Hell, the whole idea of open-source on which the entire modern tech world is based upon, which the Internet and Hacker News itself thrived upon, is completely antithetical to capitalism.
The cambrian explosion of tech exists because someone decided to give intellectual property away for free.
I agree with you. My hope and dream is that society is able to move on not by regressing to Luddism, but by restoring technology's position to service the people, as a tool for making life better, rather than to mould, measure and control humanity. Remember the sad meme that the brightest minds of our generations are thinking about how to make people click on ads. It is tragic.
> I will never as long as I live understand the argument that AI development is more fun
AI is more fun for programmers that should've gone into management instead, and prefer having to explain things in painstaking detail in text, rather than use code. In other words, AI is for people that don't like programming that much.
Why would you even automate the most fun part of this job? As a freelance consultant, I'd rather have a machine to automate the whole boring business side so I could just sit in front of my computer and write stuff with my own hands.
I don't get this. AI coders keep saying they review all the code they push, and your suggestion is to use even harder languages the average vibe coder is unable to understand, all in name of "performance"? Faster code maybe, and exponentially increasing the tech debt and amount of bugs that slips through.
It wasn't even long ago that we thought developer experience and capacity for abstraction (which is easier to achieve in higher level languages) was paramount.
> AI coders keep saying they review all the code they push
Those tides have shifted over the past 6 weeks. I'm increasingly seeing serious, experienced engineers who are using AI to write code and are not reviewing every line of code that they push, because they've developed a level of trust in the output of Opus 4.5 that line-by-line reviews no longer feel necessary.
(I'm hesitant to admit it but I'm starting to join their ranks.)
I've always thought the world needs a project to provide guerrilla internet connectivity to a large area using cheap, common hardware like a Raspberry Pi for situations like these which are increasingly common.
Basically a 12V battery-powered Wifi+3G(+Wimax maybe) antenna for clients and an outbound Ethernet port to plug to some illegal internet socket. Make it open-source, able to be built with a little ingenuity and low cost.
Surely the real cost of such a device is not the hardware or the software but the organizational effort required to install it and make it useful without anyone involved getting caught.
The target audience is people fighting for their lives. When you've lost connectivity and everything around you is on fire, you don't have much time to faff about with designing such a system. This is why I believe it should be a premade and tested open-source kit for preppers and people in high-risk areas.
perhaps it needs to be tech that is useful in daily life, with the ability to switch channels automatically when the main isp is unavailable. An example is the HNT helium network - an alternative data transport mechanism. Not saying that is what should be used - that's a crypto thing - but the principle is the same.
thinking about it in terms of "getting caught" might be the less ideal way to approach it - think of it in terms of building a more reliable system, which is a goal everyone can get behind.
Anything persistent at all is downright unusable - they'll be tracked and destroyed, people near them arrested etc.
We're basically talking attritable devices being needed and protocols which make them useful - i.e. something you can release that stands a chance of getting information out before its destroyed and where the users are nowhere near it when it's launched.
EDIT: I mean realistically you basically would want to just toss a handful of cheap USB memory sticks out across a city.
So if we're being realistic it's just more USB-C OTG devices. Ideally what you want is it to become standard for USC-C memory sticks to have a USB-C port on them so they can be daisy chained and copied stick to stick if given a power source so they're easy to copy and spread.
> Anything persistent at all is downright unusable - they'll be tracked and destroyed, people near them arrested etc.
That's a really good point. Maybe the tech needs to be in reasonably widespread use prior to when it's needed, then it becomes harder to strangle in the moment. A product in everyone's home and office.
Wi-fi routers with long-range capabilities and automatic mesh fallback in case of isp outage?
I assume that these are blocked by sanction-following CDN firewalls? The first link paused to “check if I’m a bot” and I’m sure they check if I’m from Iran too
Surely governments will not see any issues with this project whatsoever.
Though in US I think you can try publishing the code and blueprints as a book and claim the First Amendment, following the PGP story. May or may not work.
Don't get me wrong, but somebody has to operate an exit node and somehow there needs to be a consensus on the protocol + routing.
If the network is only earth bound fixed wireless, the distance might be small enough that the state comes for the operator itself...
This raises the cost of running this network from just money to life threat.
Getting many open source satellites up in orbit might not be feasible.
Agreed that nothing is fully trustless on Earth. The point isn’t eliminating operators, it’s avoiding single points of coercion and failure. One exit can be shut down but many exits and type of networks (includong more alternative infra like the Guifi.net’s meshnetworks in Spain for example) across jurisdictions raise the cost from “call a CEO” to sustained political pressure or directly a CEO that has control over an entire network and its also a billionaire CEO with a messiah complex, far-right leanings and tendency to drug abuse.
Absolute decentralization is impossible. Reducing capture and increasing resilience is not. That’s a meaningful difference.
