Most times that a country attacks another is a tragedy of the commons situation. A few people at the top will profit from the war even if most citizens from both countries lose because of it.
The country as its citizens does not profit from war. The country as its leaders sometimes it does, or at least it may do so in the short term.
Which is why the recent wars between Israel and Hezbollah, Iran and Houthis are so paradigm shifting. It's the first time in all of human history that the leaders are the ones to die first. If this is the new status quo due to modern intelligence capabilities and stealth fighters, then you're dealing with a whole different set of incentives.
The first time in recent history, yes. Not sure about the first time in all of human history: human history is long, and often leaders used to lead from the front.
Two states are at war, and their constituent citizens are helping each other despite the war, and you imply that's the manufactured part? Heaven help us, we should all be so lucky if whoever's manufacturing that happens to improve their assembly lines a bit. Maybe they'll manufacture all of us being interested in no wars again, ever.
I think what they refer to is that while the interests of the individual and the country almost never align, the government can work to align these interests; e.g. through tariffs on trading with that other country. By doing so, a country can reduce/remove the incentive to trade with that other country's individuals, thus aligning the interests.
Although most likely she’s well compensated, and doesn’t have to waste time on useless efforts at work, this level of discipline and striving towards a goal is just very rare in general.
Possibly also no family, limited social life and no other hobbies.
For myself, when I lived on a different continent to my family, had limited social life and job with strictly set hours, it was much easier to have the time needed to make significant progress on a hobby.
However, discipline is an enormous factor too, actually using that extra available time on something “productive” is no easy feat.
Now I have kids and live in the same area as my parents and siblings again, entirely happy, but less free time.
2021 and 2022 was also when many places were only just coming out of COVID lockdowns. I remember how much dead time I had back then. I used it to watch lots of series and youtube videos. I wish I had the discipline and motivation to work like she did during that area with all that free time.
Yeah same. I made a dent in my gaming backlog and TV shows and built a gaming computer that has only ever been used to play Factorio (notably, a game that can probably be played without a GPU).
Half of me kinda wants another lockdown so I can do more discipline-y stuff but the other half is like, dude you're just gonna waste it playing more games. I just gotta face the music - I'm just not disciplined and I just don't have the drive.
She does a bunch of social media stuff with her girlfriend on top of that, so “limited social life and no other hobbies” may not be a good description.
It’s Russian state ideology: freedom doesn’t actually exist, the only way is a total subordination to a nation state, only certain nations states are allowed to be independent (Russia is one of them), others are to be vasals to us, because of our capacity to make war.
If you live in Russia, you need this kind of beliefs.
Can they afford a middle class lifestyle with just 100k? My understanding of costs of living in California puts people in that range in the working class with a very low rate of savings (no hope to escape into middle class even with compounding) or they could afford a small family and no savings.
What does the alternative look like though? Sure tech companies pay engineers well, but there's plenty of other jobs requiring a college degree that don't reach that salary level.
… but not in most cities in CA is the OP’s point, actually not even is most large cities on either coast. Which isn’t to say it’s not possible, you could definitely live well elsewhere on that salary but there is an obsession with coastal cities.
They're just matching your energy. $100k is an entry-level number in this conversation and, yes, solidly middle class in most cities in California. There's no shortage of homes in nice neighborhoods available here for under $600k, including in large metros like Sacramento. You aren't going to find that in the Bay Area, but the Bay Area isn't representative of the whole state. Not even close.
They're not going to take jobs across California. They could just move further inland and take jobs towards the coast. In fact, I met many blue collar folks who did precisely that. Stockton to SF is just a bit more than an hour.
If I were an 18 year old financially savvy person making $100k a year in California, I would probably take home about $70k. About $1k, maybe $2k at the highest would be set aside for rent with roommates because I'm 18 and there's very little upside to me having my own apartment yet.
Groceries here in Finland are more expensive than I remember them ever being in the United States, and so based on my current budget I would set aside about $300 per month for food for myself. Maybe $400 if I wanted to go to restaurants more often. $500 is reasonable too. Over $1000 and you are deluding yourself or need to buy a rice cooker.
