trymas

There's seemingly appearing trend of ultra low contrast foreground to background (e.g. mid gray text on top of dark gray background), often combined with 1px borders and/or 1px thick fonts.

I constantly need to either zoom on such websites or crank up screen brightness to the max (or both) to be able to see anything (or even better, not visit such sites ever again).

That link you pointed out has:

- mid gray font: rgb(122, 125, 126)

- dark blue tint background: rgb(14, 21, 24)

- 1px border that is nearly invisible against background: rgb(37, 42, 44)

That link text has unacceptable contrast: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=7A7D7E&... , not to say the border: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=252A2C&... .

At least main text has passable grade: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=A89F91&...

Though how did US managed to be long term thinking since world wars up to ~1980s or 90s? Was it just generational trauma of world wars that allowed to align opinions between parties? And by trauma I mean some combo of real trauma to not have WW2 again to the capitalistict and globalistic drive to be world’s hegemony.

US government now is a kakistocracy made out of sycophants to the biggest egomaniac this generation have ever seen. Who is only driven by personal wealth and attention.

Any billionaire capitalist psychopath openly promising to give cash and attention to orange musollini gets a free reign to do anything (they could be even not from USA) - it’s oligarchy.

China is not that. Xi and CCP are much more principled than emotional children in USA.

I was probably lucky.

We got homework as one of the first lessons in statistics course, for exactly this case.

Roll pair of dice, save the result, do it 200 (or some other bigger number) times, plot the histogram, do some maths, maybe provide any conclusions, etc.

Such things then definitely stuck with you for a long time.

I am not aware about the details - can you elaborate?

Sony WH-1000XM and Bose QuietComfort can do 24h on bluetooth + ANC if not more.

I remember from peak net neutrality discussions during trump 1 maybe around 2017-2018 ant saw an article on theverge.com (that cannot find now) and biggest sum to individual politician was around $200k, when median values were much much lower.

Politicians are selling tens of billions of dollars (if not hundreds of billions) worth of revenue to ISPs for couple or dozen million. Literally 1000x return on investment (if successful).

I remember local politician (I am not from US) got caught taking 100k bribe from a company for helping with alleged highway construction procurement. Project was valued ~1B - 10 000x return on investment (if they wouldn't have been caught).

[1] I am sorry, not "corruption", but "lobbying".

Traffic light buttons were already equidistant to the edge of the window. Now they are trying to center circles in squircles[1], breaking window edges and draggability, etc.

> It creates a larger inconsistency than the "consistency" it supposedly brings.

That's why I am baffled (as many commenters here) - how did this went out all the way to release, instead of ending as an experiment at design floor.

[1] parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321065

And to OC you're replying to: window close/minimise/resize were already equidistant from window edge on macOS 15 and probably earlier.

Here is a screenshot (safari in the background, textedit in front): https://pasteboard.co/OeMBTDKGsTx9.png

In MacOS 26 it's only weirder, because as you say - due to squircle window corners, now we have this constantly varying distance to the edge.

EDIT: I "get" apple's fascination to squircle, but why they made it such a big radius. Probably no one would've complained if they just have changed from current ~15-20px rounded corners into ~15-20px squircles, but they went 50px+ on toolbared windows.

Uber flat, you don't know what's a button, what's a text. I dunno if I just adjusted to it or it actually somewhat got better up to iOS/macOS 15. Though with iOS/macOS 26 - it's iOS 7 moment yet again.

NB: not sure about Liquid Glass - though I was recently (and weirdly) recommended to watch iOS 7 trailer on youtube[2]. Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses. Though I am not sure anymore, maybe people actually like such designs and it's just HN bubble complaining (IMHO complains here are 110% valid) about nothing. Maybe in 10+ years ordinary guy will praise iOS/macOS 26.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_7

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzLr7xSr-g

> society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.

Yes, and it's politically very hard to change. I totally understand price sensitivity around food. At least where I live milk and meat is extremely subsidised. How can you have chicken that is grown, slaughtered, cleaned, packaged, distributed, kept cold all the way, etc. and sell it for 5eur/kg (and cheaper on discounts). There's s much human work, resources, fuel used - I cannot understand.

Also - being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.

Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?

$7T of spending, $1.77T in deficit[1] and they planned to fix this hole with $100B?!

Masterminds!

…and now they need to refund it.

NB: also puts into perspective how numb I became about reading AI and AI related sums of money, and how crazy actually those numbers are.

[0] off course many knew that it’s crazy way before it happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_bud...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157398

IMHO, CLI tools are better more often than not against MCP.

EDIT: and here is similar opinion from author himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47252459

TL;DW: 2010s intel mac era laptops have seen at very best 35% single core CPU performance over in 5 years time! This happens almost every year now with M line macs.

