rurp

> (I thought Tesla's initial market segment was going to focus on who ever buys Jeeps, boondocking, outdoorsy stuff.)

I'm part of that market and was initially curious about the cybertruck but it was clear that tesla was totally unserious about building an actual 4x4 overlanding vehicle. I'm not sure EVs are even there yet for a true exploring vehicle since it's the extreme end of the range problem. There are places people go that are a couple hundred miles from the nearest supercharger, and I bet rock crawling kills the range like towing does.

The actual target market was probably a guy who spends 100k on a heavily upgraded Rubicon that never drives on dirt or gets a scratch, and happens to be a huge elon fanboy.

This seems like an awfully niche case, no? How often does someone lose power at home for days, while also having a nearby and accessible charging station that stays functional the whole time? Most of the disasters I'm aware of people either get their power back in a short enough amount of time that they can use a normal generator for the gap, or things are bad and widespread enough that they aren't driving down the street to recharge their vehicle.

The guy literally tweets and retweets neo-nazis and white nationalist content on a regular basis. He celebrates an election win with a literal nazi salute. He openly supports fascist parties and politicians. Being aghast at someone calling him a nazi is ridiculous.

For any normal use of the term congress very much is required. They literally control federal spending. If you had some less common idea in mind you should explain it rather than dropping a one line comment that seemingly makes no sense.

We could, but that would cost slightly more and the richest people in the world hate anything that would make them slightly less rich.

That's fine if you want to sit alone in a basement playing with AI models, but the context here is politics and the wider business world. In those domains accounting for the thoughts and needs of other citizens isn't just the morally correct thing to do, it's required to have any sort of sustained success.

Data center companies had some initial wins utterly steamrolling local governments. They sent millionaire legal teams after part time city councils who didn't immediately cave to their demands and it worked for a time. But people notice that stuff, don't like, and will react.

You can ignore the world all you like, but if that's the attitude actual decision makers are going to take with AI things are going to get even worse for them, no matter how many demeaning insults they fling at their opponents.

Tech stocks, and stocks in general, are overwhelmingly held by wealthy people who are way more exposed to crash than working class folks. The median retiree is much more reliant on social security and safe investments than they are on NASDAQ. Even if a few big tech companies go to zero it will only have a modest impact on their finances.

Obviously there would be knock on effects of a major crash that are hard to predict, but people inside the AI bubble wildly overrate how invested most Americans are in their success.

Exactly. The most baffling thing about the backlash is how shocked the tech boosters are at it. I know tech can be a bubble, but it's stark to see just how out of touch people inside can be.

Most American's lives have been made worse by AI so far, rather than better. They are deeply skeptical that future gains will be freely shared with them rather than horded by a few tech oligarchs. Based on pretty much all of modern history, they're right to be skeptical.

This is apparently incomprehensible to many AI proponents, but many people would genuinely rather live next to a farm than a data center. They don't care that you can vibe code a hobby project or a jira ticket 10x faster than before. They do want cheaper utilities and a secure economic position, and they are well aware that AI is providing the opposite for them.

Lots of discussion about less terrible alternatives to postman. For those already using a Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well. I haven't used it for anything too complicated, but for routine stuff where you need to hit an endpoint and fiddle with the payload and headers it's great.

Yeah this was the same for me. When I first made the switch to Linux for my dev machine Ubuntu was the distro I was by far the most familiar with so that was just the default choice. Later on after learning more and seeing how Ubuntu progressed I regretted not going straight to Debian.

The difference is that other new technologies didn't have a literal trillion dollars invested into them within the first few years, nor were the industry leaders warning that the tech could destroy humanity. Given those conditions I think "Has it made any money?" is a reasonable question to ask.

Yeah once I progressed past junior level work the value of asking questions on SO fell off a cliff. At that point most of the problems I got really stuck on were more niche than how to do $standardThing with $CommonLibrary, and there just weren't many people answering oddball questions like that. Even with popular languages like Javascript and Python most of my questions would get zero useful answers, so I pretty quickly stopped writing them. I think it's true that SO really didn't do much to encourage folks who would write answers like that to stay active on the site.

