Spending time in parts of Latin America or western Europe or east Asia and then coming back to the US, you can see a lot of ways in which we've built loneliness into the fabric of US culture.
It goes beyond car culture. It's probably illegal to build a cafe within walking distance of your neighborhood or into the first floor of your apartment complex.
Americans get an idea of how bad we have it when we go on vacation, but we don't see it as something that can be built at home.
The number of comments in here slandering the developer’s morality for picking locks is actually pretty surprising for a site literally called Hacker News. Every day there’s a story on the front page of some grey/white-hat showing off an exploit they found to infiltrate a site we all use. It’s an odd double standard.
$36/mo for 2/4/50 VPS without public IP... Ok, I get the idea that the service is for non-regular use, but I think even $0.005 per hour ($3.6/mo) of suspended state is too expensive. The same config in Hetzner is just $4.09/mo for 24/7 working VPS with public IPv4 address
The problem is that so many things have been monopolized or oligopolized by equally-mediocre actors so that quality ultimately no longer matters because it's not like people have any options.
You mention you've done work for public transit - well, if public transit documentation suddenly starts being terrible, will it lead to an immediate, noticeable drop in revenue? Doubt it. Firing the technical writer however has an immediate and quantifiable effect on the budget.
Apply the same for software (have you seen how bad tech is lately?) or basically any kind of vertical with a nontrivial barrier to entry where someone can't just say "this sucks and I'm gonna build a better one in a weekend".
Sprinter vans, utility vans, or even minivans are far, far more useful for trades than modern pickups. Heck, my minivan was the goat for home renovations—it’d easily fit a dozen full 4x8 sheets of drywall/osb/ply/mdf/etc and I could still close the rear gate. I always got chuckles from guys awkwardly wrangling/securing sheets onto a pickup’s bed at the supply yard when I’d easily slide the sheets off the cart directly into the van by myself.
A heavy duty pickup makes sense when you have regular towing, or large bulky transport, needs. While on this topic, I’ll take a moment to lament the demise of the light duty pickup that provided a bit of extra utility while still fitting in a normal parking space.
It’s a complete sea change. I feel Canada only set tariffs on cars out of some deference to the US auto industry. I don’t want to use slippery slope thinking, but this to me smells like rolling out a Canadian auto market that is not dependent on the US.
For the average family, being able to spend significantly less on a car is a big deal.
> It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later.
> The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001.
He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
This article repeatedly cites revenue growth numbers as an indicator of Nvidia and Apple’s relative health, which is a very particular way of looking at things. By way of another one, Apple had $416Bn in revenue, which was a 6% increase from the prior year, or about $25Bn, or about all of Nvidia’s revenue in 2023. Apple’s had slow growth in the last 4 years following a big bump during the early pandemic; their 5 year revenue growth, though, is still $140Bn, or about $10Bn more than Nvidia’s 2025 revenues. Nvidia has indeed grown like a monster in the last couple years - 35Bn increase from 23-24 and 70Bn increase from 24-25. Those numbers would be 8% and 16% increases for Apple respectively, which I’m sure would make the company a deeply uninteresting slow-growth story compared to new upstarts.
I get why the numbers are presented the way they are, but it always gets weird when talking about companies of Apple’s size - percent increases that underwhelm Wall Street correspond to raw numbers that most companies would sacrifice their CEO to a volcano to attain, and sales flops in Apple’s portfolio mean they only sold enough product to supply double-digit percentages of the US population.
Understanding (not necessarily reading) always was the real work. AI makes people less productive because it's speeding up the thing that wasn't hard (generating code), while generating additional burden on the thing that was hard (understanding the code).
173.245.58.0 is owned by cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/). You're probably tracking the IP address of cloudflare's reverse proxy that hits your application instead of true source IP (which cloudflare will copy into X-Forwarded-For header).
Likely you pulled this IP from your application's logs? If you're trying to track bot traffic, use Cloudflare's built-in analytics tool.
Also a single source IP can be hosted in geographically distinct locations - that's called anycasting, which cloudflare does use, however I don't think that's the issue here.
Since I was a small child, my grandfather used to beat me savagely and shake me and pin me to the ground, screaming that the devil was inside of me and that I would never be capable of loving or being loved. This was literally beaten into me. He'd beat me with the buckle end of the belt, like a whip, hitting my face, arms, whatever he could. He'd keep beating me until I couldn't cry anymore, telling me that men are not supposed to cry, and that it was his responsibility to teach me not to cry. I flashback at least once a day to it.
But, he was wrong. I love a lot. So much that sometimes it's unbearable. I cry all the time. Sometimes out of pure love for someone. And there are people who I think love me. Of course the doubt is permanently sewn in. But my heart goes out to you, seriously. I love you just for existing and being yourself, and I hope you're okay. We're not alone. Email's in my bio if you ever want to talk.
The Palantro CEO, Alex Karp, is on the record that he approves of what the president is doing in regards to immigration enforcement and the striking of boats in international waters.
I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture in the same way that Intel has historically with its various architectures - their current generation's power and cooling requirements are requiring the construction of entirely new datacenters with different architectures, which is going to blow out the economics on inference (GPU + datacenter + power plant + nuclear fusion research division + lobbying for datacenter land + water rights + ...).