I'm still saving about $40,000 per yer, over half of my take home pay, conservatively. I'd consider that really good! What I do with that is my business, but on one extreme, if I threw all of that directly into my retirement fund, at a 7% real rate of return (reasonable given past index fund performance, already adjusted for inflation), I would have roughly $1 million in today's money by the time I'm 65.
But of course that's ignoring the real elephant in the room, which is that wages are famously sticky, and getting paid $100k by 18 is probably the single most surefire way to get paid $1 million by 30. The kinds of things and the kind of person you have to be to pull that off are where that price signal is coming from, and so I take away from this that, as is often the case in finance, these kids are probably not going to have to worry about that much money-wise even if they don't stick to a strictly calibrated plan.
I actually don't, those are the only two expenses my family has. Come to think of it those are the only two expenses I've ever had. I guess if we lived in the countryside we'd need a car, so, three expense categories total.
But alright, gather all of these other miscellaneous expenses up and take out another $10k per year to cover them. You still have $30,000 left if you're paying $2k a month on rent.
You don't pay for utilities, or public transport? Your family has never had to pay for clothes, or school books, or healthcare expenses (I know those aren't completely socialized in Finland)?
I agree an 18-year-old earning $100k is doing great even in the most expensive parts of California, but you don't sound like you've ever actually had to think through a household budget.
I would think that there would still be other expenses in some form:
- Utilities on shared apartment with roommates (unless you are lumping this into rent)
- Doctors co-pays (or the money to spend out of pocket until you meet your deductible, depending on your health insurance)
If you have a car,
- car insurance
- gas
- car maintenance costs such as 6 month services
At 18? Who is starting a family at 18 years old in that climate?
Claude Opus's Fermi estimate of the number of 18 year olds, making at least $100,000 a year, in California, with children, to be about 8 people. Not 8 thousand, not 8 hundred. Eight. Single digit. In a state of 40 million people.
I'll give you even odds that the number is within 4 orders of magnitude of correct. That is to say, in the year of 2025, there are/were fewer than 100,000 18 year olds, resident in the state of California, who have at least one child, and who made over $100,000 that year. If you prove me wrong I'll happily concede the point.
The demographics stats say no. It is not the job of the individual to engage in self destructive life plans because the previous generations have eaten the future and wrapped in nostalgia extruded plans think they can now comand them around like plantation owners cattle.
I agree that it is probably easier for an LLM to write good code in any framework (like Rails) that has a lot of well-documented opinions about how things should be done. If there is a "right" place to put things, or a "right" way to model problems in a framework, its more likely that the model's opinions are going to line up with the human engineer's opinions.
Also - that's easy for everyone. It's basically a framework so rigid/simple (Those are adjacent concepts for frameworks) that the business logic is almost boilerplate.
That is, so long as you stay inside the guard rails. Ask it to make something in a rails app that's slightly beyond the CRUD scope and it will suffer - much like most humans would.
So it's not that it's bad to let bots do boilerplate. But using very qualified humans for that to begin with was a waste to begin with.
Hopefully in a few years none of us will need to do ANY part of CRUD work and we can do only the fun parts of software development.-
But isn't it crazy that while it's been impressively great at translating between human languages from the start, it's incapable of translating these well-documented best-ways-to-do-it things across domains or even programming languages.
It’s the style. Responses are always eloquent and well structured. When you look at output for a domain you don’t know well, you give it benefit of the doubt because it sounds like a highly competent human, so you react similarly. When you use it with something you know very deeply, you naturally look more for substance rather than form, and thus spot the mistakes much easier. This breaks most illusions of amazing reasoning abilities etc.
My ChatGPT is amazingly competent at gardening! Well, that’s how it feels anyway. Is it correct? I have no idea. It sounds right. Fortunately, it’s just a new hobby for me and the stakes are low. But generally I think it’s much better to be paranoid than gullible when it comes to confident sounding ramblings, whether it’s from an LLM or a marketing guru.
> I wish people could be a bit more open about what they build.
