telotortium

I think Venezuela and Iran are more about restricting the oil to China in case of a conflict rather than providing energy for the US, although getting ahead of an anticipated demand increase from AI data centers is probably a contributing motivation.

If you could have FIRE'd before the COVID era subsidies you can do it now

For curiosity's sake, what exactly do you think Republicans will do to "kill the ACA"? I doubt they're going to introduce a bill that revokes the ACA in its entirety. They killed the mandate almost a decade ago and the marketplace healthcare plans have continued to limp along, depending on the state. What's next?

No it wouldn’t. American Apparel used to (maybe it still does) make its shirts in a factory in Los Angeles, and its shirts were not noticeably more expensive than the likes of Abercrombie that made clothes overseas. AA couldn’t have competed in the lower end of the market, but their clothes were still not astronomically expensive because the factory was already heavily automated via machines.

The larger cost for a lot of manufacturing in the richest countries is permitting and regulation, plus the fact that the manufacturing knowledge cluster is concentrated in China now, making every part of setting up a factory there smoother.

Both of these methods have an undesirable side effect for me, which is that it immediately pops up the passcode dialog saying that a passcode is required to activate Face ID. Depending on the situation, that could be construed as an attempt to actively interfere with a police investigation, which could bring consequences of its own. It would be better if it silently dropped you to the normal lock screen, and only showed the passcode dialog when you attempt to unlock the phone normally.

Another thing I've often wished for with kids is a mode that removes all notifications and widgets from the lock screen - the only things you should be able to do is to unlock the phone and emergency calls. You can remove most notifications with the right Focus, but not notifications to control playing music/video apps, for example, nor any other widgets you happen to put on your lock screen.

Unfortunately GitHub doesn’t let you easily review commits in a PR. You can easily selectively review files, but comments are assumed to apply to the most recent HEAD of the PR branch. This is probably why review agents don’t natively use that workflow. It would probably not be hard to instruct the released versions of Opus or Codex to do this, however, particularly if you can generate a PR plan, either via human or model.

Lots of people know trans people (by which I mean people that have decided to take some visible action to transition) by now - the people in the boonies and flyover states have access to the same internet as everyone else, so a lot of people outside the most progressive cities have transitioned. You have to remember that trans had been at the front of the culture for 10 years (since Caitlyn Jenner) by the time of the 2024 election.

From the divestiture announcement, the answer appears to be yes to both: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/announcement-from-the-new-tiktok...

As a former employee in TikTok US Data Services, the division that was stated working to separate the US TikTok service and infrastructure, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the algorithm reset theory, because the reset this time is qualitatively unlike the others.

Since 2020, when the first Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok, work has been ongoing to separate out the TikTok US business in all aspects from the parent company Bytedance. Setting up dedicated infrastructure for US users was already accomplished by 2023 for the most part, and this included the restriction that US user data couldn’t be used to train or otherwise influence non-US user operations.

However, there were a few major caveats. First, all the actual videos, at least if they’re public, were considered to be Bytedance data, even those created by US users (although the actual user intent signals - likes, watch behavior, and the like, were considered to be US user data). This allowed them to be used to train the main Bytedance-owned algorithm. Second, the Bytedance-trained algorithm continued to form the basis of the algorithm to serve US users. At least when I was there, US user data was used to tune the algorithm for US users, but the algorithm was not necessarily trained from scratch only on US user data in practice.

One of Bytedance’s main conditions for the TikTok US sale has always been that they own the algorithm (both the code and the models) and would not transfer it to the US, so this was definitely a foreseeable issue. With the chaos of the TikTok Us divestment between the Biden and Trump administrations, though, I suspect that it was hard to hire and retain ML engineers that could build a proper replacement for the algorithm in time for the divestment, let alone build one that matches the behavior of the previous algorithm.

If the algorithm is separated between US and non-US as strictly as the TikTok US Data Services mission always aimed for, then TikTok for US users is in many respects a new service entirely that shares the same UI and features. I also don’t know how US users get trained on non-US content, or if they’re even exposed, nor if any other countries use the US algorithm. So this change in content may last at least into the medium term, if not permanently. The question will be if you start seeing more left-wing anti-ICE content in the coming weeks or months.

Lots of people threw small apps on their Github accounts for their own convenience in having a backup, and in case other people might be interested, but realistically never expected to get one more user. I have several scripts, Chrome extensions, and the like in my Github that fit that description. The difference is that coding agents let you write a one-user app at a much larger scale than before.

> If you would rather support Trumps agenda then vote with Democrats, then you are supporting Trump.

Okay, but I can just as easily say that you are pro-crime because you share a coalition with progressives that get district attorneys like Chesa Boudin elected (just this week the newly-elected Democratic state legislature in Virginia introduced bills to reduce the penalties for burglary, a violent crime - no normal person was asking for this).

You have a point that anyone in a coalition supports the most extreme actions of that coalition, but if you can’t make any distinction between the intents of different actors in the coalition, the only option becomes total defeat of the other side. But that is difficult to achieve in practice, particularly with a near 50-50 party split like we have in the US today. Even when the US decisively defeated the Confederacy, there were still a lot of people that either sympathized with the South or at least thought an indefinite military occupation of the South wasn’t worth it (like the US tired of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan), which is why Reconstruction ended.