The story with Intel around these times was usually that AMD or Cyrix or ARM or Apple or someone else would come around with a new architecture that was a clear generation jump past Intel's, and most importantly seemed to break the thermal and power ceilings of the Intel generation (at which point Intel typically fired their chip design group, hired everyone from AMD or whoever, and came out with Core or whatever). Nvidia effectively has no competition, or hasn't had any - nobody's actually broken the CUDA moat, so neither Intel nor AMD nor anyone else is really competing for the datacenter space, so they haven't faced any actual competitive pressure against things like power draws in the multi-kilowatt range for the Blackwells.
The reason this matters is that LLMs are incredibly nifty often useful tools that are not AGI and also seem to be hitting a scaling wall, and the only way to make the economics of, eg, a Blackwell-powered datacenter make sense is to assume that the entire economy is going to be running on it, as opposed to some useful tools and some improved interfaces. Otherwise, the investment numbers just don't make sense - the gap between what we see on the ground of how LLMs are used and the real but limited value add they can provide and the actual full cost of providing that service with a brand new single-purpose "AI datacenter" is just too great.
So this is a press release, but any time I see something that looks like an actual new hardware architecture for inference, and especially one that doesn't require building a new building or solving nuclear fusion, I'll take it as a good sign. I like LLMs, I've gotten a lot of value out of them, but nothing about the industry's finances add up right now.
> because I can't believe Adafruit of all organizations is in the wrong here.
I've been hearing about this drama through a group chat for a long time. To be honest, neither side looks good in this one. Both companies have behaved disappointingly at different times for different reasons. I'm not doing this is an arbitrary "both sides" dismissal. There have been actions from both companies that would have been unacceptable in isolation.
The OSHW world revolves a lot around conferences, social media, and IRC/Matrix/Discord servers. Not coincidentally, this feels a lot like old IRC and forum drama of years past.
I recently read, and recommend a book titled "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben.
There's a passage where a calculation is made of the amount of minerals that have to be mined in order to build renewable energy to cover all current energy needs.
This quantity is huge. However it is equivalent in mass to the amount of fossil fuels that are extracted every year.
The major difference is that the equipment for renewable energy will last decades whereas the fossil fuels are burned and need to be dug up constantly, for ever.
> aims to remove: Most AI features, Copilot, Shopping features, ...
I grew up on DOS, and my first browser was IE3. My first tech book as a kid was for HTML[1], and I was in absolute awe at what you could make with all the tags, especially interactive form controls.
I remember Firefox being revolutionary for simply having tabs. Every time a new Visual Basic (starting with DOS) release came out, I was excited at the new standardized UI controls we had available.
I remember when Tweetie for iPhone OS came out and invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now.
Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
[1] Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser.
I think stuff like this, is trying to recreate a world that doesn't exist anymore. With whom, are you gonna go play in the woods with, that haven't already been bulldozed into housing and strip malls? Do you need to watch YouTube only on a parent's TV that's logged in, even for homework help? Some kids start working at 14 or 15: they can be trusted to work somewhere outside of home, but not online? What about Steam games? What about any games? What about hobby & fan forums, that have nothing to do with "grooming" or grabbing eyeballs? What's next, an Internet license?
It would be good to understand what Cloudflare gets out of the deal. The article is very much just "Astro, but someone else pays the bills!" which is of course lovely for Astro.
Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns.
You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. Then you infiltrate their content consumption habits and you bombard them with propaganda. And then these people are asked to decide on the future of the nation. This of course only compounds on the natural divisions that are already present within the electorate.
I'm not immune from this, and neither are you.
I don't know what the solutions should be and how CS graduates in particular can help.
It just seems to me that we haven't developed enough on a social level to deal with these challenges.
The funniest part is beyond the typo, the complete lack of physical intuition from the analysts who circulated this. 500,000 tons is roughly the weight of 1.5 Empire State buildings. If your rack busbars weigh more than the structural steel of the facility housing them, you have a geotechnical engineering crisis on your hands. It is wild that we reached a point where financial modeling is so decoupled from physical reality that nobody paused to ask if the floor would collapse.
I was just about to make precisely the same comment. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt about renewables here is ridiculous, and I expected better. I suppose everyone watched too much Landman.
China is rocketing ahead in every domain possible, from resource and financial independence, to infrastructure in terms of high-speed rail, bridges, roads, advanced fission reactors and bleeding-edge fusion research. Heavy industry like mining and processing, chemicals, ship-building.
Let's not even get into semiconductors. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after.
Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.
China has also just launched a megawatt scale wind generator a the helium-lifted balloon, the S2000 , they have active thorium rector the TMSR-LF1 and GW/h Vandium flow battery. The scale , speed and breadth of what they are doing is incredible and I think missed my people
Both companies are pretty small and presumably exist because their owners are passionate about hobby electronics. Honestly, I'd rather have companies like that ran by (flawed) humans than by PR robots.
If they want to air their dirty laundry in public, I'm happy to grab popcorn and watch. I'm honestly shocked by the number of folks on this thread who don't know the specifics, and most probably never even bought anything from Sparkfun or Adafruit, but still want to condemn one of the companies in the strongest possible terms...
I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.
So report the facts but sentences like "What Wei probably didn’t tell Cook is that Apple may no longer be his largest client" make it personal, they make you take sides, feel sorry for somebody, feel schadenfreude... (as you can observe in the comments)
It goes beyond car culture. It's probably illegal to build a cafe within walking distance of your neighborhood or into the first floor of your apartment complex.
Americans get an idea of how bad we have it when we go on vacation, but we don't see it as something that can be built at home.