TheMagicHorsey

This reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about how they needed to have a bunch of infrastructure and employees devoted to telegraph based notifications in 1970s India, because some bureaucrats refused to move everything over to telephone, and didn't want to be inconvenienced by having to use new technology.

America is "Three Corporations in A Trench Coat"?

Everything America is doing right now is because America is precisely NOT taking corporate decisions. America is doing things to the international order that are directly fucking up American corporations. Only a committed social democrat can look at the populist right-wing chaos right now, and claim that's "Corporate" action. If anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America, and that's part of the reason why Trump's racist populism is so popular ... he's exploiting a backlash. Turns out America has far more nativists than you ever imagined.

But yeah, go ahead and call it "Corporations in a trenchcoat" because then you don't have to think about how Corporations have actually played the biggest role in promoting diversity in America. While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.

Have you been on the Internet as an adult ever? Have you been on X? What about Facebook? America is "one mouthpiece"? This is one of the most puzzling takes I've ever seen.

Americans literally post 10K articles a day about how bad the administration is and all the bad that will result from going to Venezuela ... and multiply that for literally every other thing the govt does. There isn't one thing that happens that doesn't have hundreds of posts online and in papers explaining why America is so evil for doing it.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Have you sampled the media landscape in Tehran or Beijing? I have sampled both ... FROM those locations. Its night and day.

Even the media landscape in your typical Western Alliance country (Singapore, Japan, South Korea, UK ... etc.) cannot come close to what you see in America.

In a strange coincidence (or maybe its actually inevitable given the timing) I also saw a podcast with Matklad of Tigerbeetle and had a similar idea--I've been working on a massively multiplayer game as a hobby project, also built in zig, also fully allocating all memory at startup, and also had an experience almost identical to OP's. In my case both my client and server are in Zig. Zig is pretty great at doing performant game code (rendering and physics on the client) ... it's less great on the server compared to Go (early days and fewer batteries included, fewer things just work out of the box ... but you can find pretty much everything you need for a game server with a little hunting and pecking and a debugging few build issues).

Zig also works "okay" with vibe coding. Golang works much better (maybe a function of the models I use (primarily through Cursor) or maybe its that there's less Zig code out in the wild for models to scrape and learn from, or maybe idiomatic Zig just isn't a thing yet the way it is with Go. Not quite sure.

I feel like a lot of people go after Jai because of what Jon Blow says about XYZ political issue. Jai seems perfectly reasonable for at least the narrow task of making games in an indie studio. The macro capabilities might be terrifying in a large enterprise, but if you're handrolling all your own code and don't have to worry about a software supply chain, who cares?

From a Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1bbvvxb/comme...

You will often hear historians talk about working hours. They explain how Trade Unions and Socialist campaigners brought about a much reduced work day. That happened mostly over the 19th century and the 20th century. This is true, but I think the presentations of it tend to be myopic.

In the early 19th century across the whole world people were very poor by modern standards. Due to the Industrial Revolution that changed and in Europe wages increased significantly. In the UK wages in 1900 were more than twice what they had been in 1800. That's in real terms, adjusted for inflation.

Some workers campaigned for shorter working hours because they could afford it. Of course, if working hours are lower then total wages are too. Everyone knew this. By the end of the 19th century wages had risen enough that many workers were prepared to sacrifice lower total wages for more leisure time. The labour organizations would never have successfully talked their members into these campaigns unless those members were in this situation. As growth continued in the 20th century and spread to other countries there were more and more people willing to sacrifice some wage for more free time.

Suppose that there had been a law in, say, 1770 which forced people to work less than 35 hours per day. In that case many people would probably have flouted the law because their incomes were so low that they considered more work necessary to buy things. Similarly, if people find the standard working week too long then they can search out employers who offer part-time work which covers a shorter part of the week.

It's worth mentioning that in a sense, employers never control the amount of time worked. Employment contracts may specify an amount of working time, but people can leave employment. It has always been possible to work for a few years, then quit your job and enjoy some leisure time. Then take up another job. Economists call changes to the number of hours worked over the short-run changes to the intensive margin. The changes to the number of hours worked over the long-run are changes to the extensive margin - changes that come about from the decision to work or not. Of course, this doesn't mean that changes to the intensive margin are irrelevant. When the labour campaigners succeeded in bringing down weekly working hours they really did change things for many workers. Quitting jobs and restarting is inconvenient and risky in times of high unemployment. Of course, some people don't have the willpower to save up for long periods of time either. However, it's also true that changes to the length of the full-time working week probably have much less effect on total working hours than people think. For example, people will tell you that the standard working week in the US is 40 hours. In a sense this is true for full-time employees. Despite that though, working hours have continued to fall from the 1950s to the present day. This is partially because of part-time work, but also because of people taking time off by quitting.

