it again? Or did you compress a week's worth of work into a few hours and the rest of the week is shot because you don't expand?

svieiraon Deno Sandbox

Did the machine-bound Macaroons ever get written up publicly or is that proprietary?

svieiraon OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

What (or who) would have been responsible for the Holodomor if it had been caused by an automated system instead of deliberate human action?

svieiraon Claude's new constitution

> So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.

Plato, Aristotle, and the scholastics of the Middle Ages (Thomas Aquinas chief among them) and everyone who counts themselves in that same lineage (waves) including such easy reads as Peter Kreeft. You're in very good company, in my opinion.

svieiraon Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

Would you consider Knight Capital Group[1] a banking context?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group#2012_stoc...

svieiraon Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

> excel sheets

Funnily enough, Excel is the quintessential example of a fourth generation language, IDE, and database and it's the only one aside from SQL which actually succeeded from its time period. It's software, just like what you're building now, and just like what you're building now there are good points and bad points about it. The tradeoffs are different between the JS / Python code you're likely spinning up now vs. the Excel code that was being spun up before, but they rhyme.

svieiraon Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

> What they all seem to be just glossing over is how the project unfolded: without human intervention, using computers, in an exceptionally accelerated time frame, working 24hr/day.

Correct, but Gas Town [1] already happened and what's more _actually worked_, so this experiment is both useless (because it doesn't demonstrate working software) _and_ derivative (because we've already seen that you can set up a project where with spend similar to the spend of a single developer you can churn out more code than any human could read in a week).

[1]: https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown

svieiraon Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

> My favorite definition of “legacy code” is “code that is not tested” because no matter who writes code, it turns into a minefield quickly if it doesn’t have tests.

Unfortunately, "tests" don't do it, they have to be "good tests". I know, because I work on a codebase that has a lot of tests and some modules have good tests and some might as well not have tests because the tests just tell you that you changed something.

svieiraon How will the miracle happen today?

If you haven't read C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce you may like it.

svieiraon US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

So when you build a sewage farm on your back 40 you should get wealthier (while your neighbors thank you because their land tax went down), but if someone snaps a photo of your area that goes viral on {THE PLATFORM DU JOUR} thus making your county more popular and driving up a bidding war for postage stamp sized lots of land (leading to the land being valued at a higher rate than it was a year before) you suddenly have a massive tax bill because "we noticed you are living in a popular county" and the benefits of living in a popular place should be taxed away? Or do we need some kind of a standard for "more valuable" that deals only with tangible things? And if so, which tangibles?

svieiraon Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

> just like anyone

Arthur Whitney?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_(computer_scien...