Seems like a really inefficient way to do points… my CC company gives me 3 points and I eventually redeem them for USD.
Is that not the L1 L2 network stuff, but just far less efficient than a DB write?
From the consumer perspective totally - but those credit card points come from the interchange the issuer makes from issuing the card / your card txns (ie. as a proportion of your _spend_ using the card).
The sort of rewards you get for storing your business's cash at eg. Mercury, or using a wallet like Cash App - have to come from yield generated by the actual cash deposits, which is the sort of program that is much harder to operate / requires close ongoing partnership with partner banks / etc.
If I'm eg. Mercury, storing the dollars you (business) deposit into my platform in a "branded" stablecoin will get me the same rewards - bc it's backed 1:1 by eg. a money-market fund at Blackrock - for much less of the operational burden, _because_ I'm not participating in a stored value program at an actual bank. The alternative today is that Mercury does store it at a bank, does have to maintain a "stored value" program with that bank, and the yields are standard bank interest (rather than eg. MMF).
Moreover - through Bridge, I can withdraw fiat USD and deposit fiat USD into that "branded stablecoin", and it's just an in-app balance in the fintech app - so the fact that it's a stablecoin doesn't change my experience at all other than in conferring standard rewards. If you look at how eg. Stripe Stablecoin Account labels the balance, it just calls it "Digital dollars" - so it's not much more than a backend implementation detail, really.
Imagine you do it with PG - add a column “money”, put some numbers into it and issue a ToS guaranteeing money in your db 1-to-1 exchange to USD. Because now you store money amount in your db and can manipulate them at will you have to be a bank. Good luck with that.
I recently gave an unprompted tirade about bubbles creating pockets of fake economic activity with no “real” economic output or value creation tied to them, and how sometimes, the circulatory systems in those bubbles feed into themselves.
E.g. someone borrowing against their higher property value(s) to put a down payment on another property.
Leverage is the amplifier. And I don’t see many self-circulating capital flows. I expect contractions to be reasonable for this bubble, or more realistically industry stagflation.
When US manufacturing jobs moved to China in the 2000s, American workers saw their incomes drop dramatically - like a factory worker going from $30/hour at Ford to $12/hour at Walmart. Instead of accepting lower living standards, the system created an alternative solution through housing and credit.
As home prices rose rapidly (often 10-15% annually), workers could borrow against their home's appreciation through equity loans and refinancing. A worker whose house went from $150,000 to $300,000 could borrow $50,000 to maintain their lifestyle - buying trucks, boats, and continuing to consume as if their income hadn't dropped.
This created a win-win illusion: China got manufacturing jobs, US companies got higher profits from cheap labor, Americans got cheaper goods at stores like Walmart, and workers felt wealthy despite earning less. Nobody complained because everyone seemed to benefit in the short term.
The system worked as long as home prices kept rising, allowing people to keep borrowing against appreciation. But when housing prices stopped climbing around 2005, the illusion collapsed - workers were left with lower wages, massive debt, and no way to keep borrowing.
This mechanism essentially allowed America to maintain consumption by borrowing against future wealth rather than addressing the fundamental problem of job losses. The 2008 financial crisis was the inevitable result when this unsustainable system finally broke down.
Anecdotally, as someone who operates in a very large legacy codebase, I am very impressed by GPT-5's agentic abilities so far. I've given it the same tasks I've given Claude and previous iterations via the Codex CLI, and instead of getting loss due to the massive scope of the problem, it correctly identifies the large scope and breaks it down into it's correct parts and creates the correct plan and begins executing.
I am wildly impressed. I do not believe that the 0.x% increase in benchmarks tell the story of this release at all.
I'm a solo founder. I fed it a fairly large "context doc" for the core technology of my company, current state of things, and the business strategy, mostly generated with the help of Claude 4, and asked it what it thought. It came back with a massive list of detailed ambiguities and inconsistencies -- very direct and detailed. The only praise was the first sentence of the feedback: "The core idea is sound and well-differentiated."
It's better than a professor in some respects. A professor can teach me about parser combinators but they probably can't teach me about a specific parser combinator library.
There's a lot of specificity that AI can give over human instruction however it still suffers from lack of rigor and true understanding. If you follow well-trod paths its better but that negates the benefit.
Sure, for some people it will be insanely good: you can go for as stupid questions as you need without feeling judgement, you can go deeper in specific topics, discuss certain things, skip some easy parts, etc.
But we are talking about averages. In the past we thought that the collective human knowledge available via the Internet will allow everyone to learn. I think it is fair to say that it didn't change much in the grand scheme of things.
