mtrovo

Watching things from outside, it feels like the US is a pay-to-win democracy. It's hard to say where exactly the line between lobbying vs. corruption is drawn.

Remember the good old days of complaining about Bitcoin taking the energy output of a whole town.

I really like CF approach to cloud, it's a nice middle ground between old school heroku and full fledged AWS, plus their free tiers are generous enough that I barely pay anything on the stuff I got deployed there.

I know the feeling but my impression is that interacting with people that are strictly internet friends is a proxy to the real thing, the same way watching porn is a proxy for the real thing. When you spend X hours talking to people on the Internet you're spending at least less X hours talking to people IRL and building the sense of community that we now feel thinning away.

I know people that are internet famous and are terminally online all the time. I'm pretty sure it must feel like they're accomplishing something but for somebody IRL not familiar with the game they're playing their life looks very weird socially.

My current mindset for this is that social media should only work augmenting my real world social life, not take what's left of it away from me.

Loved your description of the class system. There's a general theme of old money wealthy people not caring about vanity purchases because they don't know how much stuff costs nor if that is a too much money or not.

It's interesting to see how luxury brands have different segments of clothes that range from no logos at all to a huge alligator the size of your chest, depending on whether you need to announce to the world that you made it or if you just want to have access to good quality clothes.

With the 250M price tag I really keep thinking how we in the west just accepted such a massive cost for infrastructure development, especially considering the cost of living has gone down and the Victorians typically built this things by hand.

Euros? What kind of AI slop are you talking about?

You go to Gatwick airport you take a train, which is very good (although pricey), same for most of the main airports around London.

You should definitely avoid crossing London by Uber, as there are plenty of excellent public transport options.

This is what makes the innovator's dilemma repeat itself so many times in so many industries. It's not that the incumbent companies don't see the new technology; it's that they're so entrenched in what they know how to do that pivoting to the new technology is basically a Hail Mary no matter how you do it. Do it too early and your shareholders are going to think you're crazy. Do it too late, and you're risking entering a new market as the chaser with a bad hand of company, employees, and board that don't have any idea of what they're doing.

Pollan touches on this in The Omnivore's Dilemma. The low price of a burger is an illusion because the real costs to the environment and public health are externalized, making fast food artificially cheap due to indirect subsidies on corn byproducts and other animal feed. Healthy food competes on a totally different cost base.

There's also the split between eating with agency and just consuming which requires a top down solution. Unless the government stops subsidizing meat and corn subproducts linked to health issues the majority of people will always gravitate towards the cheapest calories available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omnivore%27s_Dilemma

Daycare quality is a spectrum, the same way as babysitting at home. My smaller one just started daycare, and we settled for one that actually does stuff with the kids (forest school style). But I can tell you, we've visited lots of places that are basically just making sure the kids are not dead by the time you pick them up. Same for babysitting with grandparents; there's the hyper-social grandpa style that's always doing something, and the couchpotato with +10k hours on Cocomelon.

Agree, especially given the track record of China outcompeting in other markets where they got blocked.

Assuming this is irrational and must come back to reality at some point, I'm not convinced this is connected to the common man economy as other bubbles in the past were. This round of investment is mostly being funded by exuberant cash flow accumulated over the years that was otherwise used as stock buybacks by a small number of stocks and some private credit deals that are not that accessible to the general public. This is looking more like a crypto crash kind of effect rather than a 2008 one.

It's interesting that you mentioned on a recent post that saturation on the pelican benchmark isn't a problem because it's easy to test for generalization. But now looking at your updated benchmark results, I'm not sure I agree. Have the main labs been climbing the Pelican on a bike hill in secret this whole time?

The problem in general is consistency. Bread is very forgiving on flavour profiles so what you're saying works fine within a good threshold. For breweries it's usually not worth it as there are lots of nuances on the mutations of the harvested yeast and their effects into the flavour profile of the final product. There are some exceptions like natural fermented beers or anything related to kveik yeast, but in general people don't reuse yeast past 1-2 brews.

I know you have some bias for the education solution, but I can't see why this is not a market problem. You have broken devices; you send them to get fixed; you have to travel one day to get them fixed; you have someone take them for a fee.

You would be surprised at the amount of product repairs that are deemed not worth solving in a developed country that you can sort out in a couple of hours in a developing country.

As someone who barely interacts with the people that care about tenders, my impression is that people that usually win are the ones better at playing the game rather than better at the job. The job later is potentially repackaged in chunks and offered to other players that in turn will do the same downstream. Something like Romania gets EU fund money to build roads in Romania with a German engineering project, German contractors, German supplied materials, but Romanian workers. Or in a more particular case part of recycling trash in Germany is basically being dumped illegally in Poland for a while and the same companies keep operating and winning contracts because why not.

You create a political class full of lawyers, and you get a country where lawyers thrive, who would have thought?

Really depends on the country and the access to clean processes between milking a cow and your glass tho.

Kind of related I was really shocked when I saw people eating raw pork mince in Germany when I lived there. My first reaction is that I would never do that based on my upbringing but if natural selection is a thing it's working fine for them I guess.

I think the problem is the overuse compared to the times before ChatGPT. Same for furthermore, thus, delve and other words. Heck em dashes are so obscure that I doubt 1% of the population knows how to type it on their own keyboard.

