1,465 karma · joined August 10, 2015
For me, it was the requirement to be nicotine free for a few months around a surgery.
I went the patch route and it was a somewhat difficult 3 months, but it has been a blessing not have to clear-out my through every morning or anxiously anticipating stuff like a long flight or train ride.
I also got the "oh shit, I relapsed" dreams for about a year after I quit.
What you lose is not monetary, it's the ability to iterate quickly. It can be mitigated with next day manufacturing+delivery from local manufacturers... at a cost (IIRC, ~$80).
But frankly, it would be nicer to pluck a blank board in a laser, press burn, and have a good enough board in 10 minutes.
Fiber lasers are kind of capable of doing that, but they are still a bit expensive (~$2000), the result is imperfect (scorched epoxy board), and you can do at most 2 layers... if you are willing to manually tap rivet vias to connect the layers.
But still, I would love to have a way to build PCBs at home and I'm keeping an eye on people (mostly the Opulo/LumenPnp guy) experimenting milling and more recently engraving with fiber & UV lasers.
Plus their machinery is a bit more realistic for a hobbyist.
Knowledge has been assimilated and significant R&D efforts is being put in. If I look at Bambulalab, xTool or Makera, I see genuine designs, significant improvements in quality and price drops way beyond what cheaper labor can explain.
And it's also visible in other spaces: think DJI drones or CATL batteries in cars.
We use to see Japan in the same light by the way:
But nearly all of them want to make stuff... not make the tool that makes stuff. It's the whole "my hobby is 3d printing" vs "my hobby is 3d printers".
Assembling a Voron is already a one or two week-ends project, building and configuring a custom CNC router can take months and there are class of tools which are simply inaccessible (making multi-layer PCBs, building anything rigid enough for steel machining).
Homebrew machines will always have its aficionados, people still are building Vorons for example, even when it doesn't really make sense financially or in terms of performance. But it's a niche that only grew early-one artificially when it's the only path (ex: reprap & early 3dp days), most people don't actually enjoy this part.
IMHO, having cheap ($500 or less) numerically controlled pre-made tools like 3d printers, laser cutters/engravers and lately maybe desktop CNCs, has been a blessing in the maker space, lowering the barrier to entry and enabling an explosion in the number of people building stuff.
There is a world of difference between a 2019 Creality Ender 3 and a 2023 Bambulab A1 for not that much more money.
Auto-leveling, input shapping, PEI plates, high flow hotends, better build quality... all that have improved reliability significantly while increasing speed by a lot.
It even kind of killed the whole "tips and tricks to have good 3D prints" Youtube niche.
The Ender 3 had a huge role in democratizing 3D printing, but a 20% failure rate was kind of expected. With modern printers, the expectation is bellow 5% failure rate, plus the failures are much less painful since they are ~4 times faster.
It's not quite "press print and it works" but it's pretty damn close.
Data querying for creating marketing campaign audiences or generating some reporting reporting.
Little development for landing pages, forms, or custom integrations.
Multiple channels (SMS, push, email) & message templating.
And many marketing stuff like AB testing/fatigue, etc
Also, mono-tenant architectures is no golden bullet either. Such architecture (often coming from a formerly on-premise product that was SaaS-ified) can easily become hell to operate as it multiplies the integration points (DB parameters, URLs, allowlists, etc).
It's also quite wasteful in terms of resource utilization and hosting costs.
The AI spam is part of the issue, but not only. Maybe it's rose tinted glasses, but it feel like HN posts and comments quality have dropped significantly compared to ~5 to 10 years ago.
It used to have a lot more really technical subjects, with comments from experts on the topic.
Now days it seems to be a lot more of "hot takes with little nuance from people who have read at most half a Wikipedia page on the topic". And the content itself, being more generalist and less specialized, is no longer unique to HN.
Quality posts and comments do still occur, but they fill more and more needle in an haystack.
Cars already are extremely wasteful assets in terms of resource, space and money if you live in a decently served urban area. It already irrational to have one 90% of the times.
An indirect and somewhat hidden cost like insurance is unlikely to move the needle anywhere near significantly.
You want to keep-up appearances and leave some plausible deniability, even if it's generally BS.
The US is still one of the leading CO2 emitters, both per capita and in absolute terms. And for cumulative past emissions, it's not even close.
The expectation is not a mere 18% decrease but something closer to halving emissions just to be on a per capita level comparable to the EU or China.
It doesn't mean China doesn't need to make efforts. China's emissions are yet to be stabilized.
But the US need to make their share, and at least honor and (re-)ratify past climate agreements, if anything to dampen the economic arms race between China and the US.
It just a basic filter based on keywords, but it helps.
Also, having tried my luck recently on an old scanner (Canon 9950f), a word of cautious:
These devices, specially older ones, may not have built-in safety limits in their firmware. In my case, it ended-up only being a few belts rubbing a bit, but it could have been more serious.
Don't let the LLM test stuff unattended, and be ready to pull the plug.
On Twitter, it's mostly the networking effect, you want to be where peoples are, and unless a large chunk move at once, you are stuck there.