Said that, I’m happy with Starlink as an extra actor for a healthy mix of ISPs and networks that brings resilience.
That’s a false dichotomy. Saying Starlink isn’t sovereign doesn’t imply support for state-controlled networks. Criticizing corporate centralization ≠ endorsing government control.
The goal is systems where authority is fragmented enough that capture (by states or corporations) is structurally hard
A government may introduce a list of identifiers of devices allowed to operate in their territory. With relatively frequent verification to prevent the use of captured devices.
It’s great that starlink is there, but it can still be shut down on the whim of its owner as seen in the past. So hurray for starlink! (unless the opportunistic tides of politics change)
I know you hate it, but X and Starlink are the only channels giving us information on Iran right now. If X was censored (like many leftists are advocating), we wouldn't know anything about those riots.
People rising against a regime that the left sympathizes with, obviously.
Iranians describing how Isam destroyed their country within one decade (the UK establishment is very unconfortable with that truth, for some reaslon...).
Iranians calling on Trump and thanking Elon. That tends to make leftists mad.
Being mad is one thing, but demanding X censor that speech is another. I'm not really involved in this debate so I haven't seen anything like that. Can you provide some examples of any prominent people on the left calling for X to censor that speech?
Starmer, T.Breton (former EU commissioner, the one who got denied VISA to the US going forward), google them with "X ban" and you'll have all the results you want.
Similar with many other EU political figures.
I see news articles about Starmer wanting to ban X for allowing deepfakes and sexualized images of children, which seems reasonable to me. Presumably if X took steps other companies have to prevent those images, the ban would be off the table.
As for T. Breton, it seems they're wanting X to abide by the EU's Digital Services Act, which requires transparency in how a company tries to combat disinformation among other things (protection of children's exposure to dangerous content being one of them).
You know, not everyone on this site has an absolutist binary opinion on the Elon. Some people can give him credit for what he gets right, while simultaneously calling bullshit on his bullshit.
You need Musk to play ball. Starlink worked fine when Afghanistan turned off the internet. There’s a lot of rhetoric about the evil musk internet there - the government don’t care about things like vsat, it’s very specifically framed as anti America and anti Musk
Remember the people enforcing it (going to businesses and checking their connections) are thick as two short planks.
Iran I expect has a more effective enforcement than the taliban, but the principal is the same - starlink works fine in these countries and downlinks elsewhere (Europe in the case of Afghanistan). GEO providers like Inmarsat downlink in places like the Netherlands.
It’s all rather meaningless as only a tiny number of people have access to these systems, compared to access to the Internet via phones.
He took a very public approach to navigating that and while that would be on brand, it’s wild. He seem to have been directly communicating with Putin.
Disconnecting Ukraine at key points in battles would fit with the current administration’s flip flopping approach, but again he is at the front of it and on Twitter slagging off supposed American allies.
With Google doing everything in its power to end ad blocking, I’ve made a real attempt to switch to Firefox and Firefox-based browsers. I unpinned Chrome from my taskbar and only popped into it when I needed to. Over the span of a couple months, eventually the Chrome window never got closed… Eventually it was pinned to my taskbar again… And at some point it was my default browser again and all I was using.
I don’t like how Firefox handles tab groups, I don’t want to rely on extensions to fix that, I don’t like their dev tools, I don’t like how their private window shortcut is different from what every other browser uses with no way to change it, I personally think it’s ugly, I could go on.
I tried alternatives like Zen but I end up not liking their weird ideas of how a browser should be used, and trusting small FOSS project maintainers to ship a stable, secure browser has not been great in my experience.
Chrome is boring and reliable which is really what I want. Edge is a slightly worse version of it due to Microsoft incompetence/lack of taste but I’d still rather use that than Firefox.
It removes repetition and imitation. To avoid a frontpage list full of "why I rewrote ___ in rust" , ,"how I use rust for filing my taxes", "how I switched from braille to rust"
It's clear that human companionship has shaped wolves into dogs.
A weird, perhaps silly question I've had for a while is: how have wolves shaped humans? Has human society in any way been affected by the structure of wolf packs? Did hairless monkeys form stronger tribes because of it?
I don't believe for a second that this deep interspecies friendship has been one-sided and hasn't brought psychological if not physical changes as much as the changes it's brought to wolves.
This is where evolutionary theory can be viewed through
the lens of coevolution or group selection (a group defined as containing both a selection of humans, and also animals and plants in varying degrees of domestication, as a whole system). This is in contrast to kin selection, which only accounts for genetic relatedness.
I remember in one of Jiang Xueqin's videos, he made the interesting argument that "grain domesticated humans" at least as much, if not more, than "humans domesticated grain".
