Taxes are, in the case of a country like the United States, a legally sanctioned, representative approved (indirectly voter approved) means of supporting the needs of the nation/state as a whole.

Theft is distinguished from say, gifting money by consent. In a democracy mechanisms exist for our representatives to make decisions according to the consent of the people, to an extent.

You presumably live in a democracy so you presumably necessarily agree to abide by the laws of your nation which involve being governed by your democratically elected representatives.

My thought was that it could plausibly be that renting goes in cycles: the building is desperate for renters, so they fix everything, advertise, and so on. Then, once they’re full, the company cuts costs by reducing maintenance. Then they lose renters, and the cycle continues.

However, I then thought about my last two buildings, which were cheaper, and things were just broken right from the start, so… who knows.

At least, models were trained on vast quantities of information produced by humans, much of it copyrighted, without consent or compensation.

"Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of ‘pirated’ books to train AI models, authors claim" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/10/mark-zuck...

But in every framework I've used, the suggested way isn't how a technology is used in reality, in production. The tutorials are almost like a different framework entirely. Years ago as an Android dev the difference was shocking between what tutorials taught you and what was done in practice.

This doesn't technically detract from the author's point but it makes it moot - you just build in the current best practice way or the way that suits your needs, and that's how it often is with languages and frameworks.

Maybe that mismatch between how people are taught initially, or how the framework is intended to be used, is an inefficiency, in which case those who design frameworks should take note.

In the case of Rails I think "the rails way" is appropriate for certain style of apps, and not so much for Shopify etc scale apps.

Imagine you bought a house from HomeCorp but if you want to buy furniture or anything else that goes in your house, food, toilet paper, etc, it has to be from HomeCorp, and they take a huge cut.

Furniture prices will be higher. You can expect everything that goes in your house to cost more.

If you find a cool couch from IKEA, you can't put it in your house. You're not allowed because HomeCorp says so.

There's no reason why IKEA can't just ship you a couch but HomeCorp says they haven't tested it so they don't know if it meets their standards. But they don't even LET YOU make your own decision about what goes in your house.

IKEA could technically build their own house selling operation but that's a massive undertaking and is incredibly expensive.

Not only that but homes built by HomeCorp have all these features that suck unless you use HomeCorp for other things like your car, or your job. Your car just works a little less well if it's not a HomeCorp car - but only if you have a HomeCorp house, otherwise it's totally fine.

If your friends don't have a HomeCorp house it's clunkier to have them over, they have to jump through hoops or get a worse experience. They can't send you videos in high definition. Because HomeCorp wants them to have a house from them.

... Honestly I just convinced myself. They make it so inconvenient to use any other option that you're strongly pressured to use them. Then because you are, they force decisions on you that you might not want, and take a massive cut of money. It's all shady business practices that are incredibly unfair and result in less economic freedom.

I've been waiting my whole life for, basically, the computer from Star Trek, and I think it's on the way.

Gemini was really disappointing. It could do some incredible things but it was more like the first hints of what will be possible. For example, I could ask it to show me the biggest files in my Google Drive. And as far as I could tell, it had access to Google Drive APIs, and _could decide how to use them_. That's extremely powerful, that means it could think of what to do to accomplish any goal you have and determine how to do it. If the API can do anything the UI can do, then the AI can do anything you can do, and you don't have to point and click and type like it's 2024, and we're suddenly in the 24th century.

But, it was too early. Many of my requests were met with "I'm sorry I can't access x y z" when it could and did at other times. The unreliability is what got to me.

So I went with an iPhone (my first ever, I'm not American) because I think in the short term, iOS is going to have the experience which is closer to this intelligence. Because it can drive behavior in other apps and will increasingly do so as features roll out.

Don't be fooled though Apple Intelligence is currently very, very limited.

Side note: I don't care about the text and image gen capabilities at all. Though the notification summaries are pretty handy and occasionally hilarious.

.... I might write a piece for http://unlikekinds.com about this.

But are there any notable companies working on things that will improve people's lives in other ways? In ways that will improve society?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40898593

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Particularly impressed that it builds for iOS when written in Java - turns out the game is built on libgdx which builds for all these platforms.

Also, it's fun if you like roguelikes.

I don't really understand how it's profitable.

Also, construction sites, and road works.

Nearly constant noise.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38077117

Points: 8

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38052934

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Yes, you do need a gaming PC. I got a gaming laptop for like $2400 AUD 3 years ago and it's going great with VR (and Starfield on Ultra, not in VR)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37463282

Points: 2

# Comments: 0