"I'm not political" or "don't make it political" type posts on Musk-related topics are often signs that somebody agrees with the worldview that Musk espouses.
I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees.
Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.
> The main issue with ibuprofen is that it can have fairly annoying (but non-life-threatening) side effects like stomach upset and GI bleeds even with normal dosing.
Those side effects are more problematic when used chronically. This is when acetaminophen shines, because it has virtually no side effects at all when used as directed.
> You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell.
TFA is probably overly inflammatory but it's worth pointing out how this loss leader cycle works.
These companies are not your friends, they're burning VC money to subsidize services before the eventual rug pull, enshittification is coming.
> 2 months ago management was showing us scoreboards, praising leaders who used most tokens. Last few weeks, we're getting weekly emails, telling us that whenever we can - we should use cheaper models, and that we should watch the page which shows our tokens usage.
GPT 5.5's double token cost was the threshold for me. These things are getting expensive quickly - the subsidized pricing can't go on forever.
Android is going to bifurcate between "phones that run proprietary apps from the play store" and "phones that run software from anywhere else." And while maybe you can get by without banking apps, your life is going to get increasingly harder when you want to do many other things.
Ride hail app? Transit fare app? Government ID app? Airline app? Maybe you don't need them yet, but the best way to model this future is to consider what you'd do if you didn't have a phone at all, and the amount of friction this will generate as the expectations are only entrenched and expanded.
I'm glad people are saying no. It's good to do it as long as we can. But the final outcome seems inevitable now and to me it feels very close.
We're moving to a world where it makes sense to have one cheap locked down phone with the society mandated garbage apps on it, and another device that you use for real computing.
> I think the zeitgeist today is different. Because Trump has dialed the crazy up to eleven in his second term and a lot of Dems are now pissed. That’s why democratic socialism/leftism is having a resurgence. And, based on what I’m seeing on the ground, there’s now a strong appetite for justice and retribution.
Does it really matter how much the minority party is pissed though? The American public knew how corrupt this guy was, shrugged, and voted him back into office.
If Democrats do win back the house and senate it will only be by the thinnest of margins. There seems to be little appetite to fix any of these structural problems outside of the "Democratic base."
> They can't pick and choose "oh no they are in jurisdiction of law A but not in law B". Jurisdiction is a fundamental concept, there's no middle ground.
I mean, they shouldn't do this but clearly they can rule however they want with any pretext they want, because they answer to nobody but themselves. Who's going to tell them they can't do something? Who is left to appeal to?
It's a deeply corrupt and undemocratic institution, with virtually unchecked power to rewrite legislation and even the Constitution at a whim.
I also don't understand why people in this price bracket are buying Mac laptops instead of desktop computers with GPUs? Just to flex that it's portable?
> Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.
I think it's easy for China to be more open right now (and Western governments to essentially not worry about it yet) because they're playing catchup.
If we reach some endpoint where American models stop improving for the general public and only party apparatchiks and sycophantic oligarchs can access them, the situation is different. Chinese models could exceed the publicly available SOTA, and surely they would close off their own models in the same way.
> I felt like it was about 10X better at "pretty" but straightforward 1 shot'ish type tasks. Not so different for complex and specific tasks in real code-bases.
What metric are you using for "better" here? If I've got a straightforward task GPT 5.5 is going to 1shot it anyway.
Still not quite exactly following Carmack's suggestion here... is he saying on that last point that the problems with designers/artists were due to Sandy's mistakes (i.e. not a genuine apologetic "sorry" but a "sorry you're wrong" type response)?
The rest of the context leading up to "Sorry, Sandy" has me a little confused, can anybody who knows more explain this bit?
> One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
> We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
> Sorry, Sandy.
Is he saying that it was a mistake (but not his mistake... Romero's perhaps?) to demand that game designers were also artists? And that this resulted in a loss of talent ("Sorry, Sandy") versus just encouraging more collaboration between artists and designers?
I think there's a reasonable case to make that 9/11 broke American politics in a fundamental way, by fully unlocking and granting a permission structure for politicians to reach for nativism and xenophobia to justify basically everything.
It's clear that Bin Laden did not "win" in any immediate sense, but America might have still lost, so there's a claim to a Pyrrhic victory.
The truly erratic and unstable nature of the US regime in this moment unlocks strange possibilities that would otherwise have been unthinkable - for example, the current regime seeming to throw Israel to the wolves in order to cover its own military blunders.
> Can they not manage to open a dollar-backed account somewhere?
If you want to do financial crimes and fraud, you can't (or at least, shouldn't) really do this.
Unspoken by the parent poster is that in practice these people are usually using crypto to break the law in some way, which is why it's valuable to them.
> Exactly. Cryptocurrency is useful as as a backup system against failing/weak institutions. Just that. Like insurance, it was not there to make anyone's lives better but simply to become a safeguard to avoid complete collapse.
Meh, it's arbitrage against slow moving financial regulations.
There are times when financial regulations are "bad" in a way that this trait is desireable - i.e. your failing institutions use case - but in many cases these regulations are, actually, there for a reason.
And now in practice crypto transactions for "normal" people are performed by bank-like institutions who log every transaction anyway, so this characteristic is really only valuable to the people deeply involved in the crypto world who are using it mainly to do "normal" crimes.
Yeah for me the coding inflection point was relatively recently (GPT 5.3 perhaps). There's just a threshold they have to hit to be consistent enough to avoid having to redo work and only the later models started delivering it.
This certainly seems feasible for open weight models eventually, but I'm still extremely skeptical of the claims about reaching this level with any open weight model that can be run locally (nevermind the hardware costs to do so practically).
Makes web. Mostly Rails. Not too much.