troyvit

> If a new project is causing a “strain on resources” then the utility planners have failed that community.

Call it an echo chamber but when it comes to data centers that's the preponderance of news that I read. These two stories are about the county next door to mine. The first story highlights how the builders of the data-center continuously broke zoning laws. The second story from a month later describes how the board of commissioners let all that slide and approved construction to continue.

https://www.cpr.org/2026/08/07/weld-county-ai-data-center/ https://www.cpr.org/2026/09/10/weld-county-officials-approve...

But it's not just my state:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/25/new-jers...

Those guys were fined a "record" $1.1 million, and:

> The state is mandating DataOne apply for and obtain the required permits or cease operations, but is giving the company 45 days to do so, according to a NJDEP spokesperson. During that time, regulators are allowing the facility to continue running the generators.

That fine is a slap in the wrist.

> The whole point of the word purpose - its purpose if you will - is to be able to talk about the difference between what a system does and what it ought to do. To say the purpose of a thing is what it does, is to render the word completely redundant.

I think you might like this song then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqBBNjkAlXM

as it takes normal every day systems that we think we can depend on (banks, the army, phones) and sarcastically highlights some of the worst things those systems do vs what we're told they do. The chorus is that slogan.

What you describe reminds me of some studies of jumping spiders. Some aspects of their intelligence (like counting) matches that of a 1 year old human, but because their brains are so tiny it just takes them much longer to do the same counting. IOW it's not the size of the model, but how it's organized and the strategies for using it.

This article has lots of fluff but it describes a lot of what I'm talking about:

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2021/are-s...

This paper focuses on the use of the providers' web and phone tools, and the data sharing arrangements they built through ad networks and tracking services like Data Dog. It doesn't talk about how they handle data from API calls. For one thing that can be pretty opaque.

I have a friend/client who understandably doesn't trust the existing privacy policies of the major providers. They have the same problem many of us do: We want the most powerful models, we're willing to pay for them, but we see over and over how much of a frontier the frontier actually is. Frontiers are ugly if you don't have guns.

So for now maybe platform tools like Open WebUI and TypingMind are a good workaround since the big boys don't (apparently) train on API data (for now) or (probably) send that data to advertisers. It would be interesting to confirm that.

> - how do you solve the 3 body problem? you need people and their people and their people on the platform to use the platform

> - how do you go about getting the 1st 1000 people for something like this?

I am definitely not an expert, but I did see on their site:

Discord bridge & server import

Mirror a channel both ways, or import your whole server. Nobody has to move all at once.

And I think that helps answer some of your last 2 questions. If it works seamlessly with existing discord users then it seems like a good first step. The server-runner gets autonomy and users get the ecosystem they're habituated to.

Actually there's lots of evidence that there is life on (in?) Enceladus:

https://sales.bigmachine.io/curious-moon

This book teaches how use PostgreSQL to crunch real data from the Cassini probe, which shows a "smoking gun" for life on Enceladus.

I think there's plenty we can do about it.

* If we find life on another planet it provides a realignment for most of our world religions. That's important to several billion people. It might even create a new religion. We haven't had one of those in awhile, how exciting is that?

* If we spent $50 Billion to find algae on Enceladus we'd definitely spend 200x that to put said algae on a billionaire's plate for them to eat. That would fuel hard sciences and the economy in numerous ways, similar to how the space race gave us Nike Air shoes and the Dustbuster [1]. Like you say a human would probably never dip their toe in the water of Enceladus but we would get a lot better at drilling holes and extracting.

* We need more enemies and aliens would be great, even if they are single-celled. It would probably result in a global defense system within 50 years which would once again have several ancillary benefits for technology and warfare.

[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...

I was hoping this was minimal enough for somebody with dementia to use to make calls, but when they say "Phone" they don't mean like the old folks do.

I kept reading though, kind-of envying the physical keyboard because that would be fun, but I'm a swipe-typing guy through and through. Then I saw that it supports swipe typing, possibly by sliding your fingers across the keyboard. The idea of swiping across those keys literally gave me frisson, won't lie. That would be so groovy.

Yeah so like that XKCD, the cops have a post-it in their car with your details. But like fashion it's also making a statement.

How about internationalized then? Give the UN something to do?

You mean the same best friend that you unilaterally groped[1], shit-talked[2], undermined[3] and tried to drag into a brawl[4]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_crisis

[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-nato-policy-def...

[3] https://www.cadtm.org/Trump-Europe-and-the-international-neo...

[4] https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/31/europe/trump-lashes-out-europ...

I despise Salesforce, but when I landed on this page I was like, huh. wow. honesty. Looks at GitHub

So yeah you're exactly right, the snark is not deserved if you ask me, and I'm 82% snark.

> It should be remembered, however, that the bird successful in flight is an evolution. It has taken a great many generations of his kind to develop his muscular system in just the right way for flying purposes, and very likely the process has consumed many centuries of time. The mistake of the scientist would appear to be in his assumption that he can do with much less suitable material by a single act of creative genius what nature accomplishes with such immeasurable deliberation. [1]

> Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.