I think the "wheat domesticated humans" argument is about changes to our behavior, our culture and social structures, rather than genetic change. It isn't domestication in the evolutionary sense. It would be like keeping zebras on a farm with horses and doing your best to tame and train them. You might be able to change their behavior so that they behaved differently from wild zebras, but it wouldn't be domestication unless you bred them over generations to produce a population that was genetically different from wild zebras.
Grains aren't very good food until bread is invented (probably from sprouted grains, originally). Seeds are designed to keep their goodness inside, and are very good at that containment. Bread in turn requires cooking. (I wonder now if there was a brief period of surviving on raw sprouted grains... which are far inferior because they mold so quickly.)
Wisdom teeth are far more valuable to a precooking human, who has to chew constantly to break down plant cells. The extra chewing causes stress that induces the jaw to grow longers, allowing space for the wisdome teeth.
We're basically at the "awkward teenage" part of evolving past raw-food diets.
I know it’s said in jest, but if your kid is attached while you’re sleeping, i.e. breastfeeding and cosleeping, which a hunter gatherer society would most certainly do, babies don’t fuss unless they’re sick or something. My wife slept soundly through the night and said “it’s amazing she doesn’t feed at night!” (Referring to our daughter), and I said, shocked, “she eats at night, she makes a soft noise and you just roll over and pop a boob in her mouth without waking up!” This is entirely a modern problem of our own creation and convenience.
Only if cat-people and dog-people don't intermingle.
But given how hostile many cat-people are (see sibling comment), compared to dog-people which tend to also enjoy the company of cats, I can imagine a timeline where this misanthropist branch of humans splits off, goes to live in trees and hisses at anybody that comes nearby.
Hmm, I've known a good number of dog people who dislike cats. Never read any stats on the ratio of cat-lover+dog-hater to dog-lover+cat-hater groups, though.
I watched a documentary on dogs that was cheerful until the last 5% when they mentioned modern day dog owners. The film speculated that dogs might be a considered like a parasite that infiltrates human families and causes them to stop breeding humans and instead only have dogs and cats. So if that’s the case, the evolution ends for us :)
I've heard this before. I think better term than parasite is an addictive drug since we created these types of pet dogs and indulge on them. I feel strongly the trend of dog ownership overtaking people having children, while real, is more so a result of modern economic realities regarding cost of housing and raising a child.
Cost is definitely a factor, but I think the ease and convenience of a dog over the stress of children also plays a big role. Dogs are obedient and mature in less than 2 years.
I think some dog people already are a different species - hanging bags of dog shit on trees would never occur to me for example. I’d hate to see what their Christmas trees look like.
This seems normal to me. I've never done it or even seen it - but it seems everyone exercises a slightly personalized disregard for the very society they are a part of these days
In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. When confronted about leaving the bagged dog shit somewhere they always say they're going to pick it up on the way back, yet the next day it's still there.
Modern British dog owners are incredibly irresponsible surrounding how they look after their pets and how they handle the pets mess. Covid made it measurably worse.
> In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this.
That's wild. I've never once seen this in the US.
Obviously there are people who just don't clean up after their dogs in the first place, but to clean it up and then hang the bagged crap on a tree? Haha.
They do it a lot. My garden backs onto a public woodland and I can confirm it happens. Last summer when I tidied up out the back of my house, I found at least five years worth of buried dog turds in bags. Cleaning it up was not fun. I used a backpack blower to blow it all into line of "turd shame" away from the houses.
It looks a lot nicer out there now and I gave the trees a little prune (I'm a qualified arborist) so people know this is a "tidy area" and so far no more turds in bags.
In the US they don't hang it on trees, they just leave by the side of the trail or road or whatever. But it is very common to see bags of dogshit on the sidewalk or by the side of a trail in the US.
I've never seen it in a tree, but I do see some owners leaving their crap bags on hiking trails and often forgetting about them on the return trip. I'd rather they let the dog poop in the forest instead of encapsulating it in a plastic bag until a Good Samaritan picks it up.
Contrariwise, I was part of the troupe of people that daily picked up these bags along walking trails. One of the few benefits of living in the USA: covert prosocial behavior is extremely common.
It's so weird that cats are still so feline, basically miniature tigers/lions but that dogs went so much off the rails compared to majestic wolves. Sure, some dogs are wolves-like but many just lot the plot: chihuahuas, daschhunds (my mom always had those: friendly but... not wolves-like), pugs, sharpeis, etc.
So many are just... Not badass? A wolf is badass. Cats are totally badass: they're natural born killers, hunting billions of poor preys yearly.
My parents are divorced. Father always had huge dogs (St. Bernard, Leonberg, Newfoundland, etc.) while mother always had tiny dogs (daschunds). I loved these dogs but I really hate having to take care of dog poo. So I'm a cat person.
As a bonus my miniature tiger takes care of itself and goes shitting where nobody can see it.