Those heavily exposed to media before ChatGPT feel there's a shift on the way sentences and narratives are presented. We usually don't use that many semicolons because we structure our sentences not to use them, same for dashes or other weird constructs used by ChatGPT right now. It's hard to explain with words but there are a lot of tell signs when you start looking for them. And not even talking about the explicit ones like bullet points with "bold title:", one that really pulls the curtain open for me is the phrases that end with "one, two, and three of something". When you see it once it's hard to unsee it used everywhere, even on sites that are supposed to be user content only like here or reddit.

Really depends on your definition of destabilise the host country, not that this is what's happening right now in the Dutch case.

> It is a common sense here in China that a lot of manufactural products have better quality from imported sources

Can you name a few items that you feel that way?

My impression as a consumer is that everything comes from China nowadays, even the reliable brands. The main difference I think is the time spend around product design and fine tuning the manufacturer's process. Think about it, there's a reason why they have to make it very visible that the product is "designed with love in colorado" when all the manufacturing jobs are in China.

While I share the sentiment expressed, I highly doubt the general public would be as supportive if the roles were reversed, like if a 3rd world country attempted to nationalize an investment from a Western nation, particularly given the history of numerous nationalization attempts in Latin America with very public Western involvement in coups.

You're talking about it as if it was a bug, it was not. I'm pretty sure a generation of MBAs got raised and retired really rich shifting manufacturing jobs to China. The narrative about them not being open is just a way to cope with their rise now and get rid of any blame.

> We gave China everything - we allowed their people to study at our universities, we allowed their tourists, we gave them virtually full access to our economic market, we gave them access to the Internet, we gave them seriously discounted shipping rates and customs exemptions.

Lol, when you have to convince people that working in services instead of manufacturing is the future, that's what you get. Mindset is also a big issue, I know enough people who played the Erasmus game and graduated in double the normal time just by coasting that I think it's just normal at this point. And the problem with this spiral is that it just compounds, Europe is shifting to a continent of pensionists, highly educated people that live with their parents til their 40s and nepobabies playing airbnb landlords.

What exactly are they using? Wechat messages?

Kind of off-topic, but it's such a pity that we arrived at email as the local minimum for the best communication protocol for transactional messages. Having to set up an email service just to be able to enable authentication flows on a new website is such a hindrance that I keep wondering if it would be different if sending push notifications to a cell phone was made an open protocol..

Same here. Cloudflare products are a really good balance for small projects that could eventually need to scale up. Durable objects is such a cool concept in itself that I don't know why it didn't catchup the same way in other providers.

In the end it's all about friction, communicating IRL is much easier and less constrained. You can make online work but you have to adjust your expectations of how much time something takes and optimise for a split between focus time and comms, which you don't have to worry too much in IRL, that works but you have to adjust your expectations of how many people are working together and how long it takes to cooperate and adjust course. So I guess you better find a team that makes this mindset work?

The main pet peeve I have is with the hybrid approach of having a single person remote where you have a constant battle of negotiating interactions between folks who hate interruptions and those who hate scheduling a meeting for a 10-minute chat.

Also taking a junior stance, a lot of us learned by just being around senior devs, when you just started you don't even know what you don't know, and learning by osmosis is huge.

I don't know, it's really hard to blame them. In a way, the next couple of years are going to be a battle to balance easy access to info with compensation for content creators.

The web as we knew it before ChatGPT was built around the idea that humans have to scavenge for information, and while they're doing that, you can show them ads. In that world, content didn't need to be too protected because you were making up for it in eyeballs anyway.

With AI, that model is breaking down. We're seeing a shift towards bot traffic rather than human traffic, and information can be accessed far more effectively and, most importantly, without ad impressions. So, it makes total sense for them to be more protective about who has access to their content and to make sure people are actually paying for it, be it with ad views or some other form of agreement.

> DHH would be platformed—and ironically at the very conference he was asked not to keynote in 2022 seemingly as a result of Basecamp’s politically-charged implosion which led to a third of the entire company resigning in protest.

That's a funny way to say that he asked for people to refrain from politics when they're at work and a third of the company said no and left, I really struggle to see this in a bad light. I don't have beefs on this whole discussion and only sporadically follow DHH blog posts, I think the main conflict people are having with his views is that work is not just work anymore, people are expected to share a vision, to have the same cliques, to live the same live, work became for some people what family, church or the local community used to be for most before that. See for example https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-company-isnt-a-family-... or his book "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work".

I was talking to a friend who worked in the US and the UK about the culture differences, and he mentioned how the US leaned more towards a family culture where the UK was more of a pub culture. On a family you feel required to cope with whatever bs is thrown at you because you're supposed to stick together. On a pub the more off putting you are the more chances people are not gonna talk to you.

I recently listened to the interview between Ben Thompson and Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince and couldn't shake the feeling of a company that tries hard to repeatedly hit gold with the business model of being the gatekeeper of the plumbing of the web, with the promise of "the world out there is very dangerous".

https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-cloudflare-fo...

The section on how they solved arrays is fascinating and terrifying at the same time https://blog.cloudflare.com/capnweb-javascript-rpc-library/#....

> .map() is special. It does not send JavaScript code to the server, but it does send something like "code", restricted to a domain-specific, non-Turing-complete language. The "code" is a list of instructions that the server should carry out for each member of the array.

> But the application code just specified a JavaScript method. How on Earth could we convert this into the narrow DSL? The answer is record-replay: On the client side, we execute the callback once, passing in a special placeholder value. The parameter behaves like an RPC promise. However, the callback is required to be synchronous, so it cannot actually await this promise. The only thing it can do is use promise pipelining to make pipelined calls. These calls are intercepted by the implementation and recorded as instructions, which can then be sent to the server, where they can be replayed as needed.