taurknaut

The centrists are definitely the most scared right now. If they can't trust their institutions what remains of the ideology? Their entire worldview is crumbling right now. Actually having to rummage around for values and some instinct of what power-building even looks like beyond "vote right" is going to involve a lot of the scary soul-searching and mirror-gazing that we normally chronically avoid as it's uncomfortable and unprofitable and we could be all at BRUNCH right now letting the technocrats bomb somewhere while we sip mimosas.

Or maybe we'll just continue to ignore all the contradictions in our society and hope and plan for the best. Who knows. I'm optimistic this could snap us out of the fever dream thats caused complete political deadlock for decades. We are very addicted to a comfortable life and any actual muscle to fight back will have to grow from nothing.

> seems like the nature of the world is eat or be eaten

Surely this applies to how individuals consider states, too. States generally wield violence, especially in the context of "national security", to preserve the security of the state, not its own people. I trust my own state (the usa) to wield the weapons it funds and purchases and manufactures about as much as I trust a baby with knives taped to its hands. I can't think of anything on earth that puts me in as much danger as the pentagon does. Nukes might protect the existence of the federal government but they put me in danger. Our response to 9/11 just created more people that hate my guts and want to kill me (and who can blame them?). No, I have no desire to live in a death cult anymore, nor do I trust the people who gravitate towards the use of militaries to not act in the most collectively suicidal way imaginable at the first opportunity.

The most likely catastrophe remains giving capital outsized influence on our society. It's the easiest to imagine, and the idea of a capitalist making a money-making machine that can actually think for itself and wields actual power feels very difficult to imagine. (Granted, maybe Musk himself really is that dumb. Inshallah, I guess.) Humans are easy to manipulate and most can just be bought with sufficient money. The last thing the super wealthy want will be to rely on software that has individual agency outside the will of the owner. Meanwhile the sort of destruction this will cause is already happening around us in the form of a highly financially insecure populace, supply chain instability, climate change, automated bombings of "terrorists", "smart" fences to keep out criminals (let's just ignore the fact you're more likely to get murdered by your citizen neighbor), the reduction of journalism to either propaganda or atomized hand-wringing about mental health and individual agency, and a kafkaesque system of algorithmicly-priced rents for every sector of life. Is the algorithm "a reasonable value to both the consumer and producer"? No, it will be "how much blood can I squeeze from this peasant". Hell kroger is already playing around with dynamic-pricing-via-facial-recognition at checkout.

I always thought skynet was a great metaphor for the market, a violent and inhuman thing that we created that dominates our lives and dictates the terms of our day to day life and magically thinks for itself and threatens the very future of this planet, our species, and our loved ones, and is somehow out of popular control. Not actual commentary on a realistic scenario about the dangers of ai. Sometimes these metaphors work out great and Terminator is a great example. Maybe the AI we've been fearing is already here.

I think for the most part the enshittification of everything will just accelerate and it'll be pretty obvious who benefits and who doesn't.

You can also attach them to each others bits and make them fight at the end of the job. Waste of money? Yes. A massive amount of fun for the boys? Absolutely.

This doesn't feel terribly surprising to me. MacOS has always had impressively performant parts, but their upgrades always generally lower responsiveness. On modern hardware it's less perceptible obviously, and they want to sell machines, not software. But the last iteration that felt like it prioritized performance and snappiness was Snow Leopard, now twenty years ago.

I will say the problem was a lot worse before the core explosion. It was easy for a single process to bring the entire system to a drag. These days the computer is a lot better at adapting to variable loads.

I love my macs, and I'm about 10x as productive as on a windows machine after decades of daily usage (and probably a good 2x compared to linux). Performance, however, is not a good reason to use macos—it's the fact that the keybindings make sense and are coherent across an entire OS. You can use readline (emacs) bindings in any text field across the OS. And generally speaking, problems have a single solution that's relatively easy to google for. Bad-behaved apps aside (looking at you zoom and adobe) administering a mac is straightforward to reason about, and for the most part it's easy to ignore the app store, download apps, and run them by double clicking.

I love linux, but I will absolutely pay to not have to deal with X11 or Wayland for my day-to-day work. I also expect my employer to pay for this or manage my machine for me. I tried linux full-time for a year on a thinkpad and never want to go back. The only time that worked for me was working at google when someone else broadly managed my OS. macs the only unix I've ever used that felt designed around making my life easier and allowing me to focus on the work I want to do. Linux has made great strides in the last two decades but the two major changes, systemd and wayland, both indicate that the community is solving different problems than will get me to use it as a desktop. Which is fine; I prefer the mac-style to the ibm pc-style they're successfully replacing. Like KDE is very nice and usable, but it models the computer and documents and apps in a completely different way than I am used to or want to use.

> What's missing in containers?

From a consumer/user perspective almost none of the benefit of containers is available to the end-user. Features sets vary wildly by operating system. MacOS doesn't even have real containerization and apple has not signaled moving in that direction. (not even going to bother to take windows seriously.) jails in FreeBSD work in a completely different way from cgroups. Our phones should effectively be containerizing apps so we can e.g. control who is allowed to contact the internet, but no such functionality is offered to the user. Apps instead are simply not allowed to look at each other, but they can contact whoever they want. (Maybe a rooted android has slightly better feature set in this regard, but that sounds miserable to me to have to figure out.)

