dcchambers

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

You will own nothing, and you will be happy.

The lack of "real, comment sense human support" from giant tech corporations is terrifying - and something that only regulation can fix. These tech companies have increasingly taken over our lives - getting locked out of a 20-year-old Google or Apple account could legitimately ruin your life - or at the very least - make it incredibly difficult for 6-12 months as you work to recover every account linked to it and migrate to something else.

One problem is that even if you can reach a real human - they have to follow a script and have strict limits on the problem solving they can do. If something falls outside of the normal support algorithm they are stuck.

What do you do if you're an average Joe without a popular tech blog and connections to the Apple community? How many people has this happened to that have just given up entirely?

Scary, scary world.

Seriously concerned for the future of consumer electronics right now.

Next up: Nvidia exits the consumer hardware space and shifts fully to datacenter chips.

Long ago I remember reading society in China was like this. There's SO MANY people that you HAVE TO cheat the system to even maintain pace with your peers, much less get ahead. And cheating is so rampant that it's expected you will do it.

Really sad that mentality seems to be normalizing world-wide.

I am fully expecting a 20%+ price bump on new mac hardware next year.

When companies stop hiring juniors it completely kills the employee leveling process. It all but stops the creation of skilled senior employees.

You say you can just hire from outside the company - but what do you do when there is no one left to hire because the talent pool is completely drained?

Abandoning the junior employee will slowly drain that talent pool until there are no seniors available to hire, the "just hire from outside the company" plan doesn't work any more.

The companies that are abandoning junior roles are making a life-or-death bet that AI will eventually replace ALL work.

Because those senior people will NOT be around forever. And they have killed their talent development and knowledge transfer pipelines.

Either direction you take it, this feels like a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Surely you didn't do anything ILLEGAL, right DOGE employees?

Reading Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' broke me. I have two kids, still far too young for smartphones, but his book and all of the surrounding research has made me DRASTICALLY alter the way I use my own smartphone and will shape the way I treat phones with them.

If you have kids, take the "wait until 8th" pledge: https://www.waituntil8th.org/

No smart phones until after 8th grade.

I was born in 92 and thus didn't start reading them until after the original run of Calvin and Hobbes, but I discovered these comics via book collections at the library and became OBSESSED.

I am so incredibly happy that Watterson never "sold out" and gave away film/animation rights to his characters. They are perfect the way they are.

I feel like the stars are all aligned for Linux-on-the-Desktop right now.

   - Windows 11 forced-AI integrations and telemetry. Many "old" devices are incompatible
   - Windows 10 is officially end-of-life
   - MacOS 26 looks and feels like a toy operating system. Performance issues and bugs continue to
     pile up and undo the incredible work that Apple hardware teams have done the past decade.
   - Omarchy Linux has some substantial hype in the developer world.
   - Valve continuing to make Linux a first-class OS for gaming and is pushing forward ease-of-use.
   - New hardware from Valve looks to be a great entryway into PC Gaming/Linux for outsiders.
   - Framework is becoming more mainstream and has great options at all price points.

The collaboration tools built into Zed have basically existed since the product launched. It is one of the primary drivers behind the product - they wanted to build the best editor for remote code collaboration.

This is so much more interesting than the Apple Vision Pro/Quest for one main reason: An open builder-friendly platform.

So let me get this straight...OpenAI wants to eliminate basically all jobs via AGI/ASI. They claim it's going to cost trillions of dollars to do that. And they want us (the American people) to pay for it via federal guarantees (bailouts).

They don't want to do this as a nonprofit, they want to be a for-profit company that will reap all of the rewards yet they don't want to take on any of the risk.

This whole industry makes me sick to my stomach. How do the people doing this sleep at night?

Here's the fundamental problem I have with this: This is treating the symptom and not addressing the problem.

The problem is that America's healthcare system is ridiculously broken. The symptom of that problem is that prices are astronomically high.

I am happy AI is useful for things like this, but I want to focus on CURING the problem and not just making the symptoms more tolerable.

The value here is not in a product used to make art.

The value is for documenting history and being able to *prove* something happened (eg for lawsuits, criminal cases, security, etc).

