jameslk

The arguments for more humans always sound like a Ponzi scheme to me: we need more people so we can support existing people. There’s plenty of downsides of having more people on the planet. And tech seems to be making it so there will be less and less a need for more people anyway, for better or worse

What are McDonald’s profits adjusted for inflation?

It was an internal codename that leaked out and then despite trying to use a more corporate-friendly name that was terribly boring (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), they got trolled into continuing to use nano banana because nobody would stop calling it that. Or that’s how the lore has been told so far

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google shortens the name to NBP in the future, hoping everyone collectively forgets what NB stood for. And then proceeds to enshittify the name to something like Google NBP 18.5 Hangouts Image Editor

This article seems to be just a summarization of https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-w... which has a lot more information and specific stats

> The percentage of younger women wanting to move to another country first rose decisively in 2016, the final year of President Barack Obama's second term. That year, Gallup surveyed the U.S. in June and July, after both parties’ presumptive nominees were set for the November election, which Donald Trump went on to win. Desire to migrate continued to climb afterward, hitting 44% in President Joe Biden’s last year in office and remaining near that level in 2025. This suggests a broader shift in opinion among younger women, rather than a solely partisan one.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-w...

> Behind Canada, top choices for where the American females would relocate are New Zealand, Italy and Japan.

Thank you for the context! I genuinely didn’t know anything about this person until recently

Why is this on the front page of HN other than the mention of OpenAI? The article barely even mentions how this is related to OpenAI. What’s notable about this event other than this person is disliked by many?

Cloudflare's own status page is not responding. I guess it's down too?

> I swear this one looks like a tiny seahorse when you squint

> everyone says it looks like a seahorse anyway

> Sorry for the chaos — I was having too much fun watching you wait for the “real” one that doesn’t exist (yet)!

That's some wild post-rationalization

Lack of supply exists because housing is an investment. If you suddenly flooded the market with housing, prices would drop (see Austin) and this puts everyone from your typical homeowner to your friendly neighborhood PE firm in a difficult financial position. Ultimately this drives votes towards maintaining the status quo

Housing as an investment vehicle is ultimately the problem. Those who buy into it expect prices to keep going up, like any good investment. If rising prices falter, there’s big rippling consequences, especially for those whose net worth is mostly their house value, bought with debt.

On the other side is those who need shelter, who don’t have unlimited income to afford the price of something that rises faster than they earn.

It doesn’t seem like a sustainable system.

> Our ancestors of the distant past can be invoked in conversations about nearly anything: They supposedly worked less, relaxed more, slept better, had better sex, and enjoyed better diets, among other things.

That’s just an artifact of modern life. Pool enough money between family and friends and you can buy yourself a cheap plot of land in the middle of nowhere and wild out on your own agrarian commune

Cash is just another asset class, and since becoming a pure fiat it’s never been a good one: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

Given the fiscal dominance we’re in now that pretty much guarantees higher rates of inflation in the future, I think there’s much better places to place your money if you want to diversify. At least cash equivalents would be better

No need to guess, the article literally states where the money went:

> That’s why Thiel rotated into Microsoft and Apple, tech giants with more diversified revenue streams, cloud scale, devices, and software.

> That’s why Thiel rotated into Microsoft and Apple, tech giants with more diversified revenue streams, cloud scale, devices, and software.

These are supposed to be a hedge against a presumed AI bubble? Seems half hearted at best

Could models mitigate this by answering questions incorrectly with random information instead of outright refusing to answer them?

I want it, but I have ideas in mind that aren’t just a chat window bolted to a browser.

Once upon a time there was a popular Firefox extension called Firebug. Everyone loved it because it made web dev so much easier. Devs helped drive the adoption of Firefox because they preferred the easier dev experience over IE6, which meant websites were built for Firefox over IE.

We’re facing a new paradigm for dev with AI. Where’s the rebirth of Firebug built for this new experience to help drive adoption again? Make web dev much easier on Firefox and more devs will flock to it.

The surplus and debt servicing near the end of the 90s didn’t have much effect to the debt: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN

Social security and Medicare liabilities mostly wiped out any gains

What surplus there was came from both tax increases and reductions in spending. Along with a strong economy and low employment for tax revenue in the dotcom heyday

Any realistic change to pay down the debt would require substantial structural changes at this point. There’s no political incentive to do anything about that until runaway inflation and the US credit ratings start to really mess things up, and by that point it’s pretty much too late

Instead of giant pyramids, it’s giant museums these days

Salami slicing stimulus package

Maybe there’s a bias towards avoiding full rewrites? An “anti-refucktoring” bias

I’d be curious if the approach would be improved by having the model generate a full pelican from scratch each time and having it judge which variation is an improvement. Or if something should be altered in each loop, perhaps it should be the prompt instead

Also relevant:

> “This should not be seen, in our view, as a cautious or negative stance on Nvidia, but rather in the context of SoftBank needing at least $30.5bn of capital for investments in the Oct-Dec quarter, including $22.5bn for OpenAI and $6.5bn for Ampere

> That amounts to “more in a single quarter than it has invested in aggregate over the two prior years combined,” Bulk said.

> … Following the recapitalization and SoftBank’s $22.5 billion investment into the ChatGPT maker, the Japanese firm’s 4% ownership of OpenAI will increase to 11%.

It sounds like Nvidia was played out for them and they’re aggressively trying to get in on OpenAI so they can exit sometime after retail investors get in

Is it assumed that humans perform 100% against this captcha? Because being one of those humans it’s been closer to 50% for me

I’m guessing Google is evaluating more than whether the answer was correct enough (ie does my browser and behavior look like a bot?), so that may be a factor

> Also, when they ask you to identify traffic lights, do you select the post? And when it’s motor/bycicles, do you select the guy riding it?

This type of captcha is too infuriating so I always skip it until I get the ones where I’m just selecting an entire image, not parts of an image

Google’s captchas are too ambiguous and might as well be answered philosophically with an essay-length textbox

You’re right, there isn’t even any marquee or blinking text

It’s been disappointing to you for at least a decade and yet you keep using it? Blink twice if the mods have been keeping you imprisoned in the server closet and forcing you to speak to them in Arc

> But if they don't get it from the government, they'll get it somewhere else

It's not an equal comparison. The biggest governments in the world don't need anymore consolidated power.

> I think we just need to reduce the amount of discretion involved in government action of all kinds.

This we both agree on.

Yes, outcomes like these are the best way to avoid dependency on a central authority. I’m more for moving away from the ability of such authorities to exercise such power, rather than hoping they don’t abuse it. They certainly will eventually