> In the past we thought that the collective human knowledge available via the Internet will allow everyone to learn. I think it is fair to say that it didn't change much in the grand scheme of things.
Just an anecdote of course, but for me having access to the internet changed my life. I found a community I couldn't find locally (programming) as I'm from a rural place, and most of my employments since then have, in one way or another, come from people finding me on the internet. I'm surely not the only one who managed to climb the class ladder mostly because of the internet.
Overselling is not the right word exactly. For some questions it will have professor-level understanding, and for other questions it will have worse-than-idiot-level understanding. Hopefully the students are able to identify which :-)
Even after reading the 2025 updated version, reading the original made me absolutely giddy at the end.
I can only imagine the euphoria of reconciling the inputs of “the things I know to be true of computers and email” and “my emails won’t send further than 500 miles”. What a great story - thanks for posting the original.
I’ve seen some weird technical glitches in my career. One that i will always remember is that a customer was very happy with his new big computer, but could not work for multiple hours on it, because his office would get colder and colder when he kept using it. After some mailing and talking over the phone i suggested a visit to his office where i quickly found the cause of the problem: The big computer fan was aimed directly at the thermostat knob of the radiator, so it assumed the entire office was well heated and closed.
It's not quite in the same league as any of this, but when I was a child, we sent our Commodore 64 in for repairs several times because it started "writing" by itself. Gibberish would slowly appear as if someone was randomly hitting the keyboard.
Each time it took several days before they repair centre got to it, and they then contacted us to tell us there was nothing wrong with the computer at all.
After we picked it up, eventually, when it started happening again for the third or fourth time, we realised the problem:
The "large" (a whopping 26") CRT TV we'd recently started placing it under when not in use caused it... A few days away from the TV to dishcharge it, and it was fine - hence why the repair technician didn't find anything.
I know this story is a bit unrelated, but your story brought it to mind (probably the keywords child, repaired several times, etc): When I was a kid my father had a Nokia 3310. Any early Nokia owner would remember how you could configure your own 'welcome message', which would flash up on the phone's monochrome screen for a second while it boots. My Dad was an engineer, and would get totally hung up on the minutiae of anything technical. Picture him spending a totally inappropriate amount of time adjusting the TV's audio settings, for instance. One day I thought I'd play a prank on him, and changed the welcome message on his phone to say 'SIM CARD ERROR'. It sent him completely bananas, and triggered this huge quest to remedy the problem. He ended up taking it back to the local Vodafone store where he bought it multiple times, and they couldn't figure out what was wrong either. Maybe they got the joke and thought it was too funny, who knows. The store ended up escalating the case to Nokia and authorised an RMA. At which point I figured the joke had gone too far, and I reset the welcome message to 'Dad's Phone'. For some reason, he was happy just to leave it at that. I never confessed what I'd done! It caused way too much fuss, and I'd have been absolutely in for it if anyone figured it out!
I once had a desktop computer that had great uptime, but started to consistently crash when I got up and left the room to get a drink of water.
Turns out it was old building with loose floorboards. The vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a failing power supply. As long as I sat my desk, it was fine.
But I had a co-worker who had a worse problem with getting up to get a drink of water. Once while she was kitchen, an eight foot steel lighting ballast came loose from the ceiling and felt right onto her chair.That what-if memory still haunts me.
(not disclaiming that it wasn't, but that "chair piston causes EM surge" had me driven crazy for the longest time til I was able to pinpoint the cause)
That reminds me of one. I had a PC that would fail to boot the first time every day. Second and subsequent times were fine, until the next day.
When it stopped happening in the spring, and started again in the fall, it became obvious -- my apartment was too cold. The heat from the first failed boot sufficiently heated up the system to boot the second time.
“WiFi doesn’t work in the summer” is one of the first anecdotes I learned about WiFi when it was still brand new. You set up WiFi between two buildings in the winter, spring comes and the water in the leaves blocks the signal.
I had one of these myself. WiFi wouldn’t work when my wife was using her laptop in bed. As soon as she gave it to me, it started working again. She thought it was the magic touch of the engineer, but it turned out that when she was in bed, she pulled her knees up and set the computer on her lap, while I would lay down completely and let the computer rest on my chest. Her knees blocked the WiFi signal enough to be quite noticeable.
I wonder if the feeling is excitement or horror when you encounter one of these weird problems that seems like it has to be the user.
