oceanplexian

These vehicle emissions laws are almost always fake compliance theater and were dreamed up by idiots. They are a huge drag on the economy and achieve absolutely nothing.

For example, the reason we don’t have super efficient turbodiesel subcompacts that are perfectly legal in the EU is thanks to the so called “Clean” air act. Since the law is based on vehicle weight I can go buy a 8,000 pound truck and commute to work alone in it and pollute all I want. But if I want a super clean 80MPG diesel subcompact that’s 1/4 the gross weight supposedly bad for the environment.

But it gets worse in all sorts of ways, the law grandfathers coal plants from all these emissions standards. One coal plant can emit more pollution than millions of trucks. Guess which polluter the government is aggressively pursuing and violating the rights of? You guessed it, car enthusiasts who downloaded an app. Give me a break.

> They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify.

Why would an American company outsource manufacturing to China if the labor cost is the same in both places? The entire reason the Chinese manufacturing base exists is to exploit cheap labor.

What would be the point of shipping products across the ocean?

It’s actually harder (requires more advanced technology) to refine heavy and sour crude. The US refining industry process this type of oil mainly because it’s more profitable not because of some limitation.

American oil on the other hand (As in extracted out of the ground) is actually too high quality for domestic consumption therefore gets shipped overseas and sold at a premium. The weird economics of this are made possible by globalization. While it’s not fungible on a dime it’s easy to solve and the US really does hold all the cards when it comes to the petroleum industry.

Texas has plenty of refineries and the children there aren’t dying or choking on the air.

It’s not enough to “make a profit”.

Southwest has 30B in assets and makes $441M in profit. Like most airlines it’s a miracle of modern economics and should practically be considered a charity or a nonprofit. You would make more in treasuries or corporate bonds.

Kroger and the others operate razor thin margins. They offer programs for low income consumers, support local and national charities, do second chance hiring and specifically create unique roles for people with disabilities. They aren’t required to do ANY of those things in most places that they operate.

They have to operate in California though, so I don't blame them.

This is a state that made me a criminal for putting the wrong air filter on my car (Clearly my bad for putting on the 49 State legal version that makes the tailpipe emissions cleaner).

Price controls will screw over the most vulnerable consumers. Small businesses will offer lower prices to price sensitive or low-income consumers or repeat customers. Because despite what you will read about on Reddit, the owners are not cartoon characters, live in the community and care about their neighbors.

The author is saying that it's worth noting that their privacy is more important because they personally identify as a group with the same mainstream popularity as Coca Cola and Football.

Nothing is being rubbed in anyone's face. The writer is just arrogant and self-centered.

Because 71% is practically a supermajority. That's the opposite of persecution.

"I'm super special and worried about my privacy because I have a lifestyle that's as completely mainstream as Coca Cola and Football" isn't really a talking point. It just makes you an arrogant person.

> That includes gay people like me, who could hardly have admitted under our names to how we lived our lives for most of America’s history, as well as many other groups with minoritarian lifestyles

While the points made are completely valid I want to point out that the statement of "Hey, by the way, first let me talk about my sexuality" lowers the quality of dialog a significant degree.

31 million people in America are gay. 71% of Americans support Gay Rights (more than any other political issue polled). It also quietly insinuates that only people with a certain minority lifestyle would care about privacy or that their privacy is somehow more important than others. It's not. Privacy is a universal right that's important to everyone.

> Benchmarks are toys, real world use is vastly different, and that's where they seriously lag.

I'm not disagreeing per-se but if you think the benchmarks are flawed and "my real world usage" is more reflective of model capabilities, why not write some benchmarks of your own?

You stand to make a lot of money and gain a lot of clout in the industry if you've figured out a better way to measure model capability, maybe the frontier labs would hire you.

> And the fusion with a one-party state government that doesn’t tolerate huge swathes of thoughtspace being freely discussed

That would be a great argument if the American models weren’t so heavily censored.

The Chinese model might dodge a question if I ask it about 1-2 specific Chinese cultural issues but then it also doesn’t moralize me at every turn because I asked it to use a piece of security software.

All these number are peanuts to a mid sized company. A place I worked at used to spend a couple million just for a support contract on a Netapp.

10 years from now that hardware will be on eBay for any geek with a couple thousand dollars and enough power to run it.

