> “I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton,” the two wrote in their email, signed by both, as reported by The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas. “Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.” [0]

Pointing out hypocrisy is easy and not necessarily damning. But looking at all the -100 for everyone but +2 for me fabric of society abusing startups he funds I can't help but think he is a pretty whack person. Let's stop listening to him.

[0] https://fortune.com/2022/08/06/marc-andreessen-billionaire-n...

- No search competition, when you search on duckduckgo or google for the page a competitor can bid to show up, won't happen with an app.

- Notifications, this is a big one. We live in the attention economy and apps are more likely to slide into push notifications - with ads - than webpages.

- Some users have a mental model that more easily maps to "this app is my go to for this task" and struggle with webpages. That's a psychological and incentive issue. Apple support PWAs but just barely and don't like them because they don't partake in the 100 billion dollar revenue 30% payment processing extortion.

- More intrusive access and "better" targeted advertisement.

- Once an icon is on the home screen somewhere, chances are some users are going to use it because they notice the icon and would not have done so if it were just a tab inside the browser. The attention economy strikes again.

- Companies _love_ to build a relationship with customers. It's usually a very one sided and jealous relationship where getting the user to install an app is perceived as a step in that direction.

- Users are more willing to create accounts for apps than webpages (citation needed, this is just a gut feeling)

- On mainstream iOS and Android it's much harder to block ads in apps than it is in the browser.

I'm sure there are other reasons, but those alone explain why we see them so often.

[0] https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-laser-revolution-pa...

This fetish we as an industry have to hide platform specifics makes us blind to the platform specific capabilities. Some software would be better off if it leaned into the differences instead of fighting them.

Trying to solve climate change in anything but a very narrow sense is like trying to perform humane torturing. One can either treat others humanely _or_ torture them. The two at the same time is impossible. The majority of conversations around climate change focus on doing the same things - modernity - but without the negative effects. Chasing a way to humanely torture children will not in fact stop the torturing of children. The goal is wrong! No amount of "solutions" will help you if they all aim to achieve the goal that itself is the root cause of the issues.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776501

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I was born into and shaped by a science and enlightenment religion world-view and lack proper words to describe the issues with it, but I feel them.

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

Tell me you have bland taste without telling me you have bland taste. But if your customers eat it up and your slop manages to stand out in sea of slop, who am I to dislike slop.

Source https://www.sven.de/dpi/

> We will keep mining for these resources so where should we do it?

We don't have to keep mining, yes our lifestyle is incompatible with reducing mining output. But why is our lifestyle - or modernity in a more general sense - taken as non-negotiable? The trolley problem has a solution, stop the train.

Hey AI please create art, and it gives you a hue shifted Mona Lisa. I find that supremely boring.

[1] https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pd...

In Tom Murphy's words:

> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.

So if we look at what NVIDIA has to say about NVFP4 it sure sounds impressive [1]. But look closely that initial graph never compares fp8 and fp4 on the same hardware. They jump from H100 to B200 while implying a 5x jump of going with fp4 which it isn't. Accompanied with scary words like if you use MXFP4 "Risk of noticeable accuracy drop compared to FP8" .

Contrast that with what AMD has to say on the open MXFP4 approach which is quite similar to NVFP4 [2]. Ohh the horrors of getting 79.6 instead of 79.9 on GPQA Diamond when using MXFP4 instead of FP8.

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/introducing-nvfp4-for-effi...

[2] https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/software-tools-optimization/mxfp4...