On Github, it's the technical cost of migrating, the git part is trivial, but tickets, PR history and CI/Integration are another can of worms.
Projects which moved away, moved away for good, at most only leaving a synchronized mirror.
In my opinion, the moment tech perception flipped from "it's kind of cool" to "I don't trust it" was E. Snowden in 2013.
For more than one decade now, we have progressively switched to treating tech more like a cigarette addiction we should keep in check (even if we don't succeed) rather than the qualify of life improvement, communication & entertainment tool it could be.
And tech companies don't care anymore. We went from Google's "don't be evil" to CEO's clamoring they will maybe make us jobless, and potentially kill us all, with Uber & Amazon's run of the mill human exploitation in the middle for good measure.
And these CEOs have very little to do with creating and improving said companies' products. The repeated outlandish claims kind of definitely broke this illusion.
It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example).
When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car or home, less Uber Eat, etc) to ensure a few unlucky people have food and roof".
Most western economies, specially one as wasteful as the US, have the luxury to make this choice. Not sharing it is a political & ideological decision, not a materially constrained one.
Training a model requires two or three orders of magnitude more investment than the typical OSS/Creative Common contributor can reasonably afford.
It reminds me a bit of Open Source hardware (CPU, GPU).
The rural & underdeveloped area and the niche applications (ex: ships and planes) will bring-in some cash.
And in addition, the US Army will pretty much guaranty it to be in the green: it wants this capability plus some control over it.
If it was civilian only, I doubt the economics would make much sense, specially given the amount of satellites and their short lifespan combined with the overall shrinking market (rural flight to cities + fiber deployment on land).
I published nearly everything I code on my free time, that's ~100 git repositories. Out of these, ~15 are documented and made generic enough to be used by other people, and out of these ~5 actually have some users, 2 being packaged in mainstream Linux distributions and one even has a CVE.
In total, I have received one AI slop PR. one.
Your mileage may vary, and you may be blessed/cursed with the new redis or xz. But in all likelihood, things will stay more than manageable in terms of critical infrastructure piece.
I have the feeling these projects were not deeply intertwined with Google products like this cli is.
This project was not exactly some random devtool or library polished a bit to be published and used outside of Google.
It was a de-facto major feature of a significant Google product.
Honestly, at Oracle scale, doing the "let's destroy and rebuild the company mid-flight" seems like a losing proposition compared to newly formed companies or more natural extension of existing companies.
And meanwhile, customer reliant on Oracle products are left alone, with all the negative output it entails.
From what I could found, billionaires die on average at ~83 years old. ( https://strygin.substack.com/p/how-billionaires-die )
It's not far off what a decent health care system is able to provide in most wealthy countries. It's even somewhat lower actually.
It's difficult to assess the risk factors, but in the end, I have the feeling their additional medical staff and their ability to "cut the queue" (S. Jobs-style) just barely offsets the additional common risk factors (stress, long hours, segregated life), specially if we compare to the upper-middle class.
In the end, there is no magic $100M pill giving you 10 more years. And in truth, access to food, drinking water, a non-toxic environment and really basic healthcare & medicine (vaccines, antibiotics) probably already brings you at a fairly high life expectancy.
Given the number of moving parts, I would be terrified to have to look under the hood of what Talos deployed for me.
Given how many quick & dirty sed patching or exec commands I've seen in the few nix package/modules I've read, I would not exactly bet my life on it being completely idempotent & reproducible.
It's not like the Linux world where you have distinct projects like the Kernel, GNU, OpenSSL, and then it's the distributions job to assemble everything.
In the BSD projects, the scope is developing and distributing an entire base system, i.e., the kernel but also the libc, the shell/all posix utilities, and a few third parties like OpenSSH (which are usually "softforked").
It's quite visible in the sources, it's a lot more than just a kernel: https://github.com/NetBSD/src
Additional packages you could get from pkg_in/pkgsrc (NetBSD), pkg-ng/ports (FreeBSD) or pkg_add (OpenBSD) are clearly distinct from the base system, installed in a dedicated subtree (/usr/src in NetBSD, /usr/local/ OpenBSD/FreeBSD), and provided in a best effort manner.
The reproducible build target was almost certainly only for the base system, which is a few percent of what Debian tries to achieve, and on which NetBSD has a tighter control over (developer + distributor instead of downstream assembler+distributor).
A reproducible base system is useful, but given how quickly you typically need to install packages from pkgsrc, it's not quite enough.
Anthropic bought it in a somewhat dumb attempt to solve their "performance" issues (not realizing their horrible code was the issue in the first place).
It probably helped them, simply because they brought in some actually competent developers.
But doing so, Bun went from being a public project to more of an internal tool for Anthropic, spoiled for now with AI money and losing quite a bit of focus.
Let's hope that when the bubble pops, some of the Bun effort could at least be salvaged. I don't see Anthropic maintaining it long term, they are simply not in the business of selling support for a runtime nor have the (Google) scale justifying maintaining one on the side.