This article radically downplays the role that unions had in killing the UK shipbuilding industry.

While it's true that shipbuilders were reluctant to introduce new technologies and techniques due to capital requirements, the much bigger reason they did not was the impediment put up by unions. Yes, capital expenditure is painful in a cyclical industry, but in previous eras of shipbuilding, companies did invest in modernization ... in those previous eras, unions were much less active or absent. Other countries also faced the same capital crunches and cyclical business environment, and still invested. It was not that the Japanese, Koreans, and Italians were somehow more "risk-taking" than the English ... no, rather their unions had not yet taken hold post-war to smother innovation.

Unions always trade away the advancements of tomorrow for the security of the workers today. When one supports a union one should always keep in mind that you are putting down for your comfort today and mortgaging your children's tomorrow. This might not be an issue if your children don't follow your trade. But if they do, you've just screwed them over. The rest of the world doesn't stand still while your union blocks radical progress.

I wouldn't say so confidently that Airbus is better than Boeing. Its just better than Boeing at THIS moment. They've been trading places over the decades. A company selling commercial airliners is really only as good as the order book for its latest aircraft. And a single stumble in developing a model can sink your orderbook for an entire decade or more.

Ultimately both Boeing and Airbus are moribund bureaucracies that survive only with the dual intravenous injections of state subsidies and duopoly.

Making commercial aircraft is a capital intensive process, but its ripe for disruption. With China on the rise we may get a third competitor on the scene with completely different cost structure.

There's also disruption coming from down below. New tools (including AI and more sophisticated manufacturing automation) are making it possible to enter the market with shorter timelines. If regulators can get off their asses, we might actually see the duopoly disrupted by new national and subnational champions. More will be better than two.

This seems to be a tiny vessel ... just 5000 tons of cargo. Most container ships carry more like 200,000 tons of cargo. Can sails scale to carry that much cargo? If not, I fear the economics will not work out for sails alone. Perhaps sails plus something else makes more sense?

This is like that situation where a kid goes up to the dad who abandoned him and says, "You have given me nothing! I had to do everything myself."

And the dad says back, "By giving you nothing I have given you everything. Look at the tough guy you have become!"

Did you come first in time before the Deepki company? If so you probably have the ability to win. First in time wins, even if you were a small player. It would be their responsibility not to choose a project with a similar name to what you have if you came first.

The licensing on this project is wonky. They have an MIT license, but then they say you can't use the software for commercial purposes without contacting them. That's in contradiction to an MIT license. An MIT license is basically "use it for anything". If you don't want that, then use some kind of "copyleft" license for non-commercial users, and specify separate commercial terms for users who want to keep closed source with their modifications.

Never attribute malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.

Microsoft isn't intentionally obfuscating the docx. Docx is a shit-show because hundreds upon hundreds of Microsoft business initiatives, executive pet projects, and ancient compatibility rules have all collided to make a giant pile of dung.

If LibreOffice is worried about what docx does to their productivity ... you should see the fucking engineers lamenting INSIDE Microsoft about what it does to their friggin productivity.

This horseshit isn't anyone's plan. This horseshit is an emergent phenomenon like a fucking termite hill in your back yard ... where no single termite is responsible or knoweldgeable, but all of them together made a pile that breaks your lawnmower.

Are you generally able to quickly understand what is going on in somebody else's codebase written in Rust? I find it quite difficult to understand other people's Rust code. Is this just a familiarity thing? I have not written anything particularly huge or complex in Rust, but I have written a few CLI utilities. With an equivalent level of Go exposure, I find it much easier to understand code written in Go, compared to code written in Rust.

I'm quite proficient in C/C++ (started coding in C/C++ in 1997) but I still have a much harder time understanding a new C++ project compared to a C project.

Amazing!

