zzzeek

in my Atari days, I went through half a dozen of those stupid joysticks, which broke easily as they were poorly designed and put way too much repetitive strain on the plastic insides that broke regularly.

contrast to my SNES controllers that still work today and feel more or less like they did literally 34 years ago. that blows my mind.

on the console side, the 2600 itself had some components go out which had to be replaced back in the day (remember when you'd take your console to the video game shop and they'd repair it?). The 800 itself didnt have any failures but the 810 disk drive was always a nightmare.

my comparisons are all to the SNES so admittedly these are all unfair comparisons, I never had an NES.

I was a total Atari kid and I still have my 2600 and my 800 on me. If Atari was the one distributing an NES like system IMO they would have just fucked it up. While I loved my atari devices, they were also extremely unreliable mechanically / electronically. The build quality of Nintendo devices (I own about 10 Nintendo devices going back to the SNES that's plugged into my TV with a modern HDMI adapter today) is worlds beyond what Atari was able to pull off in my experience. Granted the Nintendo devices have the advantage of more sophisticated technology but Atari I think really had a cheaper build mentality.

This is all going to hinge in a tremendous way based on what kind of app you have and who your users are.

got a family friend who keeps posting on Facebook big "Fight Datacenters!" photos / posters that are extremely obviously AI generated

it's quite cringe, like a not-so-subtle troll on the people who share the image

Fun post but sort of ironic to end with a lecture on "cultural hegemony" from....a Brit!

there is significant resistance to air conditioning in Europe at many levels (all of which are invalid or solvable):

* "not technically feasible" - people talk about old buildings with oddly shaped windows

* "can't afford it" - as you see here. people talk about the units themselves and the electricity bills

* "our infrastructure can't handle it" - this has to do with things like grids overheating, failing

* "our infrastructure can't handle <the regulations>" - things like nuclear reactors in France not allowed to raise the temperature of rivers by another N degrees during a heat wave

* "it's bad for global warming" - a little late for that, probably should save lives first

literally hospitals in europe don't have AC throughout the entire building yet. global warming is really coming at them fast

> Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write.

federal

I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it.

You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.

Sure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work

> execs cargo culting on using AI as a pretext for layoffs.

reading this article I think that is not what happened in this specific case:

> Over the last three years, Ford says it has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions.

> “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said. But “we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.”

That is, Ford had been slowly relying more and more on automated tools (if the "rehiring" is over three years, then this all precedes our current "AI" ecosystem) and realized that now that they want to add modern AI tools, they need experienced engineers to train the newer systems, and are hiring people from the open market, where some of these folks were former Ford employees, but nothing like "were laid off due to AI".

That is this doesnt sound at all like "Ford fired 350 engineers to be replaced with AI and is now backtracking", which is certainly what the headline here implied.

As I said - on mainland. That study was done on a peninsula community surrounded by water, except on the north side, which was mostly a nature preserve where a 6 foot high fence on that side prevented new deer from entering.

So yes "kill all the deer" (like nearly ALL deer) works if you're in a small community that is 95% sealed off.

Realistically, "we have no solution to tick borne disease except for hiring tens of thousands of full time hunters continuously shooting animals in residential areas to keep the deer population on the brink of extinction" is not a sufficient solution for me.

And I live in a town where we have lots of those guys. It's fine. But scaling them up to the point that we don't need to spray for ticks anymore, you'd have them falling out of trees in playgrounds.

the "bubble" is all about, "companies are burning tons of money to provide these models and not recouping their investments"

open source models would strictly be the usual army of free labor getting paid elsewhere

the sovereign AI thing is fascinating to me for many reasons:

* it's time to build out stacks! servers, deployments, things! Especially in Europe. Hence sovereign AI is already a big sales buzzword for lots of hardware and hardware adjacent companies - NVIDIA (obviously), Cisco, Oracle and my own employer, Red Hat (hooray!)

* It makes the whole "AI is a bubble" thing completely irrelevant. OpenAI and Anthropic are no longer relevant, AI models themselves no longer need to "make money", and hopefully lots of really good / free ones start becoming commonplace. Ed Zitron goes out of business.

* How fascinating that Trump/ Hegseth maybe didnt completely create this but boy did they throw a thousand gallons of gas on the fire, bullying Anthropic around and scaring the crap out of every government, institution and business that's not 100% US only who is using Claude. nice job idiots!

* Can models be maybe trained with little more focus on only what they need to know? They need to know code, math, business, science. They don't need to know how to rip off movies or art. These LLMs would hopefully not be spamming Amazon with shitty books and Instagram with fake influencers (but I'm likely being too hopeful)

and then Chomsky goes on to form a deep online friendship with Jeffrey Epstein

and the rabbits and chipmunks and mice and squirrels, as well as that you have to kill basically all deer to the point of about 8 deer per square mile, since one deer can carry 2000-3000 new ticks. which is basically impossible on mainland because new deer just wander over.

claude because it would be more ethical, grok because I can just trip it and it will shatter into pieces

We definitely noticed behavioral differences in 3.14 regarding gc which could show up in particular test suites we have that are purposely ensuring all objects of a certain type were collected after a gc.collect() run. Between this and other issues (changes to the runtime API for typing, the first decently runnable version of free-threading, kind of a longer time for some C-based dependencies to catch up), the transition for my projects (SQLAlchemy) to 3.14 was generally more bumpy than that of say 3.12 or 3.13. will be interesting to see if 3.14.5 allows us to relax some changes we had to make to the test suite.

