“Charity” is not foreign aide. Foreign aide keeps the refugees from the one chunk of wherever from overwhelming the government of their neighbour which has a knock-on effect on the price of Critical Defence Material or shipping and/or oil. That bones us, even if we hate everyone involved.

Then, afterwords, everyone has to do a ton of work re-corrupting and re-inserting their business interests into the upstart regimes. We want the Devils we know and have bribed handsomely, new bribes suck.

It has very little to do with ‘them’, per se, and everything to do with our wallets. Granted, normal business people like stability; disruption, famine, and war work very well for others. We prefer to choose when we topple regimes than having food shocks and epidemics thrust it upon us, better ROI and easier scheduling.

A large part of my extended family lives near a large facility. Wind turbines launching ice at the nearby roads is a larger (yet trivial), safety concern.

More rationally, if some 25% of the country can’t express themselves and another 25% are unsure/uncommitted one should assume their interests are best represented by the most invigorated and unified minority.

I wish I could drop an ‘/s’, but, uh, ‘/no-really-thats-this-timeline’.

It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations).

Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue.

Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.

Validating their ego and effort and social position can fulfill their social desires regardless of an answer that dismisses, say, buzzword soup as both inappropriate to the current context and incoherent to people who know what those words mean.

It’s pretty ok in Python, but meaningful indentation is amazing with a proper type system and compiler. Clean, consistent, efficient, and ensures working code is easily read and standardized.

I’m unaware of anyone accepting improperly formatted C# as ‘done’, and would reject any such PR out of hand because of the potential for legibility issues to hide bugs. So: if it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done by the compiler to save line noise.

Decentralized uncontrolled flow can also be seen as free rein for select power players who can manipulate the system. It changes, but not necessarily positively, how media power consolidates. And without scrutiny or national corrective pressure, that consolidation of power creates a very different perceived media system than is experienced.

The combined Senate report on the 2016 election interference from Russia — anti-both sides, lying to both sides and claiming it was the other — should have triggered a strict and meaningful reaction. Now we are in a spot where our kids are being mainlined Al Jazeera and Russian Times propaganda filtered only through uninformed useful idiots in short form video while they do their makeup or emulate Joe Rogans podcast. It’s pay for play media, with no scrutiny, bothers make it easy to heat, juice, or manipulate chosen content, hosts, and themes.

Power consolidation at the local/national level prevented it at the global level. At the global level those power structures move around axes we can no longer even name in polite company, and have fully corrupted the political discourse.

I think OCaml is slept on in the LLM-hype discussion as it allows for very high level human readable abstractions and specifications, and feel all the ML inspired languages might be due for a resurgence of popularity.

Also a bit funny to monitor my own reactions as a spoiled F# dev, chunk by chunk, oscillating between “wow, that’s great I want to use that always” and “ew, yuck” for both languages. The grass is always greener, but also that which I’ve already nitpicked has fewer nits to pick, apparently.

On the one hand environmental issues from oil and coal are creating an existential pressure that requires mass investment and change as a high public priority.

On the other hand the primary cost drivers of the greenest tech to address oil and gas and industrial process heat usage at scale has paperwork and financing issues that are resolvable by MBAs and some straightforward investment strategies.

Existential threats, paper challenges.

Taken at face value, and considering we have mapped out the physics, these ‘environmentalists’ arguing ad nausea about this online want long term entrenchment of high carbon fuel sources and intimate connections between the global economy and oil despots with no real hope of solving transportation, shipping, aviation, or other major drivers of global energy usage in order to prop up half-solutions for electricity to avoid rational investment or cost-control mechanisms in proven scalable nuclear tech.

Stopping a constant cycle of forced First of a Kind construction, regulatory timebombs unaligned with science, and corporate NIMBY campaigns, is the easiest physics breakthrough humanity will ever have to make. It should be an area of obvious victory, not a show-stopping excuse.