Recent sci fi novels I've ready have been really depressing because while maybe some colony planet is doing OK the Earth is a used up husk, and I'd like to think that we could have both: a planet we chose to make last and successful footholds on other bodies (water moons and water planets make more sense to me)

[1] New York Times, 9 weeks before the Kitty Hawk's first flight (https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/svc/tmach/v1/refer?pdf=true...)

> you could reimplement all its basic features easily in a weekend with AI

Cloudflare did that:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/

I haven't heard of anybody but Cloudflare using it though.

Name recognition still means a lot. WordPress is baked into most hosting platforms now so SMBs just reach for it. Most of them won't hear about this b.s. and honestly the platform can continue to run on momentum for years.

There's a whole ecosystem behind WordPress that, while it's a security nightmare, is also pretty damn useful. You can't vibe code that yet, you have to build it over years, if not decades.

I worked for a company with co-CEOs. The ideas CEO left and the company tanked. I think there's a right way to have an ideas CEO but maybe a balance helps keep them from switching everybody to C# on a whim. A CEO without ideas seems like a recipe for at best stagnation and at worse just fleecing the company of value and taking a golden parachute.

They did say "less shady" but at this point Anthropic and OpenAI are approaching parity.

I think it'd be cool to compare a modern day life in rural Ethiopia to what I'm used to.

I use Aurora on GOS. I get that they say sandboxed Play is more secure than Aurora, but I prefer it for its lack of toxicity and absence of shitty dark patterns.

I think the increased popularity of GOS is going to draw in more users like me who picked it for reasons adjacent to Graphene's original purpose, and I hope it's not too annoying for their community.

Yep. We asked for the nightmare we've brought upon ourselves

He definitely sounds more pragmatic than before, which is, in a sense, more positive.

> This is actually one of the benefits brought by AI; it has made Nvidia a good participant in the Linux kernel space. [...] Now, when Linux is so important for AI clouds, Nvidia suddenly cares very much about Linux.

I'm a climber so I'm biased but I really liked your climbing harness example because of the configuration you're able to easily make to the harness.

Saying the harness is like a car's chassis doesn't work as well for me because the chassis isn't as configurable as a climbing harness for as little work.

Getting deeper into the climbing analogy you can even swap out the harnesses themselves for wildly different climbs. Like using Claude Code with a bunch of agents for medical software (climbing K2 where that extra padding comes in super handy) and pi.dev with a local model for a respectable web project (sport route where you'll be back in a few hours and it's safe to be a little more exposed).

I'm glad your article made HN, and thank you for pi!

There's more than one model for news and some of those models don't even result in advertising-controlled biases. Public media sites employ journalists for instance.

Maybe you're right. The important thing is to remember this moment the next time you're signing up for a free product that seems just a little too good to be true.

holy cow thank you!

I have another, similar example, though not quite as insidious. I switched to GrapheneOS and it's been mostly great. Unfortunately Graphene's stock camera creates drab shots compared to what the hardware supports. OpenCamera is available, but due to OS restrictions it doesn't work with hardware controls. In other words if you want to take a quick shot you have to unlock the phone and select OpenCamera. Bummer if you're into wildlife shots.

Graphene recommends installing google's pixel camera and sandboxing it, which, fine, I did and it takes beautiful pictures. However the pixel camera locks in google photos for it's gallery. As a result going from the camera to the gallery requires going back home first and then selecting the gallery.

Glad to hear about experiences like this because it was getting tempting to install and sandbox google photos as well.

Sticking to OSM has helped me get lost in new and interesting ways every time I make the mistake of relying on its address search without double checking on a lat/long translation app, or if I forget to load this: https://github.com/pnoll1/osmand_map_creation

It's embarrassing, and it definitely adds to my reputation as that weirdo open-source guy who really can't cope ("Sorry, my map app screwed up," said almost nobody else ever), but it keeps my hypothalamus big.

That's what it should be doing. There's plenty of analysis out there about Iran's strategy (my favorite so far: https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/05/21/mosaic-defense-dispe...) but I get no sense that anybody actually in charge is trying to attack Iran's strategy. Instead they just attack Iran.

I'm updating Metabase's Podman documentation to reflect using Quadlet instead of "the old way." It's my first open source contribution in quite awhile and while it's tiny I'm excited for it. It's a chance to get to know pi.dev, not to write, but to behave as a copy editor and fact checker. Since it uses Mistral on the back-end it's a slightly insane copy editor and fact checker, but that's almost better. It's forcing me to check everything I say.

That's a good point. I got to hang out with a printer in Slovenia for a few hours in February and your comment made me realize how deep and strong his faith is despite the changes that automation has brought to printing.

He had classes set up for kids and grown-ups to learn printing and they had a ton of cool projects to show for it. We went through all his letter blocks and he told stories about a giant building in the U.S. Northeast that was just stacked with those blocks. He loved the idea of that place and saw threats to its existence as real problems, but not as existential. Faith never came up. It was just there and that's how I know it was real.

Yeah there were parts that were so organic it looked alive. I was imagining the folks at Toho taking detailed notes.