Dogs get bred for specific personality traits and to develop physical traits. My border collie was a maniac that just wanted to work all day every day. That herding part of his personality was extremely prevalent. Even if I tossed a treat on the ground, it never would occur to him to use his nose, he'd frantically look all around. Even if it was right under his nose if he didn't see it then it's as if it didn't exist. Likewise, from 1000 yards away I could make subtle hand jesture and he knew to go get his ball that was 1000 yards in another direction and bring it to me; over half our communication was body language and it even had context. Like if we were out somewhere and he was off leash, also 1000 yards away, I could nod my head slightly and he knew it was time to go and he jumped in the truck. Same head nod elsewhere meant something else. It's hard to explain but that was the most connected I've ever been to another creature (even my wife in many ways if I'm being honest, he never misunderstood me :)).
Likewise, I now have a golden doodle. It's like having a giant 5 year old puppy. They've been bred to be docile, kid friendly, playful, cute, non-shedding, and the perfect family/instagram dog. But they're extremely dopey when compared to a border collie.
I'm not sure what cats get bred for. Fur length? Ability to shit in a box? I'm guessing they've not been bred too much on their personality, which is why they are mostly the same and still miniature tigers.
Putting aside the greater variety of physical traits that you describe, dogs generally are more adaptable than cats. They are estimated to have twice the number of neurons and are much more malleable whereas cats feel more hardwired into a set of cat behaviours.
I’ve assumed that this greater learning capacity and malleability is both the best part of a dog and a vulnerability that can lead them to become highly anxious and dependent animals.
I’ve had both cats and dogs, and loved them both, but my goodness they are so wildly completely different animals.
Full sized dogs can kill and eat a human. Full sized sand cat (or whatever they began as) can't eat a human. It's another domestication filter: "can't be able to easily eat a human".
Years ago I was walking along the beach on a pacific island (probably Rarotonga). I'd noticed dogs running about (individually, not in a pack) and remarked how docile they seemed. Mentioned this to a local I ran into to which he responded "any that wasn't docile went in the Umu".
Slightly tangential, but I think that dogs have allowed for some bad things to happen to us. Like, they are available physically, so if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person (your one and only partner), you can get a dog or five, or simply pet your friend’s dog or even a neighbor’s. Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet.
Are nuclear families a post-agricultural phenomenon? AFAIK, it's a much recent societal change driven by the industrial revolution (i.e. 300 years ago vs ~15,000 years of agriculture)
I don't really understand this comment. Are you saying dogs made way for nuclear families? Why would it be impossible? In India for example pet ownership is very low. Much lower than prevalence of nuclear families
> ... if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person ...
There are animals where the male and female only ever live together and are loyal (and not for the sake of the idea of loyalty, they're animals). It's not something speficic to some human societies.
> Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet.
That's silly. US Midwest farmers meet every detail up until "would have been impossible"; dogs are common but not ubiquitous, and farming communities are highly social.
(Cats, ironically, are ubiquitous on farms, because of their utility at hunting mice and rats.)
Ironically, you're describing the classic "cat lady" trope, only with the wrong pet type.
Seems plausible to me that our long relationship with wolves/dogs has modified humanity to be more empathic to other species of animals in general. Probably impossible to prove though.
More than a fad, MCP is a reinvention of Smalltalk. Of course an automated agent doesn't want to communicate through other autonomous systems via text or binary protocols. There should be a unified way of executing high-level commands (i.e. message passing) to other systems. A global RPC mechanism, if you will.
MCP is simply a crappy implementation of this idea because our programming environments do not expose global remote function call mechanisms with well-defined protocols. The "everything is a file" idea is quite limiting these days.
Speaking of Smalltalk, I always imagined that you could integrate LLMs/actual artificial intelligence by giving them access to the internal data and telling them what you want to do, rather than calling a method. Instead of:
a := Point x: 0 y: 0
b := Point x: 5 y: 7
distance := a distanceTo: b
You would do:
a := Point x: 0 y: 0
b := Point x: 5 y: 7
distance := a llm: "You are a point object. Please calculate the distance to the argument." arg: b
Wouldn't that be neat? But alas, we're still writing software as if it's the 1970s.
Reminds me of Brexit: let’s leave Europe; we’re still going to be affected by its laws because they’re our closest and biggest neighbours, but now we don’t even have a seat at the table to further our interests.
The dream of decentralised moderation that came with Web 2.0.
In reality, the Venn diagram of people wishing to moderate online spaces for virtual points and petty bureaucrats that get off on making arbitrary rules is pretty much a circle.
The cambrian explosion of tech exists because someone decided to give intellectual property away for free.
I agree with you. My hope and dream is that society is able to move on not by regressing to Luddism, but by restoring technology's position to service the people, as a tool for making life better, rather than to mould, measure and control humanity. Remember the sad meme that the brightest minds of our generations are thinking about how to make people click on ads. It is tragic.
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