The difference between Mondragon, the kibbutzim, and other successful examples of collective labor, and the Soviet system, is precisely that the former are not governments, and operate in a capitalist system of property rights and free markets (in a practical rather than spherical cow sense of that term).

I'm all for more cooperatives, it's a good model. Operating in a system which doesn't compel that form of organization is what keeps them honest. Mondragon is a profitable company, emphasis on profitable.

The article talks a bit about how, while Mondragon is a pretty good deal for basic labor, they have trouble attracting high-demand talent like engineers, which they also need. In a free-market system, a worker's collective can solve a problem like that, by offering more perks, raising the 'level' for new engineering hires, waiving some amount of the up-front investment, or just getting by through, in effect, paying some of the salary in a nonmaterial reward of belonging to something which better meets some people's sense of ethics and fairness.

That's not how it works when the company you work for is also the police and the military. It's also not how it works when every company is compelled to organize itself this way. That compulsion leads to dysfunction, corruption, cheating, and at the extreme end, gulags.

So let's pass on all that. If you believe that worker cooperatives are a social good, as I do, buy stuff from them. Work for one, found one. It's working so far.

My pony’s doing just fine.

At a friend’s birthday last year, I wrote in the space of 8 minutes - then performed - a 3-minute long verse about said friend and their puppy. I didn’t get the verse from ChatGPT. I had it help me find rhyming words that fit the rhythm, had it help me find synonyms, and find punchy ends to sentences.

I made a xylophone iphone app way back in mid 2024 by copy pasting code to Claude and errors from Xcode, just to show off what AI can do. Someone asked to make it support dragging your finger across the screen to play lots of notes really fast - Claude did that in one shot. In mid 2024, 6 months before Claude Code.

I made a sorting hat for my sisters’ kids for Christmas a few weeks ago. I found a voice cloning website, had Claude write some fun dialogue, and vibe coded an app with the generated recordings of the sorting hat voice saying various virtues and Harry Potter house names. The cloned voice was so good, it sounded exactly like the actor in the movie. I loaded the app on my phone and hid a Bluetooth speaker in a Santa hat - tapping a button in the app would play a voice recording from the sorting hat AI voice. The kids unwrapped the hat and it declared itself as the sorting hat. Put the hat on a kid’s head, tap a button, hat talks! With a little sleight of hand, the kids really believed it was the hat talking all by itself. Laughing together with my whole family as the hat declared my cheeky niece “Slytherin!!!” was one of the most humanising things I’ve ever seen.

I’ve made event posters for my Burning Man camp. Zillions of dumb memes for group chats. You always have to do some inpainting or touch it up in an image editor, but it’s worth it for the lulz.

And right now I’m using Claude Code for my startup, ApprovIQ. Dario Amodei was right in a way: 99% of the code was written by Claude.

But sorry, no multi million line vibe coded codebases. For that my friend, you’ll be waiting until after the next AI winter.

The "this wasted my time" comments are missing the point...

In addition to his great sense of humor, Steve is usually ahead of the curve in terms of trends. There's a lesson in this. LLMs have become incredible constraint solvers ("SAT-solvers for code"). Well-thought-out tests, types, specs, and docs are all incredibly valuable constraints. This has big implications - for example what happens to licenses when you can cheaply rewrite the codebase and therefore unencumber it.

This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt.

I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?

I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/

Bragging about this has to rank up there as the worst idea in the world. If your hole argument is taunting would be attackers with your wallet - saying you're more overprovisioned than the traffic they can send, you're just threatening them with a good time. At another time in my life I'd take this post as an invitation, even, specially because the numbers shared are super low.

I've had 3 situations where my place of work was under DoS attack, in the 3 cases I managed to identify an email address and reached out asking why they are doing it, and if they want to talk about our backend. In 1 case, the "attack" was a broken script by someone learning how to program, the other two were real attacks and one of them just immediately stopped once they knew we knew who they were, the other actually wanted to chat and we emailed back and forward a bit.

99.99% of the time a DoS is someone who is bored. Talking to them tends to work.

Edit: there's some questions about the situations so I'll expand:

- The first was not a real attack, and they were doing the network calls through their authenticated API key. This was early days of a YC startup so of course there was no rate limiting in place. In this case I exchanged 2 or 3 emails and after they sent me their python script I sent them back a patch and they finished their scraping without bringing us down. Never heard from them again

- The second was at a different company, we were getting targeted to distribute email spam, because at the time we'd allow people to invite their colleagues as members of their account, and some people associated with casinos based out of Macau automated a way to spam their casinos by putting the URL in the name of the account, which went out in the email notification. I contacted one of the admin emails of one of the casinos I found and they stopped and disappeared. In this case we also locked all their accounts and prevented further logins + emailed them to reach out to support if they thought it was a mistake.