It stayed useful as a reference tool for quite a while, for when I needed to look something up that was fairly common but that I wasn't personally familiar with. But as others have said, the way they handled dupes and supposed opinion-based answers was really poor and meant that the top answers got more and more out of date each year. By the time LLMs came around they were strictly better for those kinds of lookups. Strictly better for now at least, LLMs will themselves get enshittified in the coming years.

Obama deported at least as many people as trump, but did it in far more competent way.

If the goal was actually just about enforcing immigration laws we wouldn't see armies of masked thugs beating the shit out of people in the streets. That's counterproductive because it drives local governments away from cooperating, which is essential to actually getting things done in a productive way.

Look at how this administration handles cases where ICE agents murder non-threatening people. They lie relentlessly and blatantly, even when there is clear video evidence showing up happened. Then they absolutely refuse to investigate any violent misconduct and even go out of their way to block other governments from investigating or trying to hold violent incompetent agents accountable.

The message should be clear to everyone. Fascists love a good spectacle. This is about that, and developing a paramilitary force that operates outside of the rule of law.

They already are. A majority of ICE detainees have no criminal record and that has been true for most of this administration.

Give me a break. Dems weren't throwing people in foreign torture prisons for not wearing a mask at the grocery store. Or throwing them in internment camps and stripping them of their citizenship for simply expressing an opinion.

A core principle of a free democratic society is that everyone has obligations to more than the whims of a wannabe fascist dictator. ICE agents who do things like violently assault peaceful citizens are in the wrong, both morally and legally. The fact that the current president wants to destroy the pillars of our society means there won't be immediate consequences for that kind of behavior, but that doesn't make it any less despicable or immunize them against future consequences.

This is totally wrong. Accounting for partisan non-response bias is a standard part of a pollsters job, not some insurmountable gotcha. Some are better than others at this. Polls aren't oracular, nor are they claiming to be. It's almost always better to look at an average of polls rather than a single one.

There is a lot of public data on past elections that anyone can analyze and see exactly how accurate polls have been in the past. If you're expecting polls to be a perfectly accurate prediction then you are misunderstanding their purpose. What they are great at is giving a probabilistic estimate of the outcome, within a certain range.

It's likely that any key race you care about next week will end up within 4 points of the current polling average. It's extremely likely that it will end up within 8 points. That's useful information!

Bird watching is something that my younger self would have never ever believed would be appealing, but it's actually really enjoyable! Getting out and exploring the natural world is great and I highly recommend it, but even for people without the opportunity or inclination to get out there birding is still extremely accessible.

Everyone can see birds around their home or work. Getting started can be as simple as noticing which birds you see regularly and figuring out what kind they are, and how the males and females differ in appearance (or don't). Usually males are the prettier more colorful ones, which is an effective signal for fitness.

Common birds will be easy to identify. Figuring out unusual birds or behaviors can turn into quite the detective project.

From there you can start to recognize calls and behavioral patterns. Once you learn a little bit in those areas it can be like seeing in another dimension. It's neat to hear a particular call and immediately know that there is a hawk in a nearby tree, or a cat behind a car.

Well when the alternative is someone who is openly in favor of violently overthrowing fair elections it's hard to get too upset about someone winning fairly, even if it is their fourth time.

It's wild how closely Brazil's politics have mirrored the US in recent years, at least at a high level. They literally had their own Jan 6 insurrection. Lula, like Biden, was competent enough for a time but ultimately outstayed his welcome and ran for another term when they should have gracefully retired. Unlike Biden, Lula actually imposed some consequences on the people trying to destroy his country's democracy.

It's a really bad source compared to what? Downdetector is not perfect, but is usually correct when I check it. Official status pages on the other hand are usually wrong when I check them.

That was hardly a one-off. Just off the top of my head...

There was the massive amount of CSAM it produced for weeks that wasn't an oopsie, the company adamantly refused to do anything about it for a long time despite the outrage.