The US is a banana republic now. Absolute joke of an administration.

I really want to know why Apple refuses to put a cellular chip in the macbooks.

They are so scared about cannibalizing mac/ipad sales - they really really want people to own both.

> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.

The only way "number goes up" capitalism continues to work is with planned obsolescence and things that need to be replaced regularly. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. Nvidia (and all of their investors) love the fact that the stuff they make now will be outdated or broken in a few years.

If things last forever and never need to be replaced the only way to continue to increase profits is to have more people buying them. And global population appears to be peaking, at least in western countries, so that's not going to happen.

Is it sustainable? Probably not. But everyone seems to have their heads buried in the sand at the obvious dangers of what we're running into.

Especially crazy considering the 737 is not a particularly large commercial aircraft.

40kg/minute is around 12 gallons (47 liters) of fuel per minute. Meanwhile a 777 burns around 42 gallons (160 liters) per minute. A 747 burns 63 gallons (240 liters) per minute - more than a gallon per second!

> People being super negative about this is a bit surprising to me.

We're reaching a point in these advances where EVERYONE is starting to worry about their job security.

And the society we live in - at least in the US - has no safety net ready for a mass replacement of workers with technology like this.

Oh AI took your software job? Good news you can still go into construction - oh wait, that's not an option either. How about housecleaning? Oh no, that's been automated too. Well sorry, we have no safety net for you. Good luck in the streets.

Well the site is blocked on my company laptop (reason given: newly registered domain), so it will be a rocky start for them. I love a good vanity domain but using a traditional .org domain probably would have been better, too.

My 2c is that 95% of ruby developers aren't aware of the drama going on around Rubygems.org right now. They have probably seen emails from Ruby Central but largely ignore them and move on with life. Most people have no idea there are issues and they will just continue using Rubygems.org. Getting a project like this to critical mass is incredibly challenging.

I definitely don't "get" Silicon Valley finances that much - but how does any investor look at this and think they're ever going to see that money back?

Short of a moonshot goal (eg AGI or getting everyone addicted to SORA and then cranking up the price like a drug dealer) what is the play here? How can OpenAI ever start turning a profit?

All of that hardware they purchase is rapidly depreciating. Training cost are going up exponentially. Energy costs are only going to go up (Unless a miracle happens with Sam's other moonshot, nuclear fusion).

Incredible article. Thanks for sharing.

On the other hand, if a service goes down for a few minutes and gets a post on HN I guess it means they've really made it!

Why do all of these model providers have such issues naming/versioning them? Why even use a version number (2.5) if you aren't going to change it when you update the model?

This industry desperately needs a Steve Jobs to bring some sanity to the marketing.

I've been super duper happy with AntennaPod since I discovered it a few years ago! It's perfectly useable right out of the gate but has nice customizations if you want/need it. And the Android Auto support is great (essential since I do most podcast listening in the car).

Caveat: I *only* listen to Podcasts on my phone so I don't have to think about syncing library/status between devices.

I feel like we're lucky Nvidia even sells consumer GPUs any more. At this point it's just a distraction to them and takes away resources they could be devoting to higher value hardware.

And the data center-class hardware doesn't do well in a home environment. It's not good for gaming. It runs hot and uses a ton of energy. Not to mention, silicon that is running hot 24/7 for years probably isn't the best thing to own second hand.

It's not just dev culture - it's *EVERYTHING* culture.

In modern society, if you're not trying to monetize all of your hobbies and every little thing you do you are seen as doing something wrong. Everything has to be a hustle these days. You're not allowed to do things simply because you enjoy it.

Hasn't Ruby Central always 'owned' RubyGems.org, Bundler, and all related infra?

Removing existing maintainers from the project isn't good - and hopefully it's a temporary oversight as Ruby Central gets things set up in the new org. Either bad communication from Ruby Central - or they really did made a bad mistake here (maybe even with the best intentions, given recent NPM issues).

Edit: It seems like there's a lot more to the story here. Many volunteer RubyGems/Bundler maintainers have left because they disagree with decisions that Ruby Central (the nonprofit organization) has made and it seems like all of this is fallout related to that.