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twoodfinon The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)

People naturally get hung up on the syntax and the interop story with existing popular languages, but it’s the object model differences between Smalltalk, Objective-C, Self, C++… that really matter.

ref: https://www.abebooks.com/9780201834543/Object-Model-Lippman-...

twoodfinon Web Search API

Not joking: They need to figure out how to sell ads for agents first.

Google Search only works as a business because human eyeballs see (and brains choose to click on) ads at rates that justify advertisers’ (massive in aggregate) dollars.

twoodfinon Religious scholars met with Anthropic

Personally, I’d like to experience a low-end tasting menu restaurant.

twoodfinon We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

Sure, but prior to AWS introducing a notion of “project”, then they’d be at risk for those $1M bills from the data science team looking for agentic magic to reduce readmissions.

My point is this was never as simple as, “Give me a dial to set my maximum account spend.”

twoodfinon We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

I imagine that the product folks at places like AWS are averse to introducing discontinuities in the experience based on scale. Little customers get the same experience as big customers who get the same experience as mega customers.

Obviously they’ve changed their mind about cost management in light of the scale and dynamism of agents, which isn’t too surprising.

twoodfinon We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

This is the right perspective, but the folks who would be setting this cap for the customers that matter likely have no idea how to price that, or the price would be so absurd as to make the cap meaningless.

How much would a hospital pay to avoid unexpected downtime of their software systems?

twoodfinon We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

For a large enterprise spending millions on AWS, 1.5X is already a budgetary disaster. Unfortunately, shutting off critical IT infra because it hit 1.4X spend this month is a business disaster.

There’s no magic wand that produces good outcomes when planning or execution goes awry at scale.

twoodfinon We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

This is one of those features that customers think they want without having thought it through:

“Never let me spend more than $X” also means, “Shut down my business-critical app/service/solution at 2 am on a Sunday morning because Joel in IT forgot to plan for the new report runs.”

The product design work to let customers have the first thing without risk of major pain from the second thing is non-trivial.

twoodfinon From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4

https://github.com/antirez/ds4

The project GitHub page is a much better introduction for the hn crowd.

twoodfinon Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met

“In <current year>, the Feds could derive this automatically and just send me a postcard.”

“No, they can’t.”

“But they should be able to!”

Personally, I don’t want a battered wife fleeing her husband to have to file a form with the IRS for tax purposes, but mostly I’m just tired of this kind of hn thread.

twoodfinon Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met

Literally everything could be derived automatically by the government in current year…

The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most important transfers embedded in the tax code. It provides about $70B to low-income workers every year.

Take a look at the eligibility criteria:

https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-in...

You can claim the EITC if you are married, not filing a joint return, had a qualifying child who lived with you for more than half of the tax year and either of the following apply.

- You lived apart from your spouse for the last 6 months of tax year, or

- You were legally separated according to your state law under a written separation agreement, or a decree of separate maintenance and you didn't live in the same household as your spouse at the end of the tax year.

…

You can claim the head of household filing status if you're not married, had a qualifying child living with you more than half the year, and you paid more than half the costs of keeping up your home.

No, the government can’t derive this all “automatically”.

twoodfinon The AI Race Just Got Awkward

This looks like a speed run of the history of analytics DBMS’s.

Once upon a time, everyone had a secret sauce in network or data encoding or query optimization, but in the last ~10 years computational physics and economics have basically decided the “correct” architecture and everyone (including OSS) has converged.

twoodfinon DraftKings is using AI to behaviorally target chronic gamblers

Education has plenty of funding. Per pupil K-12 spending has grown relentlessly higher than inflation for decades.

twoodfinon Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election

Censorship by elected governments is OK?

twoodfinon Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election

So actual government censorship.

twoodfinon ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

France has a PPP-adjusted GDP per capita that’s much closer to Russia than it is to the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

twoodfinon Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

Well, they just pushed it back to 2028.

twoodfinon Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

VW is planning a slightly modified 2027 model after skipping 2026.

My wife bought one of the first edition models. Other than the lousy range, it’s incredibly cool.

twoodfinon Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries

Sorry, what?

We’re talking about offering users a choice of ad options on a site they’re choosing to visit.

That’s nothing at all like a gangster threatening physical harm.

twoodfinon California is chasing wealth that has feet

So owning anything that’s in limited supply produces “externalities” that should be taxed?

twoodfinon California is chasing wealth that has feet

Does Larry Page’s brokerage account pay no taxes on dividends like a 401(k)?

twoodfinon California is chasing wealth that has feet

That’s true of everything in limited supply.

twoodfinon Oracle cites 'force majeure' to shield itself on controversial data center

Cancel their mortgages and keep their houses?

I don’t think Oracle is proposing they get a data center they didn’t finish paying for.

twoodfinon Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries

“Holding a gun to our heads”?

How is that metaphor apt?

twoodfinon Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

Right: Capital markets know how to efficiently turn dollars into tokens, even if it means tens of billions invested in new DRAM fabs.

twoodfinon Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries

Teachers sending encrypted report cards home with zero-knowledge proofs attached?

Reports they can never again consult when gauging a student’s progress over time?

Say what you will, but at least it’s an ethos!

twoodfinon Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries

What does that mean?

twoodfinon Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries

Nothing is “taken” when a shopkeeper writes down in his notebook that Sam Gallo bought two loaves of bread and a gallon of milk.

I’m glad the parent of this thread specified the need for a Constitutional amendment. Anything less would be an obvious intrusion on free speech.

twoodfinon Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries

This is simply untenable. Institutions of all kinds have been keeping records connected to individuals for millennia.

Try to run a school when you can’t maintain data on the students.

twoodfinon Tokens Too Cheap to Meter

A phrase comes to mind: "Your margin is my opportunity."