Not computer related really, but I'm reminded of when my Mom was helping set up macs in the lab at my middle school. I, a 4th grader, tagged along and hung out in the other lab across the hall. I got very incredulous looks when i claimed that there was a lizard in there. It was the Midwest over summer break! I was obviously a kid seeing things. There's no lizards here.
Then I produced it, caught under a bin. It was a brown anole that had come back in a plant sent from Florida. I wasn't crazy that day.
Since you mentioned your mom, mine is not as tech savvy. At one point she needed a computer to type something and print it, a simple use case so I came up with this idea of setting up a computer that would give me no tech support trouble, since I was living in another state. I installed CentOS, libre office and made sure the printer was supported.
I told my mom to keep the system up to date and set up an ssh connection for remote access just in case.
A few months go by and one day I receive a phone call that she cannot find the system updater shortcut anymore. I started to think how I could get Gnome to load over ssh, I was sure she moved the icon accidentally or something but decided to google it just in case.
Lo and behold and there is a bug report that due to some bug in package management dependency resolution the graphic software updater GUI could remove… itself… if the user performed a routine system update. It seemed to even affect RHEL at the time if I’m not mistaken.
A yum install command away over ssh and it was solved but that was the day I realized that no matter how stable a distro is famed to be or how much support it has from a company, there was still lots of work to be done until Linux could be seen as friendly enough for the end user.
Most of these are good, but "can't log in while standing up" is just too implausible. I can't possibly be led to believe that every single one of a whole group of technically-literate touch typers failed to notice that keys were swapped.
There also is the (somewhat) famous caps lock gamble in XCOM 2 [1].
Quote: "Hitting the key, through a rube-goldberg-esque series of events, forces all outstanding load requests to be filled immediately in a single frame. This causes a massive hitch, and potentially could crash the game. If you don't care about those adverse effects the synchronous load is faster."
Not to be that guy but this just isn’t a helpful heuristic and I think the author fundamentally misunderstands introductions. The point of self identifying with some operating principle (value-add) isn’t about guaranteeing it to be true, it’s a social contract that A: indicates your priorities and B: offers a short-circuit to credibility.
Just because you state yourself as value-add doesn’t mean I am going to believe you are a value-add, it indicates that being value-add is your priority, so if I need to call on my investors for something I might go to you first, and if you fail to be a value add then you discredit literally your entire existence in my professional network.
This is why “introduce yourself” is such a valuable question. It reveals how a person views themself in a context. Do they jump into titles? Achievements? Their operating principles? Their failures? Their insecurities?
> This is why “introduce yourself” is such a valuable question. It reveals how a person views themself in a context. Do they jump into titles? Achievements? Their operating principles? Their failures? Their insecurities?
An old standby I love that is familiar, warm, emphasizes respect and consent, and plays well with individuals or a group:
This is amazing and exactly what I needed as of ~12 hours ago.
The coincidence is kinda insane though - quick personal story I think is worth a readers time. I was just working on assets to develop a very quick (3-levels, built for one person) narrative romance game until I fell asleep last night. I’ve never developed any game of any kind.
I then wake up to a JS library for narrative games at the #1 spot on HN.
FTR the game is a simp game I’m using it to ask someone I’ve been seeing to make things official.
its a thoughtful idea – and been there too, just recently did a faithful html recreation of the 2005 MSN chat interface to surprise someone with teenage nostalgia. it was sweet.
If it's worth anything, this sounds very sweet and thoughtful, I don't think enjoying someone's company makes you a "simp" neither does showing attention.
Text doesn’t translate it well but that’s just my sarcastic sense of humor :)
I love trying and going a bit overboard because life is short and sweet and it’s your responsibility as a human to make it fun.
I do appreciate this comment though. I personally know a lot of my peers would be made better by internalizing your belief - I’m just not one of them :)
I know the nostalgia of your first tough job. Mine was certainly not as blue as the oil fields of Alberta, nor the railways, it really wasn’t even blue collar. But I did find it tough. I was a food runner in a kitchen built to serve 90 that served 450 + catered events.
The chaos and heat was overwhelming. My most active day was doing 30,000 steps during a 5 hour lunch shift, half of which were walked with a 40+ pound tray being carried just over my shoulder (on the shoulder was not classy enough). The kitchen was easily 110 degrees and had a single comically small fan that did absolute fuck all. The steam from the washing machine blasted you every time you went to grab bread, the chef was a maniac who makes “the bear” look really chill in comparison. And even without him every person in that kitchen was ready to explode at any time.
Fortunately I make quite a bit more now than I did then. I’ve made it to the other side of the dining car window, so to speak. But I really do miss it. Especially the chaos. If you spent 30 seconds in that kitchen, you’d be confused as to how a single dish ever made it out the door. And yet we consistently served 2k+ people on our busiest days.