- The third one was more difficult, they weren't using any account, so all we had was network. At some point on the second day though they changed how they were sending some of the calls, and by mistake or not leaked their Telegram username. I installed telegram and talked to them, they trolled me a little bit, but stopped very quickly and didn't start it again. This one was very amusing to people in my company because I had told them this approach would work but a few of the big wigs didn't want me to do it (they didnt have any reason other than "obviously won't work to just talk"). I just did it anyway.

To be clear, you shouldn't reach out with some threats or how you're so good that you found them. My approach is of genuine curiosity, and my literal first message to the telegram person was:

"Hello, how is it going? I work at <companyname> and we're seeing a load of requests originating from your user here on telegram. Does this make any sense to you or do you think I might have the wrong person?"

That's it!

>improperly

On the contrary. They're all properly configured. It's just that, their goals are not the same as our mental health goals.

I used to be a deadbeat 30-something who got his reward of progression and a sense of achievement from winning online arguments and grinding ranks in online games. Just like our brains cannot tell the difference between a picture of a girl that doesn't exist and a girl that does and both evoke some feelings of attraction, or an image of a wild animal that couldn't possible exist and one who does and both evoke some feelings of fear, the same happens when we get upvotes on reddit or platinum rank in Call of Duty.

In healthy and balanced scenarios both are distractions in our free time. For people whose life situation is less than ideal those same tools exploit their need to be appreciated and rewarded, in return for profits from sales or/and advertisements.

And we're all pretending that these people just lack willpower, and if only they had willpower they could break away from the software whose parts are deliberately designed after consultation with psychologists specialized in behavioral addiction.

Freya Holmer, of The Continuity of Splines [0] fame, recently gave a great conference talk about how quaternions naturally arise from the desire to define the multiplication of two vectors if you just agree to one new axiom: v^2 = ||v||^2, or "the square of a vector is equal to the square of its norm". It was fascinating and entertaining and I highly recommend anyone who finds this stuff interesting but confusing (like I do) to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htYh-Tq7ZBI

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds

Here's how I describe KL Divergence, building up from simple to complex concepts.

surprisal: how surprised I am when I learn the value of X

  Suprisal(x) = -log p(X=x)

entropy: how surprised I expect to be

  H(p)        = 𝔼_X -log p(X) 
              = ∑_x p(X=x) * -log p(X=x)

cross-entropy: how surprised I expect Bob to be (if Bob's beliefs are q instead of p)

  H(p,q)      = 𝔼_X -log q(X) 
              = ∑_x p(X=x) * -log q(X=x)

KL divergence: how much *more* surprised I expect Bob to be than me

  Dkl(p || q) = H(p,q) - H(p,p)
              = ∑_x p(X=x) * log p(X=x)/q(X=x)

information gain: how much less surprised I expect Bob to be if he knew that Y=y

  IG(q|Y=y)   = Dkl(q(X|Y=y) || q(X))

mutual information: how much information I expect to gain about X from learning the value of Y

  I(X;Y)      = 𝔼_Y IG(q|Y=y)
                𝔼_Y Dkl(q(X|Y=y) || q(X))

I used an exit trap to kill an SSH agent that I am running, and I noticed that dash did not kill if the script was interrupted, but only if it ran to successful completion.

I asked on the mailing list if this was expected behavior, and it turns out that POSIX only requires EXIT to run on a clean shutdown; to catch interruptions, add more signals.

  trap 'eval $(ssh-agent -k)' EXIT INT ABRT KILL TERM

Yup.

I have a huge GH portfolio[0]. Dozens of complete, soup-to-nuts, documented, tested, and in-use projects. I have complete source for shipping apps, backend frameworks, APIs, SDKs, communication libraries, UI widgets, teaching material (complete course modules), etc. I also have many personal blog entries, and online documentation for stuff; not to mention years of tags and commit history.

No one ever looked at them. In fact, when I asked one interviewer, why they didn't bother looking at them, I was told "You probably faked it."

Needless to say, that interview did not proceed any farther.

[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away (NOTE: I just archived and retired a bunch of stuff, because I maintain what I publish; even if I am the only consumer. I dogfood most of my work).