So counting on total defeat of the other side is a fool’s errand, unless one side or the other executes a coup, which sadly is looking more and more likely. Trump supporters argue that the Democrats and their sympathizers in the Republican Party performed a soft coup during Covid and the 2020 election, which is why Trump has taken care to surround himself with loyalists this time around.

Welfare perhaps. State, almost certainly not. If this did come to pass, I wonder if the inhabitants would be US citizens or non-citizen nationals, like the population of American Samoa.

The world where he does it and then tries to present it to Congress as a fait accompli. If the security concerns around Greenland are seen as legitimate enough, he’ll get his Democratic congressmen to approve it, particularly as it’s unlikely that it would become a state (too few people).

The Wikipedia article mentions a bipartisan delegation to Copenhagen in support of Denmark. Maybe they took along Republicans that have been a bee in the Trump administration’s bonnet, but it’s definitely not fair to say they uniformly support his agenda, only that they would rather support him than the Democrats.

Alaskan Native Americans may be paid in the sense that the government provides subsidies for infrastructure and the like, but it’s seen as either welfare or necessary to allow them to keep practicing some of their native way of life. All Alaskan citizens also get a dividend from the Permanent Fund, but that’s only around $1000 a year. They are definitely not being paid to discourage Russia from invading (except for the military I suppose).

These articles have been coming out for I can’t even remember how long - it’s what popular science magazines run when there’s no better news to run. The answer is always the same - no, people are not about to start consuming bugs in large volumes, especially when chicken performs almost as well in feed ratio and produces products that people actually like and consume. Yeah, people always bring up cultures that supposedly love certain insects, but I would bet that those people start eating chicken as soon as it becomes cheap enough. Not to mention that the allergenic potential for insects is almost certainly a lot higher than chicken - I’ve never heard of someone being allergic to chicken, but a ton of people are allergic to shrimp and crab.

At best this is destined to become a potentially higher-quality feed for chickens and pigs.

It’s unfortunate that you have to resort to this. OpenAI does publish their bot IP addresses at https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots, but Anthropic doesn’t seem to publish the IP addresses of their bots.

I hate to be rude, but I found the writing quite difficult to follow in its technical aspects, and the pink and black glitter formatting was the last straw. I ended up dumping it into ChatGPT to rewrite the technical content in a form that’s easier to follow, in the hopes of elevating the discussion - I hope I don’t have to do this often on HN, but the technical story was interesting enough that it’s worth rescuing: https://gist.github.com/telotortium/58fe0c16f03455721420b768...

One year ago today

In many ways old-school bump measurement is actually less invasive

os.UserHomeDir is specified to read the HOME environment variable, so it doesn’t require CGo. os/user does, but only to support NSS and LDAP, which are provided by libc. That’s also why net requires CGo- for getaddrinfo using resolv.conf

Following up on this, has anyone tried this and seen how well it works in practice?

“ Speedify, a proprietary VPN which allows combining multiple internet connections (Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, Ethernet, Starlink, Satellite, and more) to improve the stability, speed, and security of online experiences. Available as services.speedify.”

What social metric in particular? Also, for better or worse, social metrics are easily gamed. While a basket of goods can also be gamed, it's easier to see what's going on and to explain it to people, since it's composed of concrete goods. Also, a basket of goods can be expanded if we want to increase the baseline as living standards in society improve, which we do - a smartphone should now be part of that basket, even though they barely existed 20 years ago.

Just another example of why the Tories have completely collapsed in support, even among their erstwhile base.

I don't think I would exactly call these men "monks". It has been pretty normal throughout history for a fairly large proportion of men, especially those lower down the economic ladder, to be permanently single or not marry until pretty late in life. These days, they don't have to work as much to avoid complete destitution or starvation, they're not as likely to die young, and they've largely replaced visiting cheap prostitutes with gooning, but otherwise this is not any unprecedented phenomenon.

It does mean that the economic growth that allowed most men to be a plausible marriage partner in the mid-20th century no longer obtains, which is a bad thing, despite the small comfort of consumer goods being cheap enough to alleviate some of this pain.

Germany turned down all of its nuclear plants and is actively demolishing them. Good luck with that.

Not sure how bad it is these days, but Adobe Reader used to open pretty slowly (and if you had Adobe Acrobat open your PDFs by default, it was even slower), so an in-browser PDF viewer was appreciated for that purpose.

Also, it can be useful to keep the PDF in the context of the app you opened it in. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a window manager that surfaces the fact that, for example, one macOS Preview window was opened from the browser, another from Slack, another from Finder, etc. Compare to iOS, where opening a PDF viewer from an app will result in a button at the top-left corner to go back to the app you opened it from.

1. Meta has released primarily open models until now. 2. Meta's models have always been somewhat behind the cutting edge, and the gap has grown wider as of Llama 4. 3. The AI orgs at Meta are in well-publicized shakeups, so investors are naturally skittish about the chaos there.

That’s true enough, but at that time whites were 90% of the US population, so there was arguably enough wealth then, definitely enough wealth these days, to extend entry-level jobs to the remaining 10%. When 40% or more of your population is descended from post-1965 immigrants, the competition for good jobs goes up a lot in most industries, unless enough economic growth makes up for it - and even with growth, housing scarcity is almost always an issue.

Is this the first time Waymo has partnered with Lyft? I’ve only heard of Uber partnerships before? From what I can find, previous Lyft collaborations were only pilot testing, not commercial rollouts.