It was the best job I’ve ever had and likely will ever have.
Mine was as a Domino's delivery driver in Angel, London. The long nights zipping in and out of cars on my moped, the generous tips you got on Saturdays, the non-descrit unmarked doors between two shopfronts that lead to an entire hidden luxury housing estate, the raucous office parties led by clearly coked up execs, and the not rare occurrences where you're invited up into someone's flat to hand deliver a pizza to their bed.
Nostalgia glasses fully on, it was best of the times.
I've had a few odd jobs before 'settling' as a software developer but while I appreciate the experience and diversity and sometimes think back on the simplicity of at least one of them, I don't really consider them the best jobs. I did a paper round (6 days a week, took about an hour), manufacturing (most brain-turn-off job ever), scaffold building (heaviest job, also because it was the height of summer), DIY store floor work (great part time job to do alongside an education), vegetable packing, that kind of thing.
Nowadays I rebuild front-ends over and over again. We're doing form fields again.
I believe everyone should work a service job at some point in their life. It gives a perspective you won't find anywhere else.
Your story brought back my memories of being a server in fine dining restaurants before landing my first programming gig. It was (mostly) controlled chaos with everyone on edge dealing with some of the most unreasonable people you could ever imagine. Did I also mention that I worked every single holiday?
It wasn't a restaurant attempting to be as regimented as The Bear, but similar story lines played out. Chefs yelling at each other, yelling at me, wanting to go out and yell at customers for ordering lamb well done, etc...
I wouldn't say I miss working in restaurants, but I do miss the finality of each service. When the last table left, that day was done. There was nothing to take home and stress about.
I waited tables for a few different places, none of it fine dining, but I did try to choose places with good food.
Two of the best were a homestyle italian place; I learned that smoked gouda is the best cheese for BBQ chicken pizza, and not too much sauce!
The other (my first restaurant work) was at a Turkish restaurant with homemade light brown whole wheat bread, cooked on a real stone oven. The owner, Kazim, was a bit of a wino whose stunningly beautiful wife was a PhD at the CDC in Atlanta. Opposites attact. Lamb and feta pizza is amazing.
The kitchen guy was a young-20s illegal from Mexico who hadn't seen his family in
18 months, and sent the money back. Juan was such an impressive human being. He taught me the Mexican version of the N-word, and said, "Do not ever say this." And I won't, but I remember it to this day.
And, that mezze plate was the best shift food ever, besides maybe that BBQ pizza.
Thanks for the nostalgia. Yes, I don't miss that kindof hard work, but the experience was invaluable, and I always tip well. It's an easy bit of good karma to put an extra smile on someone's face because we shared our hard-earned cash with them in appreciation for their difficult and oft-underappreciated work.
There's a lot of talk around here lately about 'vibe coding' but I'm far more into 'vibe living' where we consciously create good vibrations in the people around us. There are so many people in this world spreading their negativity who should instead take us service-oriented folks' understanding of service to humanity as a societal baseline. Not all of us who graduated out of low-level jobs retain our humility and humanity, but it makes those of us who do better, more caring and considerate citizens.
No nostalgic feelings here: I was conscripted when I was 19 and did my alternative civilian service in a home for Alzheimer patients for roughly a year. Although I was not directly involved in care (I managed the kitchen, gave food to the patients, did smaller repairs, cleaned), it was, by a large margin, the hardest job I ever had. It was the first time I became clearly aware that there is a part of the population that cannot even publicly complain about their workload because they are too tired in the evening to even hold a basic conversation.
Although the home looked nice and clean, and there were some sweet moments, the place in general was crazy and frightening to newcomers and visitors. Patients wandered off through the fire exits, they fought with each other, they died, they went to the toilet in the corner of their rooms, they were sexually interested in each other, grabbed breasts and ran around naked, they fell and injured themselves, they got panic attacks because they wanted to go home, because they suddenly thought they were in a bomber attack on Berlin in 1944 and had to go to the bunker - I could go on and on. One patient, a sweet old lady, was convinced that I was her fiance who died during their flight from Danzig in 1944. After a few weeks, she was convinced I had an affair with another woman, and her feelings towards me became more hostile. During my first week, an old, huge WW2 U-boat sailor became convinced he was in a bar fight and started attacking people. We had to lock him into his room.