For writing services, yes, they're quite useful. We've only tapped a tiny part of the potential though. These could be easily repurposed to allow the end-user who uses graphical interfaces to lock down their computer.

I'd love a future without advertisements.

What is the sort of person who is in this audience?

...why not? Is this inaccurate?

Eh. Containers will have their day.

No. Wasm is not useful enough yet. Neither are containers.

> Why would the CIA council things? It would be president and state department.

The CIA absolutely counciled ukraine. Why would you think otherwise? This is precisely the CIA wheelhouse.

I just don't care. I hate my car. I resent relying on it. Whether it works or not is something for my employer to care about.

I can't say I care without any recourse to remediation.

I can't say I've ever watched much seinfeld, but Curb Your Enthusiasm regularly has stimulating social insights.

I don't really care about how it performs so long as it's better than a CPU. I just want to target the GPU myself and remove the vendor from the software equation. Nvidia has taught me there isn't any value that can't be destroyed with sufficiently bad drivers.

Damn I could have gotten the "no fluff" version by looking at wikipedia or just googling.

Why do people expect their non-fiction reading to be entertaining? That's not the point and I inherently don't trust your judgement if that's what you're looking for. At some point you've got to provide insight.

> I’ve definitely met people that were equally competent at both

Tbh this is a meaningless statement. How on earth is any sane person supposed to compare competencies?

I both describe myself as full-stack and associate with other people who do the same. There isn't a single person among us who would try to pitch ourselves as equally competent on the front end and the back end. Who would do this? Why? To what end? This simply ignores why people actually use the term "full stack": to indicate willingness to take on work, not competency.

Gee let's consider here why nobody trusts the cia.

Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to get along with another american or is simply retarded. But I repeat myself. We americans are not a terribly skeptical people and absolutely deserve what we get. Morons. Why bother complaining about fascism if we don't even bother to tear down obviously evil structures like the cia? What is the goddamn point?

Even framing the conversation this way is quite odd. What's wrong with being old? Since when did software expire? All the best software is old. And, frankly, all software is boring. So this leaves us with no way to distinguish quality software from the rest.

I highly recommend in the future starting from what you actually value about software. Oldness and boringness are not the reasons, and if they are, they are extremely bad reasons.

> Krapivin made this breakthrough by being unaware of Yao's conjecture.

I don't think there's any evidence of this. Yao's conjecture is not exactly standard undergraduate material (although it might be—this is a commentary on detail rather than difficulty. But i certainly didn't encounter this conjecture in school). If not knowing this conjecture was the key, millions and millions of students failed to see what Krapivin did. I imagine you'd have to ask him what the key to his insight is.

Hashing is a pretty unintuitive sort of computation. I'm not surprised that there are still surprises.

Yes, he's an amazing writer regardless of his target. I primarily think of his christian apologetic work, though, hence why I was teasing his obsession with western (and particularly christian) text.

I love Chesterton. I was just ribbing him. It's not terribly difficult.

The second part of that adage was added on I believe centuries after the attestation of the first part. It's still a nice saying, of course. I think there's a third part to the phrase but I can't remember it for the life of me.

> I’ve definitely met people that were equally competent at both

This is somewhat silly because there's no good way to compare backend and frontend abilities. And why would you! A full stack engineer indicates willingness to tackle both sides, no equivalent competancy.

> People that call themselves "full stack"are a backend developer that dabbles in frontend or a front end developer that can dabble on the backend. Almost never have a met a person who was equally good at both.

I never interpreted Full Stack to mean homogenous competency, which is a rather strange concept if you think of it.

The vast majority of people learn this on the job. This is certainly not taught in schools (or is only barely scratched as a topic).

All we have left is a dumpster fire supported by ads.

> HN (website whose sole purpose is to let people advertise)

I don't think anyone comes here to read the advertisements (which is what paid job postings with no comments? I'll pass.). The closest you get are the "who's hiring" threads. Calling that an advertisement when both parties clearly want to engage seems wildly disingenuous. Advertisements are necessarily forced on people. There isn't a single person in human history whose life was improved by an advertisement (except the people hosting the ads, of course).

Somehow i feel like we can get this with employment that produces value. It'd be more productive to get people to dig ditches—ditches don't destroy our cities, roads, and services, so they produce even more value than ads do.

Anyway, the last thing this society needs is encouragement to buy even more crap they never asked for. We can be something better than "that shithole strip-mall where everyone is an ignorant consumer who worships ronald reagan". As much as the evidence points to the contrary, I do believe we are capable of more.

Bro you found the most biased news sources on the planet. How about you cite the financial times if this is so clear?

I don't see any evidence that the CIA counciled Ukraine to avoid war. I see a lot of evidence that they'd push for exactly the opposite. Even if they didn't meddle (which is straight unbelievable), they're cackling with happiness that their buffer state went to war.

> (though more commonly spelt in Welsh these days as Huw)

Somehow this is also a saner spelling with English orthography. We should probably all use this spelling.