There are a lot of companies who would gladly drop half a million on a GPU to have private inference that Anthropic or OpenAI can’t use to steal their data.

And that GPU wouldn’t run one instance, the models are highly parallelizable. It would likely support 10-15 users at once, if a company oversubscribed 10:1 that GPU supports ~100 seats. Amortized over a couple years the costs are competitive.

You can just use Claude Code with a few env vars, most of these providers offer an Anthropic compatible API

Here comes another post reminding me of the SF crowd with Peter Pan syndrome and delusions of grandeur. Maybe if they weren’t such insufferable assholes, the rest of the country wouldn’t dig on California so much.

Software is fun, but lots of people in other cities change the world without writing another AI harness. For example a group of aerospace engineers from across the country (Including Utah, Alabama, etc.) sent humans around the Moon and back. Something tells me they aren’t bragging about injecting research chemicals.

Technically incorrect, Supreme Court precedent has held that aliens are entitled to lesser First Amendment protections while seeking to enter the United States. You could be on US Soil (i.e. entering customs at an airport) and those protections don't apply.

The person in question said he was in Geneva when he received the email from Google. Therefore is a non-US citizen residing outside the country entitled to 1A protections for something they said or did while in the US? I'm not expressing an opinion but I wouldn't take that statement as legal advice.

Well duh, the purpose of Privacy and Security was never Privacy or security. The purpose is to lock you into Apple's ecosystem and prevent you from installing your own software.

Putting a UPS in a rack is a prosumer/corporate IT thing, it’s not done in real datacenters.

They typically have their own UPS in another room and multiple power lanes. And it’s going to be much more reliable than a laptop battery.

Well, it exists, but it exists if you’re willing to buy server hardware on eBay, hustle to get old parts working together, negotiate a good deal on a cabinet, get space from ARIN and announce it and so on. There are probably 10-50x cost efficiencies vs. renting 5 year old CPU families on AWS at huge markup.

A laptop isn’t the way to do that though. And your typical VC-fueled startup isn’t going to know how to do it either. It takes a very narrow slice of competence to be able to do that correctly.

They’ve also started auto-translating and cross posting Japanese X content, which has been the coolest cross-cultural thing I’ve experienced on the Internet since I started using IRC.

HN is still great but it’s in decline, I still hear about AI developments on r/LocalLlama and X sometimes weeks before they make it here if even at all.

And all the commentary here is negative, skeptical and mean. It’s like Slashdot when Apple started ascending and everyone was complaining that iPods will never catch on.

We already have this in Utah with Utopia with 53% coverage across the state (A state 5 times the size of Switzerland) so kind of weird the post is acting like Europe is special or something.

And there are lots of ISPs to choose from, several with 10Gbps symmetrical. Because it's dark fiber that you can literally purchase (I was quoted about $3k to purchase the fiber to the CO), there's nothing stopping you from putting 25Gbps optics on both ends if you are super determined.

> my belief that it is intended to be little more than a quick, dirty, and vainglorious Apollo repeat by a failing government.

If the USA successfully sends people to the Moon, achieves all of NASA's technical goals, and the astronauts make it back in one piece, isn't that literally the opposite of failure?

It might be expensive and you can argue that it's wasteful. But even to that point, the $11B cost of SLS is nothing for the US Gov. For example the F35 is a >$1T government program. That doesn't seem a lot to explore a new frontier and expand the scope of humanity.

Pretty sure the US does not buy energy from natural gas pipelines to Russia, neither are we shutting down all of our Nuclear Power Plants (like Germany) because it's green to import more gas ?

As an American I couldn't tell you what their logic is exactly.

Vaccines, Mobile Phones, Internet, GPS (How do you think container ships navigate), High yield seeds/fertilizers and the Green Revolution, Weather Satellites, I could go on.

It's really getting tiring repeating this stuff over and over again to the anti-space crowd.

Global rates of poverty are 83% lower than they were in 1969 when we landed on the moon.

So actually, millions of lives have massively benefited from science and technology. To be cynical in the face of all that is a personal take, not a reflection of the facts.

At least the US still has energy infrastructure, while the EU is forced to financially support Dictators in Tehran and Moscow to keep their economy from collapsing.

Correction: 350,000 years being riddled with parasites, fending off wild animal attacks, and avoiding being eaten alive by cannibals when your tribe runs out of food.