I think it has to be mountain biking. It's the perfect thought to have in your head when you're looking at something that is potentially crazy, but you know the laws of physics are almost certainly going to have your back as long as your technique is good.

First time I heard it I was near the bottom of the UC Santa Cruz trails into Highway 9 contemplating this section called "the poop chute" which gets steeper and rockier until you hit a 2-3 foot drop among boulders and the only solution is to have enough speed that you end up in the road. And by "the road" I mean the apex of a blind hairpin turn of Highway 9.

I had been out of the sport for 20 years but kept riding road and my buddy got me back in with a sweet deal on a YT Jeffsy we kitted up with spare parts from all his friends. Carbon everything. A bike that did not exist in any dimension when I stopped riding.

Well, this was probably my seventh or eighth weekend trying to negotiate this chute and there are these 17-20 year old kids at the top and I ask them how to do this. And this guy, with all the confidence of Santa Cruz and youth says, with a big, easy grin, "Yeah, it's just hang way back and full send." And I looked at him. And I looked at the chute. And back at him. And my brain, married with two kids, was like "I see. Ok." And I did it.

Full send. Was exactly what my brain needed to think. It works weirdly well.

I love to see the cultural differences between korea/japan and the West on the matter of artificial stuff. Whereas in the West people would try to hide fakeness as much as possible, people in the far East have a much more candid view of it.

In the West we do understand and like artificiality, but we really want to contain it to the realm of fiction. When some artificiality spills out in the “real” world we raise red flags: “tssk, this temple is not authentic, it burned down 80 years ago and they rebuilt it from scratch”

In the East, there is a deep philosophical difference that I would like to understand better - if anyone can point to any reference on that matter? It’s like people have understood that fiction and artificiality are part of our lives, cause people embellish things all the time, and we humans are happy when we believe in things. So instead of being suspicious, they let themselves invaded by artificiality, not unlike the way Western people create emotional connection with novel characters, but in real world situations.

And I mean why not? In the West, we get cartoon character-based advertising, we get actor-based advertising. How is AI-based influencer (that doesn’t hide the fact that it’s artificial) is any different? If Tony the Kellogg’s tiger had an instagram account, we’d find it totally normal. Here is the same, except that we just jumped over the uncanny valley.

There is a lot to talk about on the subject and doesn’t fit in a hn comment :-)

So the article resounded with me, because being raised by my grandparents on a family citrus farm during the transition thru the NAFTA years and watching my family loose what little land wealth they had. It left an indelible mark, a mark of insecurity and fear and it lead to behavior like this.

I remember one time, when I just started out in tech, I went to an interview for a group that was contracting for NASA, the interview went very well, they loved me, the team loved me. I pretty much had the job. The team liked me so much that they invited me to lunch. I declined, you could tell the temperature changed at that very moment that I did. I did not get the job, and in retrospect I should have just told them I am not in the position to pay for a meal out at this time. I had literally put my last pennies into the tank of my car to get to that interview.

Anyways, I back story that, to say this; I did well in the industry, I have exited a few companies and I have held some pretty impressive titles at some pretty big orgs but I never got rich. Some of that had to do with dragging my family out of poverty but some of it had to do with something else. I helped build a startup and we sold that startup for a good deal of money. I received a pittance because I did not know my value. It was enough to take off some of life's stresses but it was not FU money. I went to work for one of the companies that we had a B2B relationship with that was a downstream provider to the company we sold. Anyways it was here that things changed for me, and it was not because of me or my work. It was because the CEO of that company became my personal friend. Her name was Sheila and she told me something that I had never heard before and that was this.

She told me that I was what she calls institutionally poor. That I had been conditioned thru my childhood to think like a poor person and in doing so you send out unconscious signals to others. She told me this because she came up similar. She told me that it causes you to over analyze and over estimate risk and therefore you will not take the bold moves that people that don't have to worry do. That while you can change the world and everyone see it. If you hold onto the fear on needing your safety net under you, that you will never extract your true value from other. So I said, so you are going to pay me my fair value, she laughed and said no, I got you for a very good deal. 3 Days latter I walked into her office, with my resignation letter and told her I had an offer from another company. She said, now you get it, how much did they offer. I told her, and she said I will double that if you stay. That was when I learned a tangential lesson, and that is sometimes hard ass, ball busters are the best people.

Point being there is a piece of this, that the person that grew up poor has to break themselves free of and many times they don't even know what they need to free themselves of and that is thinking like a poor person.