… and, not for nothing, but Oil company PR campaigns a few decades back were explicit: they can’t argue climate change away, they can only confuse the issue, push personal responsibility for national policies, and push half solutions that diffuse actual social opposition. All of this angry knee jerking is following that game plan and the substantial greenwashing propaganda those petroleum giants invested heavily in, to the benefit of rich fossil fuel producers and delay of meaningful changes on our greenhouse emissions.

Step 2: harmonize all laws and regulations with EU anyways without voting influence because Single Market access is lucrative and vital

Step 3: start harmonizing other laws with the US in hopes of courting a new colonial ruler

Step 4: …?

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With love, this feels like a situation where a good friend should simply have taken the car keys away.

With psychedelics you see the upsides in engineers who come to work the next day with designs informed by massive insights, and the downsides in people whose ‘massive insights’ result in socially abnormal behaviours.

LLMs seemingly provide validation and support, something very lacking in most lives. The distance between thinking loosely about, say, an app and getting positive feedback and absurd market predictions triggers similar ‘revelations’ in people with no meaningful context, and plays on the hopes of those who do. Much like with psychedelics, though, there is a self-supported self-validated cycle going on, prone to flights of excess.

Remember ‘adpocalypse’? Metas cash cows all rely on third party devices and hardware they don’t control. Apple and Google dictate how much info they get on critical fronts, and can cut Meta out at any point. VR was an attempt to create a sustained platform advantage where Meta was in control. “AI” is an area where Metas mining of its own data could plausibly create products and services that would be uniquely competitive against MS/Google/Amazon and OpenAI/Anthropic. Regardless of broader market success, those AI capabilities should avoid a scenario where Metas operations and ad-wizardry have to rely on a third party AI giant who is simultaneously a product competitor, dooming them to irrelevancy.

The accusation is the Zuck is flighty and arbitrary. But his business is arguably a dead-man-walking without strategic realignment. On a 15 year timeline Meta is vulnerable from all sides and swimming upstream against social platform decay. These Hail Mary efforts seem reactive to their vulnerabilities, with an eye to securing long term existence.

As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.

I agree that many traditional cultures engage in egalitarianism, but genocide and mass-rapes, wars and slavery campaigns, are baked into the anthropological history.

Economic activity, expressed in water and caloric access, is the root of numerous ongoing conflicts (“tribal” and national), and the cause of many historical eradications of competition.

Capitalism seeks to maximize capital, anthropology says life just as brutal as it was before we named and systematized it. Cost benefit doesn’t need dollars as a unit of measure to be effective.

Free as in beer and free as in speech means those ‘contributors’ are also free as in Linus to go fork themselves.

Don’t like it? Go fork, yourself. Want it different? Pay, money, make, it, happen. Don’t like paying? Go fork, yourself, harder.

Cannabis is not laced with perfumes and additives as a rule, as commercial cigarettes are. Cannabis has properties that pair well with physical and cardiovascular activity, unlike cigarettes, even when smoked.

Cannabis habits in youth are also displacing booze and associated lifestyle risks and lifelong impacts (early and unplanned kids from intoxicated hookups, drunk driving, among others).

There is a spectrum of outcomes, moving towards outcomes that are less harmful and provocative of third parties symptoms is better for everyone involved (hospitals & taxpayers too). That’s about being more informed and empowered not smarter. Perfect is nigh impossible, harm mitigation and outcome maximization is what we’re doing, refining the window over time.

I’m picturing a combination of on-board facilities and online services from the Apple cloud that Apple product holders could use to flag and filter LLM slop. As a value added prospect, iPhone users who read HN or used TikTok would be seeing clear UI-level indications of when they’re interacting with slop with options to kill it.

In my estimation it would provide platform benefits without losing capabilities, leverage Apples hardware and not advertising positioning, fix critical issues of spam and scams, and let them market a higher calibre of online experience. Also, they could un-eff Siri - “play album X starting at track Y”, come on, it’s 2026.

I was agreeing and providing more context to the costs of building at a higher level, like Electron, and the limits even when applied by a unified vendor with incentives for high performance.