woooooo

Also, we already have Iran on sanctions and every possible diplomatic hostility short of war. What should we rationally ask for from our government? Invasion?

The point of the story to me was, with a clear idea of what they want, the person got a year's worth of Big Tech done in a few hours with Claude. Could have been a couple days with a tight team, either way, the problem wasn't the coding ability or typing speed.

Enduring survival properties aren't the same as enduring beneficial properties. Feudalism and slavery stuck around for quite a long time and were mostly forced out against their will.

At big tech companies "were still finding alignment" is code for leadership not being able to make decisions and unblock execution.

The key words in the quote are "not everyone is aligned". It's not about execution ability.

Bear cartel is a bunch of curmudgeons without tons of VC money. If they are being unfair, its purely for love of the game.

2024 was right after voters had seen Biden at that debate, while all the "responsible" people insisted he was sharp and smart. It really was more unique than its given credit for.

HN trusts the community by giving us green text for the new accounts.

Qing suffered a century of unequal treaties before they fell, they were the bullied and not the bully. (They were also medieval and isolationist which further hurts the comparison IMO).

"The Defence Ministry of India reported: 88 killed and 163 wounded on the Indian side, while 340 killed and 450 wounded on the Chinese side, during the two incidents.[6][7]

According to Chinese claims, the number of soldiers killed was 32 on the Chinese side and 65 on the Indian side in Nathu La incident; and 36 Indian soldiers and an 'unknown' number of Chinese were killed in the Cho La incident.[8] "

War might be overstating it a bit, "incident" might be more appropriate, but we can round up in the spirit of comity.

So adding it all up, the Chinese had 1-2 small foreign wars per decade in the 50s-70s, zero since 1979. It still doesn't justify the phrasing "threatening all their neighbors" in 2025, aside from Taiwan specifically.

In the case of the line of control with India, it's reached the point where they're having ritualized fistfights at high altitude for pride, that's just comical. It's not threatening.

If we add up "damage to countries around it" in the previous hundred years, I think Japan doesn't look so great.

China conducted one several-week war against Vietnam and annexed Tibet, both over 50 years ago. Other than the longstanding dispute with Taiwan, who are they threatening? Some quibbles over a few Himalayan mountains with India?

The upper quartile are in the US and they're not allowed to buy Chinese cars, so you are right by default.

That notwithstanding, Xiaomi cars are nicer than Teslas. They're called "the Apple of China" for a reason.

Yeah, I hear you and I also added a parenthetical that the incentives aren't always the same.

In an organization of high-minded individuals, the information asymmetry goes both ways, I've been a manager and a dev and I tried to be high-minded and do my best to smooth that assymetry for the greater good in both roles.

But sometimes, especially the last 3-4 years since it got tough, there's a lot of people trying to hold on by any means necessary. Information asymmetry isn't the problem there, it's incentive assymetry. What if you're just not that good at tech and got promoted to 1st, maybe 2nd level manager in the good years? What's your incentive?

Both, actually, but in the case I'm thinking of the devs with the strongest leadership skills in terms of organizing their peers to make things happen were completely invisible to management who were playing a different game. Just like their game was invisible to the devs shipping product, who didn't understand the implications on their careers. Saw a couple of great unofficial leaders get fired and a bunch more leave due to the disconnect. It caught up to the managers later, turned out their people skills weren't good enough after execution ground to a halt.

(Not all managers, this was a special degenerate case, but it's worth considering that different people have different goals/incentives/values. It's not always a straight line to "delivering customer value" that is only held up by a lack of people skills.)

In other large orgs, the managers are in a parallel universe playing status games while the devs self-organize to get anything done. The soft skills involved in doing that wind up being completely invisible to the status universe.

Assembly isnt how they work under the hood, but its the highest fidelity interface we have. C as "portable assembler" is targeting the surface that chip designers give us and the one that they try to make fast via all their microcode tricks.

That becomes a problem if you let the shell script mutate into an "everything" script that's solving tons of business problems. Or if you're reinventing kubernetes with shell scripts. There's still a place for simple solutions to simple problems.

If you get all the data on fast SSDs in a single chassis, you probably still beat EMR over S3. But then you have a whole dedicated server to manage your 14TB of chess games.

The "EMR over S3" paradigm is based on the assumption that the data isn't read all that frequently, 1-10x a day typically, so you want your cheap S3 storage but once in a while you'll want to crank up the parallelism to run a big report over longer time periods.

The issue is when all the spending gets you is more complexity, maintenance, and you don't even get a performance benefit.

I once interviewed with a company that did some machine learning stuff, this was a while back when that typically meant "1 layer of weights from a regression we run overnight every night". The company asked how I had solved the complex problem of getting the weights to inference servers. I said we had a 30 line shell script that ssh'd them over and then mv'd them into place. Meanwhile the application reopened the file every so often. Zero problems with it ever. They thought I was a caveman.

Obviously I and most westerners are on the side of the angels for this incident but we also hear lots of calls in the West to ban "Russian and Chinese bots", or "pro terrorist views" or whatever. Principled views shouldn't do a 180 based on the subjects involved.

I am confident that the number of broccoli eaters exceeds the number of heroin users.

I've seen some straw-men in my day but "OP wants to shift all agricultural production to heroin" might be an all-timer.

Setting aside the bad analogy, real people are much more likely to eat broccoli than to do heroin.

Ok, but are we losers who cannot compete culturally? Where's the faith and confidence? We can't compete with AI slop?

Isn't that just "culture"? Let the best content win? It used to be that the USA was comfortable competing and winning along these lines.

No but you can call out to Google or DDG APIs.

I think parent comment was talking about hype vs reality rather than disagreeing with you.

"We're not hiring but AI is in the news" = "We're not hiring because of AI! Don't sell our stock!" It's independent of actual current or future AI adoption.

But that's just software that also runs fine locally. A few tools with a local LLM can do it.

> If however you use a zero-copy format, the CPU can skip data that it doesn't care about, so you can 'exceed' the 6 GB/s limit.

You still have to load a 64-byte cache line at a time, and most CPUs do some amount of readahead, so you'll need a pretty large "blank" space to see these gains, larger than typical protobufs.

I'd love to see a source that he was there to coordinate an attack on the US embassy. Did the Iraqis invite him for that purpose?