I've been playing with making an economy simulator. People in the economy get jobs, rent apartments, have free time, can start businesses, etc. Prices change based on supply and demand. Cool.

But it's not clear to me what the player should be doing because buildings are placed by the NPCs and then they make their own decisions according to self interest. What is the player doing except watching? Setting laws maybe, but it doesn't feel very fun to play yet.

YES!!! I've been waiting for someone to do this for a decade or more.

This + https://tldr.sh/ and the command line will be so much easier for me (but especially beginners!).

With your tool, having an easy way to copy and paste your personal usage into some central website and then have some scripts would be a great thing to show aggregates.

You could probably just create a single new repo and people could send PR's with their usage dumped to CSV (and they could remove any person info manually before). Then you just have a script that reads those CSVs and prints a nice web page with summary data.

How we got to the point where utility-style regulation is seen as the key to ensuring a free and open internet is a true puzzle.

Utility-style regulation gives regulators plenary authority over the internet - meaning full and complete. Their power to do this or to forbid that is highly discretionary and essentially boundless.

This in turn gives a gatekeeper role to the regulators: you play by their rules or you don't play. And that means they have final say over what happens across the internet, at least within U.S. jurisdiction.

So today they say net neutrality rules.

Tomorrow maybe it is price controls in the name of consumer fairness. Or maybe it is mandated compliance with government snooping orders in the name of national security. Or who knows what not?

Why not? With a utility-style regulatory framework, you essentially have a form of administrative law run wild, legally speaking. Standards are exceedingly vague, power is wildly broad, and (in the end) he who has the most power and pull to control the regulators winds up having the final say over what the law is or is not as it affects the internet.

This is the exact antithesis of the largely hands-off idea of what the government could do with respect to the internet over the past several decades.

Of course law tends to conform in the short term to what people want and, today, most people truly do want a free and open internet. Therefore, the risk of any existential threat to internet freedom is either minimal or non-existent in the short term.

But if your idea of preserving maximum internet freedom is in effect to place a loaded gun to its head and then declare it is not a problem because it is the good guys who control it and who therefore will use it only for good purposes, then you have what you want with utility-style regulation of the internet.

It might just work great as long as the good guys are in control. But what happens when it changes some day? And, if you think it cannot, then you have far, far more faith in human nature than I can possibly summon.

Welcome to the brave new world.

I personally am disappointed that there's so little will to improve buses. Buses have a lot of good attributes:

1. Turn radius is pretty good: streetcars have 18-20m turn radiuses, buses are comfortable at 12m radius, doable at 9m, and can go lower. Buses are compatible with existing city forms.

2. Because of this you can change routes based on demand. This almost never happens, but it should.

3. Broken buses don't break the line.

4. Express buses can coexist with local service buses.

5. Turns out passing is a useful feature!

6. It would be possible to responsively add buses to meet demand. Never happens, but possible.

7. Variable stop frequency is a possibility. If you are on a late-night bus in New York they'll let you off at any corner you want. (Most cities lack this basic sense of decency, but I won't claim we do buses right.)

8. The vehicles are not proprietary. You don't like your buses? Buy any brand you like!

9. New manufactures could enter the market. Trains are regulated to a degree that makes it very difficult to enter the market. This is especially bad in the U.S., so maybe it's unfair: we have terrible regulation, and local manufacture requirements. This has a lot to do with the high subsidies trains require: it requires so much political will that everyone wants a piece of the pie.

10. Buses don't have to be inefficient. Intercity buses are often more fuel-efficient than intercity trains, for instance (I'm guessing this is mostly because they use variable pricing to run at capacity, but something like that is possible for transit too.)

11. Rubber wheels are pretty awesome for stopping, and stopping is pretty awesome for not killing people. Trains are incompatible with humans and even cars except at very low speeds, and require intense separation, or barriers with long lengths of times to let traffic and pedestrians clear. Surface trains substantially hurt the walkability of their immediate surroundings.

12. Buses can run lines that are more dense than trains, which is important for people with disabilities. Most disabled people I see are using buses.

13. We really do need roads everywhere. I remember making SimCity cities with only trains, but that's not a real thing. You need roads for emergency vehicles, trash collection, utilities and utility repair, your moving truck, and so on. I'd love to see roads scaled back, but they aren't going to disappear, so let's make the best of them.

Buses do absolutely suck. But I am not convinced they have to suck. Unfortunately transit systems (buses or trains) have no incentive to meet customer demand, their real customers are the government not the riders. Riders are a liability for transit systems, and so there's painfully little innovation.