My major responsibilities, lunch, breakfast and dinner, were usually complete chaos: imaging a room full of adults who behave like 2 year olds. They tried to eat their drinks with a fork, fell into their soup plates, threw their food onto the floor, complained about the food, refused to drink, cried, choked on the food, wandered off, all while a single patient who didn't even recognize her son anymore loudly proclaimed poems she learned in school as a little girl.
Dealing with relatives was also challenging, because they usually refused to accept the state their loved ones were in. We had one wife who repeatedly wanted us to get her husband to read Plato and Aristotle again, because "he loves doing this". But her husband, a former professor, couldn't even read or write his own name anymore and was mainly interested in trying to get female patients naked.
Other highlights include the time I confused the liquid for our industrial dish washer with a container of hand soap (they looked exactly the same) and flooded the entire kitchen and dining room with a 10 cm carpet of foam. Also, I once worked the late shift for 11 days straight, without a single free day in between. I am sure that wasn't even legal. Afterwards I couldn't remember what I did on individual days, it somehow all blurred together.
All for a pay of around 300 EUR per month (40 hours/week, back in 2007). I was so glad when it was over. But the experience greatly helped me in my later jobs, to put the workload into perspective. It was a humbling experience.
Oh, and 3 or 4 times, someone was convicted by court to do social work and help me out for a few weeks. These were always interesting characters. We once had a girl in her mid-twenties who attacked and beat up her friend in a fit of rage because she stole her boyfriend, and was convicted to a few months on probation and to 2 weeks doing my job. Surprisingly, she greatly enjoyed the work and often told me that it was much less stressful here than in her normal job. She worked full-time at Aldi, and although it seemed to pay good money, she had recently been diagnosed with stress-induced heart arrhythmia after some years of working there.
I spent my late teens driving a weed eater walking behind tractors mowing highways and state parks in North Texas. 100+F many days in the summer and required to wear work boots and eye protection (very hot), I still have scars from sunburns on my arms. Most of my family on my mom's side are West Texas oil hands and ranchers. My grandfather, all of my uncles, and most cousins are dead or their bodies broken to the point they can barely walk or stand up and live in constant pain. Widows are very very common in West Texas.
> The kitchen was easily 110 degrees and had a single comically small fan that did absolute fuck all.
I worked as a server at a Golden Corral (large all-you-can-eat buffet here in the States). One summer Sunday, the AC went out early afternoon. By the shift change, I was already literally soaked, other servers called out, so I decided to help out and work a double. Note that this was Sunday, so the church folks (nice but hardly the best tippers, as GC is cheap American grub) were more interested in buffet eating than the insane heat, so it was still packed!
But the best job I ever had was walking security routes (not for intrusions, but for spotting safety problems like leaks or smells or a worker in distress, none of which ever happened) on ships in local shipyards, including a massive BAE one. We'd walk the routes and tap the RFID tag-dots with the wand, twice an hour.
The first ship I walked (for $8/hr) was one of only four transocean cable laying ships. It had two huge vertical cyllindrical wells that stored the cables that would be fed out the back as it laid them. Getting to see the entire ship, walking up and down the ladders, into the engine room and around the bridge and those two giant wells was sooo cool.
Other ships I got to work on were a navy ammo resupply ship being decommissioned, a cruise ship, and, best of all, a huge container ship with a geek-salivating bridge whose engine room was massive and clean and spacious. I got to see it all, and be paid to exercise.
And seeing a pair of guys wrangling a huge elbow pipe section out of its very tight space using chains and pulleys to inch the giant (meter in diameter with inch-thick steel) up and over using hand-crank lever things was impressive. The connections were ringed with maybe inch-thick bolts, just massive.
I often poke my nose into my daughter's all-metal-gear Singer 503a sewing machine's top to get a whiff of that industrial grease to remind me of that badass engineering room smell.
Another great assignment was for a smaller shipyard that did small yacht repairs. It only had room to do one at a time, but the part of the walk that went through their office had a little living room-style waiting room that had a coffee table with a coffee table book on it that catalogued the Dodge brothers' (founders of the automobile company) use of their profits to build and sail luxury yachts on the Great Lakes. Those early 1900s ships were gorgeous. Those engine guys did well for themselves (I believe they built the original engines for Ford).
The key to the job, however, was I got weekly overtime at 1.5x, so I'd pick up any shift I could, as all hours >40 were $12/hr. One week I worked 64 hours, including 20 straight! My wife and I would sometimes literally just see (or just miss) each other as she got home from her restaurant work, and I would be going to the shipyard.
Thanks for the inspiration, friend. Yes, times used to be far simpler, and in many ways more enjoyable in that simplicty, sweat, and smells.
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