How was your experience using Rust on this project? I'm considering a project in an adjacent space and I'm trying to decide between Rust, C, and Zig. Rust seems a bit burdensome with its complexity compared to C and Zig. Reminds me of C++ in its complexity (although not as bad). I find it difficult to walk through and understand a complicated Rust repository. I don't have that problem with C and Zig for the most part.

But I'm wondering if I just need to invest more time in Rust. How was your learning curve with the language?

The author seems to forget that no matter how he "frames" LLMs and AGI more generally, its really not up to him, or even any one nation (or block like the EU) to make this decision about what future they "want". If you can't build an international consensus to, for example, restrict AI, then whatever you say is pointless and someone else will build it and eventually overpower you.

The only way that doesn't happen is if AI doesn't produce huge productivity boosts or huge R&D boosts. Does anyone still think that's going to be the case ... that AI is going to be a no-op in the economy?

Seems like OP either thinks their wishes will be the world's command (somehow) or that AI won't matter to him if he (and his community) choose not to develop it for themselves.

He seems hopelessly naive to me.

I know these are three sided marketplaces and difficult to coordinate demand and supply ... but why isn't there more locally hosted town and city level options that undercut the national/international conglomerates? Food delivery is ultimately a local thing.

I wouldn't use Zig for something production critical, but other people like TigerBeetle have decided its good enough for them, and they seem to be doing fine commercially, so I just refrain from saying its not production ready.

But one things for sure ... there's just not a lot of sample Zig code out there. Granted its simpler than Rust, but your average AI tool doesn't get how to write idiomatic Zig. Whereas most AI tools seem to get Rust code okay. Maybe idiomatic Zig just isn't a thing yet. Or maybe idiomatic Zig is just like idiomatic C ... in the eye of the beholder.

After using Rust on a couple of projects, I understand the appeal of simpler languages like C3, Zig, and Odin. As one commenter very aptly put on the Zig subreddit ... "I used Zig for (internal tool) because I wanted to quickly write my tool and debug it, and not spend all my time debugging my knowledge of Rust."

What's going to happen is that we are going to see browser forks from places we never imagined ... like China.

They were trained to handle the relationships with the companies writing software for x86 and the companies building computers with Intel chips.

The sales engineers had a special rotaion program so they could work in different parts of the business and get experience in different areas, and they had special social events, dinners, etc. Their starting salaries were like 25% - 50% higher than regular engineers' salaries. The rest of us peasant engineers just wrote code.

I used to work at Intel (around 1999) in their Jones Farm campus in Oregon. My employee stock grants from that time are still underwater.

This was the heyday at Intel. I left within a year because I noticed that the talent that was respected, compensated and influential at Intel was the sales engineers. I can't pretend to have known that would lead to the decline of the company, but I knew that as an engineer uninterested in sales, that it wasn't the place for me.

I tested out Gemini 2.5 and it failed miserably at calling into tools that we had defined for it. Also, it got into an infinite loop a number of times where it would just spit out the exact same line of text continuously until we hard killed the process. I really don't know how others are getting these amazing results. We had no problems using Claude or OpenAI models in the same scenario. Even Deepseek R1 works just fine.

I think it uses Llama.cpp, which doesn't support MLX.

Never heard of these guys. Do they do good work?

I know of several examples of worker-owned coups where the product is excellent: Cheeseboard pizza in Berkeley, Moog synthesizers, etc.

I've always wondered whether this model could extend to cutting edge technology, where the contributions of a few extremely talented individuals could be the decisive factor.

That's not to say Bocoup is limited by this question, because it could be their work does not require any cutting edge research, but instead is deploying existing stable technologies in an artisan/workman/guildsman like professional manner--which I think is the sweet spot for worker-owned/worker-directed activities.

You seriously think America's innovation is Saas for a dollar? As opposed to almost everything that makes the modern world move forward, like cheap spaceflight, modern EVs, quantum computing, semiconductors ... the list of American-driven innovations is endless.

What kind of rock are you typing under?

Right, because so much innovation comes from places with super high taxation in Europe. Give me a break.

It looked like exactly what you said. Plastic.

I'm curious if anyone has tried one of the newer e-ink smart watches you see on Alibaba, which use ESP-32 or other low-power SOCs. I saw one recently at a meet-up and the guy who was wearing claimed it was completely open-source and he could run whatever he wanted to on it. It did not have heartrate monitoring or anything other than clock on it, as far as I could tell.