Plus there has been all of the monkeying with the system prompt to push random propaganda elon wants.

Also the weird fixations on white genocide, election lies, and other nonsense.

On top of all that any data or funding sent to this company directly supports the ongoing destruction of US democracy and state capacity.

The guy literally owns a business in this space and has a huge financial incentive to push passkey adoption. Technically he has an "industry connection" just like millions of other people who work in tech and happen to know about passkeys through other work, but conflating the two is wildly misleading. His perspective is as far away from unbiased as possible.

Research funding is hardly perfect, but most of the people studying climate change are doing actual research and trying to draw evidence based conclusions that hold up under peer review. Their incentives are not the same as a tech founder who could potentially make generational wealth if one particular outcome is realized.

The ones who are actually good at investing largely do. The vast majority of investment managers soliciting new accounts are pure sales roles, not investors. Their job is to get as many assets under management as possible; that's how they get paid. They will fluff up the presentation with some nice charts and stuff but the actual "investing" will just be tossing the money into some generic funds.

Are you under the impression that all current and future shady business transactions are public knowledge?

To give a specific example of where I've seen this utterly fail... A few months ago one of my pets had an unexpected reaction to a new medication. It was late at night, well past our vet's hours. Google's AI response was basicaly "They are going to die, rush to an emergy clinic now".

But nothing else matched that. I was looking up all kinds of resources and that hadn't been the conclusion from any of them. It turned out Google AI was just wrong and put us in a bad spot for even looking at those results.

Agreed, it's surprising to me how often I see people on HN and other tech communities who don't assume every big tech AI product will get aggressively enshittified over time. It's a surprise to me because these same communities universally agree that the last era of big tech products has been ruined by greed and abuse.

Products like Facebook and Google search were magical in their early days, but over the past couple decades they have been relentlessly and deliberately degraded into useless slop.

The people who made all of those unfortunate decisions are the exact same people building and funding AI! What do you think they are going to do with more powerful Skinner boxes? Help the masses live their best, most empowered lives?!

Politicians literally write the laws that people get convicted of violating, and they can write those laws pretty much however they want. A juror's job is not to decide if they think an act was morally wrong, it's to judge them against the law as written. Laws can and have been written in all kinds of horrible and negligent ways.

Yes, based on it being one of the largest most profitable industries in the world. There is an immense amount of data showing that shoveling ad money into a product will convince some percent of people to buy it. Or just glance at the ads that fill up most people's Facebook feed and Google SERPs; it's mostly crap that looks flashy but few seconds but that few if any people actually have a real need for.

I've personally blocked who knows how many tens of thousands of ads online over the past couple decades. Somehow I doubt my life is lacking for not buying hundreds of extra products I would have learned about from all those targeted ads.

I've been seeing this kind of argument increasingly often from Israel's defenders and I have to say "Look at this other horrific atrocity that might be even worse than the one we're doing, but gets far less coverage in the US media" is a terrible defense. If that's the best Israel can come up with, and they continue down the path they are on, their western support will be gone before they know it.

To take this example, the Azerbaijani president didn't talk the American one into a major shit show of a war; one that is materially harming American lives. The Azerbaijani government doesn't run a major political influence operation in the US, spending 10s of millions of dollars against candidates for the sin of mildly criticizing them. The Azerbaijani government doesn't receive anything close to the level of military, diplomatic, and financial support from the US that Israel gets. The Azerbaijani prime minister didn't give an address to the US Congress to undermine a major foreign policy agreement, one which has only looked better in hindsight.

So no, it's not at all weird that the citizens of the US care more about Israeli committed atrocities than Azerbaijani ones. The US is far more involved with Israel's actions and has far more influence over them, influence that has so far not been used to try and alleviate the suffering in Gaza.

I'm with you on the older tech era. The 2000s were the peak of technology in my opinion. The freedom and openness of the internet was a unique point in human history. It was still standard to control the hardware you owned back then and IoT hadn't yet infected a bunch of stuff it didn't need to be in.