Hacker News: sbt

New comment by sbt in "xAI joins SpaceX"

sbt — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 10:41:57 +0000

"If you mix raisins with turds, they're still turds" - Charlie Munger

Another consequence of US NatSec being gradually privatized is that once your income stream derives mostly from government spending, it becomes an imperative to influence politics to secure that stream. Yet some of these companies will remain vulnerable to shifting political winds.

Bidenomics: Transitory Inflation, Remarkably Successful on Employment and Growth

sbt — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 06:00:08 +0000

Article URL: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/bidenomics-truly-transitory-inflation

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45843888

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by sbt in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

sbt — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 04:10:49 +0000

> It never made sense to me how such a ruthless and inhumane culture is sustainable in the long run.

It’s pretty simple, actually. Once such a dominant market position is achieved, you can get away with almost anything, whether with customers or employees. This is true of all the BigTech companies.

New comment by sbt in "Why haven't local-first apps become popular?"

sbt — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 04:18:41 +0000

This is the correct answer. Consumers also don’t seem willing to pay for privacy, sadly, when they can get a product for «free» in exchange for data.

New comment by sbt in "Trying to get error backtraces in Rust libraries right"

sbt — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 09:03:46 +0000

> The core issue is that Rust still hasn't stabilized backtrace propagation on errors.

I would actually strengthen this to: «The core issue with Rust is that Rust still hasn’t stabilized _»

New comment by sbt in "Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language"

sbt — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 07:47:28 +0000

This is probably my favorite programming language I would like to use if it had more backing. Their reference capabilities in particular seem like a very good match for the actor model. Alas, it does not appear to have a large corporation behind it pushing it forward, nor a compelling niche use case (e.g. it is still GC'd).

New comment by sbt in "Why is AI so slow to spread?"

sbt — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 07:35:37 +0000

> ...context needs to improve drastically.

Yes, drastically. This means I'll have to wear Zuck's glasses I think, because the AI currently doesn't know what was discussed at the coffee machine or what management is planning to do with new features. It's like a speed typing goblin living in an isolated basement, always out of the loop.

New comment by sbt in "Why is AI so slow to spread?"

sbt — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 07:11:35 +0000

I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. It's useful for some boilerplate generation, but for more complex stuff I find that it's more tedious to explain to the AI what I'm trying to do. The issue, I think, is lack of big picture context in a large codebase. It's not useless, but I wouldn't trade it for say access to StackOverflow.

My non-technical friends are essentially using ChatGPT as a search engine. They like the interface, but in the end it's used to find information. I personally just still use a search engine, and I almost always go to straight to Wikipedia, where I think the real value is. Wikipedia has added much more value to the world than AI, but you don't see it reflected in stock market valuations.

My conclusion is that the technology is currently very overhyped, but I'm also excited for where the general AI space may go in the medium term. For chat bots (including voice) in particular, I think it could already offer some very clear improvements.

New comment by sbt in "Ask HN: Is anyone else just done with the industry?"

sbt — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 04:06:29 +0000

Note that many companies are pretending to hire in order to look successful/growing. They might be willing to hire if some unicorn candidate comes along, but in practice the job ad is just marketing.

New comment by sbt in "The Future of Flatpak"

sbt — Fri, 23 May 2025 04:20:37 +0000

The problem is that now you have to package for N distros. And the people who run the distro may not want to spend time on it, so you have to do it yourself.

New comment by sbt in "Will Elon Musk fire a third of the US government?"

sbt — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 15:13:00 +0000

Please do it. It will not solve the problem (which is SS/Medicare spending), but will guarantee that they lose the midterms, which will grind the rest of the MAGA agenda to a halt.

New comment by sbt in "Tesla's FSD – A Useless Technology Demo"

sbt — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:47:35 +0000

Unfortunately, the adaptive cruise control is also far dumber than it thinks it is, slamming the breaks when passing under bridges on the highway etc.

New comment by sbt in "District court rejects Tesla request, Postnord does not have to deliver plates"

sbt — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 17:59:19 +0000

Well it’s not like Postnord manages to deliver something even if they try.

New comment by sbt in "U.S. GDP grew at a 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter, better than expected"

sbt — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 14:43:59 +0000

> The US isn't just productive. It is productive beyond the wildest imagination of the rest of world.

Productivity has a specific meaning in economics, i.e. labor productivity (GDP per hours worked). What I think you are referring to here is output, i.e. GDP.

You can learn more about this here and see the latest country data: https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm

New comment by sbt in "Oil Is Hard to Quit, Even in Norway Where Electric Cars Rule"

sbt — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 14:49:48 +0000

Cost of production is much higher in Norway than in Saudi.

New comment by sbt in "Scaling Rust Builds with Bazel"

sbt — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 13:14:16 +0000

I didn't know about this but will check it out, thanks.

New comment by sbt in "Scaling Rust Builds with Bazel"

sbt — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 08:20:39 +0000

We use a similar setup where I work. One challenge we have has been generating bazel targets for different sets of crate features for dependencies. We have solved this by writing Bazel tooling, but learning how to do this has cost a fair bit of time. We also rely heavily on cargo-raze, which has rough edges.

As with all things Bazel, it's great when it works, but it has a steep learning curve that could be hard to justify in many situations. You need at least one person on the team who is willing to really spend time on it.

New comment by sbt in "The Nobel Peace Prize 2022"

sbt — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 09:37:09 +0000

I think awarding it to Obama was the wrong decision. That said, people sometimes misunderstand what the Nobel Peace Prize is about. "Peace" is interpreted in a very abstract sense by the committee and should perhaps be better understood as "Civilizational Progress". The reason the committee awarded it to Obama was because it wanted to commend the progress the US has made on the Civil Rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King received the peace prize, and Obama is seen as a culmination of this movement. In short, Obama's prize should be seen as a prize given to the American people for their progress.

New comment by sbt in "What I’ve learned from users"

sbt — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 09:23:09 +0000

This essay is uncharacteristically incoherent. The title is "What I've learned from users", yet after reading it I have no answer to this question.

New comment by sbt in "The Ethereum merge is done"

sbt — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 11:14:51 +0000

> If you want to give "power to the people", you need some way of estimating independent voting power, that is not tied to resources.

You mean like a democracy?