I would say for the last 6 months, 95% of the code for my chat app (https://github.com/gitsense/chat) was AI generated (98% human architected). I believe what I created in the last 6 months was far from trivial. One of the features that AI helped a lot with, was the AI Search Assistant feature. You can learn more about it here https://github.com/gitsense/chat/blob/main/packages/chat/wid...
As a debugging partner, LLMs are invaluable. I could easily load all the backend search code into context and have it trace a query and create a context bundle with just the affected files. Once I had that, I would use my tool to filter the context to just those files and then chat with the LLM to figure out what went wrong or why the search was slow.
I very much agree with the author of the blog post about why LLMs can't really build software. AI is an industry game changer as it can truly 3x to 4x senior developers in my opinion. I should also note that I spend about $2 a day on LLM API calls (99% to Gemini 2.5 Flash) and I probably have to read 200+ LLM generated messages a day and reply back in great detail about 5 times a day (think of an email instead of chat message).
Note: The demo on that I have in the README hasn't been setup, as I am still in the process of finalizing things for release but the NPM install instructions should work.
> probably have to read 200+ LLM generated messages a day and reply back in great detail about 5 times a day (think of an email instead of chat message).
I can think of nothing more tiresome than having to read 200 emails a day, or LLM chat messages. And then respond in detail 5 of those times. It wouldn't lead to "3x to 4x" performance gain after tallying up all the time reading messages and replying. I'm not sure people that use LLMs this way are really tracking their time enough to say with any confidence that "3x to 4x" is anywhere close to reality.
A lot of the messages are revisions so it is not as tedious as it may seem. As for the "3x to 4x", this is my own experience. It is possible that I am an outlier, but 80% of the generated AI code that I have are one-shot. I spend an hour or two (usually spread over days thinking about the problem) to accomplish something that would have taken a week or more for me to do.
I'm going to start producing metrics regarding how much code is AI generated along with some complexity metrics.
I am obviously bias, but this definitely feels like a paradigm shift and if people do not fully learn to adapt to it, it might be too late. I am not sure if you have ever watched Gattaca, but this sort of feels like it...the astronaut part, that is.
The profession that I have known for decades is starting to feel very different, in the same way that while watching Gattaca, my perception of astronauts changed. It was strange, but plausible and that is what I see for the software industry. Those that can articulate the problem I believe will become more valuable than the silent genius.
The same noise was made about pair programming and it hasn't really caught on. Using LLMs to write code is one way of getting code written, but it isn't necessarily the best, and it seems kind of fad-ish honestly. Yes, I use "AI" in my coding workflow, but it's overall more annoying than it is helpful. If you're naturally 3x-4x times slower than I am, then congratulations, you're now getting up to speed. It's all pretty subjective I think.
This is very measurable, as you are not measuring against others, but yourself. The baseline is you, so it is very easy to determine if you become more productive or not. What you are saying is, you do not believe "you" can leverage AI to be more efficient than you currently are, which may well be true due to your domain and expertise.
No matter what "AI" can or can't do for me, it's being forced on us all anyway, which kind of sucks. Every time I select something the AI wrote it's collecting a statistic and I'm sure someone is probably monitoring how much we use the "AI" and that could become a metric for job performance, even if it doesn't really raise quality or amplify my output very much.
> being forced on us all anyway, which kind of sucks
Business is business, and if you can demonstrate that you are needed they will keep you, for the most part, but business also has politics.
> probably monitoring how much we use the "AI" and that could become a metric for job performance
I will bet on this and take it one step further. They (employer) are going to want to start tracking LLM conversations. If everybody is using AI, they (employer) will need differentiators to justify pay raises, promotions and so forth.
Are you implying that someone starting to use AI now has already been left so far behind by experienced users that they would never catch up? That seems ridiculous - it seems to be getting better understood with time, which should make catching up increasingly easier.
It's actually more than 6 months. 6 months was when I developed enough to start chatting with AI to be really productive. Moving forward once the licence is in place and the files become unminifed you can track exactly what ai generated.