Rant:

Retina macs were great and had great form factor over unibody macs. Touch-bar macs in the mid 2010s was IMHO a disaster. Terrible keyboard, poorer thermal capacity, missing essential ports, adapters galore.

But when it comes to performance - early 2010s macbooks with dedicated gpus had serious overheating issues.

Retina macbooks were decent, both form factor and performance.

Touch-bar macs were totally abysmal, all performance gains over previous generations was all through pumping more heat. CPUs constantly pegged at 90C+, cannot have laptop on your lap, Apple planning and delaying release schedules around intel fumbling their tik/tok cycles (as far as i remember some macs did not get any improvements for 2 years+ if not way more). Upgrades sometimes were total jokes, because of thermal throttling there was no point to put more hardware than it could work with. From reviews buying higher level cpu sometimes didn’t give noticeable real life gains because, again, thermal throttling kicking in instantly. 2020 intel macbook pro has fans spinning almost all the time. Having a remote call - your battery is dead in 2h max (essentially 1% per 1min).

M1 mac gave insane perceived performance boost - no noticeable throttling. Macbook airs are fully passively cooled, never heard M Macbook pro with fans screeching.

Also real full work day battery doing real work without power adapter at full performance. Cool to touch most of the time.

I made homework for a job in 2020 on a 2013 personal macbook. Apart from memory footprint - I could not feel noticeable difference on development experience. Editing images was frustrating on both. With M macs - its silent, smooth fast.

Number of parallel cores matching best intel cpus on base models, GPU blowing any mobile gpu in price range out of the water with thermal capacity to peg it 100% no problem. Unified memory for those GPUs to do what you could only imagined doing on GPUs that cost 3 times more than the macbook.

It’s a such excellent architecture that yeah - it’s “boring” you can nitpick about M69 Ultra Pro Max performance, but take a base MBP of any M line and it blows almost any laptop out of the water, even to this day.

CoreImage - GPU accelerated image processing out of the box;

ML/GPU frameworks - you can get built-in, on device's GPU running ML algorithms or do computations on GPU;

Accelerate - CPU vector computations;

Doing such things probably will force you to have platform specific implementations anyway. Though as you said - makes sense only in some niches.

I think I read somewhere long time ago that Capture One is also using Qt for GUI, though cannot find this anymore, so probably not true.

Just like current Iran situation is due to UK and USA “playing country building” 50-70 years ago.

- Alexa (and other voice assistants) spy microphones in their homes;

- Internet connected:

    - locks;

    - door, bedroom, living room cameras;

    - lights, appliances and whatnot;

I wonder what anthropologists will write about us these days 100 years in the future. What is super creepy and super illegal to do for a physical individual, but is given a blank check from society to be done by tech corporations at unimaginable scale.

EDIT: also corporations (from my social bubble) are giving (almost) unfiltered access to their data from LLMs (and probably soon a control of that data through "Claw" trend), that would be instantly fireable offence for any employee.

Imagine giving enterprise access to some Joe-Claw from the street and allowing him to press any buttons he wants..

For small personal projects it’s great value for money. Cheapest subscription was like 3$ during new years, token quota is acceptable to me (my guess it’s about 50-100M tokens per 5h)

Dunno how it would be with big projects, but with “personal project” things it feels to me that GLM-4.7 is 80-90% of Claude Opus 4.5. Just a tiny bit of more hand holding for GLM.

N is obviously too small to get anything meaningful, though article was about the same problem and article’s author haven’t visited facebook for 8 years…

Cannot say about FB or IG, but on Youtube I get way too many “AI girlfriend” ads or video recommendations. I report as many as I can and my subscription channels are as far away from such topics as it can be. Thus I totally understand OC and article’s author.

> Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.

So I guess it depends how active you are? My speculation would be (that would match the article) - if facebook figures out you’re a man, but you don’t actively like and engage with specific topics - it will default to AI thirst trap slop.

5h allowance is somewhere between 50M-100M tokens from what I can tell.

On 200$ claude code plan you should be burning hundreds of millions of token per day to make anthropic hurt.

IMHO subscription plans are totally banking on many users underusing them. Also LLM providers dont like to say exact numbers (how much you get , etc)

IMHO ruzzia hasn't changed in ~450-500 years since Ivan the Terrible. No matter how they sell their way of governing to international scene - it's always a tzar rulling with iron fist. There were optimistic glimpses that they will grow out of it, but it always returns back to tzar.

By western standards ruzzian economy is in collapse, but their citizens are willing to endure anything beyond western imagination. Not to mention that even before 2022 apart from Moscow and Saint Petersburg there are many towns that are like timecapsules 50+ years into the past.

TL;DR: I will believe ruzzina state collapse/death when I will see it, but now I don't hold my breath.

Could I - as an individual - do such surveillance[1]? Won’t three letter agency knock on my door? Is there a difference between digital surveillance and physical surveillance?

[1] obviously at smaller scale, but imagine same level of creepiness.