> Palantir, whose software is widely used by US defence and intelligence agencies, has faced growing scrutiny in parts of Europe as governments reassess their dependence on American technology companies.

I think it's great. Europe and other regions will be building out their own tech stacks, decreasing global dependence on big US players like AWS and Palantir, creating lots more jobs for programmers and much broader ecosystems for doing things.

yes. github has very minimal controls for PRs (either shut them off completely, or not at all) but through GH webhooks you can essentially script "auto-close" of PRs that dont have correct preliminary approval.

it's time for there to be some really nice workflow tooling that people can plug into their GH repos that does this and other things.

one paragraph in the three mile long TOS the homeowner clicks OK on and problem solved ?

sorry what ? I'm personally responsible for getting Democrats elected? Can you show me a Democratic campaign that is calling half the country racist ?

> I don't know the demographics of that cohort

here it is:

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/demographics-us-military

this is upper military leadership. Black individuals account for 6.5%-9% of general officers/admirals, senior female leaders (colonels, generals, and admirals) represent less than 5% of all senior military leadership.

> 60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below.

doing the math this means a Black or female senior military leader has 8.5-11 times higher chance of being fired by Pete Hegseth compared to a white male counterpart

(back from my two hour Hacker News ban - "make sure all the tempban knobs are turned to the max for that zzzeek guy"

look this is the thing with racism - racism to the degree "races" are fit (randomly, or forcibly) into different ethnic / cultural / etc categories (e.g. "in-groups" and "out groups") is largely, due to the in-group/out-group differential, a natural tendency in humans that has to be actively worked against (hence the term "anti-racism"). Nobody who has grown up in modern society with extreme separation of "races" / cultures into disparate groups can really say "oh I'm not a racist" amongst people who study this at an anthropoligical, sociological, or evolutionary level, biases towards those in societally placed in "out groups" have to be critically challenged on a regular basis.

This is why it's not enough to be some MAGA who says, "oh Im not a racist! i just agree with trump's policy", they of course have no idea how their words and actions are linked to racism because they've never looked at it (and by my experience with Trump voters, they angrily, adamantly refuse to even look at contrarian evidence to their belief systems if you try to show them, much less have the critical thinking skills to actually understand them). They are marinating in distrust and contempt of "the other" (if you know me in RL I'll introduce you to people who wont listen to a single fact you give them if it was not on FOX news).

> People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.

they care about their in-group. Countries like those in Scandanavia have developed very deep social welfare systems largely because of their history (now being challenged by immigration) of being culturally homogeneous meant that everyone trusted each other implicitly and had no issue with their government dollars being used to help their neighbors [1] (this is a really interesting article btw). A diverse society has a steeper hill to climb in establishing social trust between different cultural / ethnic groups.

[1] https://trendsresearch.org/insight/the-paradox-of-right-wing...

> If he starts passing racist policies, that's bad, but otherwise we don't give a shit.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/03/pentagon-pet...

> Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.

> About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hires”.

so..it's not "racist" when it's "oh all those Black men and women are obviously DEI hires", is that the logic?

tribalism is totally how people work when they lack culture, education and critical thinking skills!

here's some basic reading on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism

have you talked to Trump voters? I have talked to many, many, in my family, in my neighborhood, everywhere.

If there is one view that ties them all together, it's racism (and misogyny). Loud and clear.

If any president of any party posted a tweet like [1] or [2], I would never ever answer "I approve of the job theyre doing" in a poll.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/trump-china-i...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/news-wrap-trumps-racist-so...

> if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.

> The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out.

40% is ....not a majority

the current POTUS has a 37% approval rating and this is considered to be historically low, due to wars, corruption, etc.

but even with all of that corruption and failure, 37% of surveyed adults, *still approve*. This includes his frequent, deeply racist tirades on Twitter. They approve!

the parent poster is trying to say "well where's your evidence that a society not based around human labor is possible?" which is sort of a silly question

you can't claim an invention is invalid because there are no "studies" that show such an invention has already existed and succeeded, you'd by definition never invent anything!

did Chad, or whoever posted this for him, post this as a jpg with no alt text? wow, thought Chad was a bit better than that (I can't even read this thing easily and im not considered to be visually impaired)

"but it's a real typewritten letter! you dont understand!"

yeah but you didn't snail mail it to all of us, you or someone put it on the internet on a webpage. if you can scan a letter as a JPG and scp it to a server, you can run an OCR and put alt text in.