It summarized the instructions required to install and setup. It (Gemini and Sonnet) did fail to mention that I need to setup a server and create a DNS entry for the sub domain.
yeah, tipically they are building a to do list and organizer app and have not found that github is flooded with college students' project of their revolutionary to-do apps
I don’t want to dismiss or disrespect anyone’s work. But I never see precise descriptions of categories of tasks that work well, it’s all based on vibes.
I recently built a data streaming connector in Go with all kinds of bells and whistles attached (yaml based data parsers, circuit breakers, e2e stress testing frameworks, etc). Worked like a charm, I estimate it made two months of work about two weeks.
Whenever you think of a court versus Facebook, imagine one of these mini mice trying to stick it to a polar bear. Or a goblin versus a dragon, or a fly versus an elephant.
These companies are for the most part effectively outside of the law. The only time they feel pressure is when they can lose market share, and there's risk of their platform being blocked in a jurisdiction. That's it.
>These companies are for the most part effectively outside of the law
You have it wrong in the worst way. They are wholly inside the law because they have enough power to influence the people and systems that get to use discretion to determine what is and isn't inside the law. No amount of screeching about how laws ought to be enforced will affect them because they are tautologically legal, so long as they can afford to be.
The worst part for me personally is that almost everyone I know cares about this stuff and yet they keep all of their Meta accounts. I really don't get it and frankly, find it kind of disturbing.
I know people that don't see anything wrong with Meta so they keep using it. And that's fine! Your actions seem to align with your stated values.
I get human fallibility. I've been human for awhile now, and wow, have I made some mistakes and miscalculations.
What really puts a bee in my bonnet though is how dogmatic some of these people are about their own beliefs and their judgement of other people.
I love people, I really do. But what weird, inconsistent creatures we are.
Voting with your feet doesn't work if you don't have a place to go. People are afraid of losing their connections, which are some of the most precious things we have. Doesn't matter if it's an illusion, that's enough. Zuck is holding us hostage on our most basic human instincts. I think that's fucked up.
> The worst part for me personally is that almost everyone I know cares about this stuff and yet they keep all of their Meta accounts.
They care as much as people who claim to care about animals but still eat them, people who claim to love their wives and still beat/cheat them. Your actions are the sole embodiment of your beliefs
Eh, I care and I don't do it, but my wife does. I do not agree with her choices in that area and voice the concerns in a way that I hoped would speak to her, but it does not work as it is now a deeply ingrained habit.
I, too, have vices she tolerates so I don't push as hard as I otherwise would have, but I would argue it is not inconsistency. It is a question of what level of compromise is acceptable.
I keep sharing stories like this with them. Privacy violations, genocide, mental health, …. Whenever I think it might be something someone cares about I share with them. I also make an effort to explain to my non tech folks that meta is Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp, to make sure they understand recognize the name. Many people do not know what meta is. Sometimes I suspect it was a way to capture the bad publicity and protect their brands.
$1 for the first user, $2 for second, $4 for third...By the 30th user, it would be painful even for mega corps. By 40th, it would be an absurd number.
Might also be worth trying to force them to display a banner on every page of the site "you're on facebook, you have no privacy here", like those warnings on cigarette boxes. These might not work though, people would just see and ignore them, just like smokers ignore warnings about cigarettes.
But these users were NOT on Facebook. It was an app using the FB SDK. So it should be the apps that use SDKs should put up large banners clearly identifying who they are sharing data with. Some of these sites are sharing with >100 3rd party sites. It is outrageous
Everybody blames facebook, noone blames the legislators and the courts.
Stuff like this could easily make them pay multi-billion dollar fines, stuff that affects more users maybe even in the trillion range. When government workers come pick up servers, chairs and projectors from company buildings to sell at an auction, because there is not enough liquid value in the company to pay the fines, they (well, the others) would reconsider quite fast and stop with the illegal activities.
Sarah Williams (forgot the name) testified in US Congress as to Facebooks strategies on handling governments. Based on her book, it seems Brazil has been the most effective out of major democratic governments in confronting Facebook. Of course, you have China completely banning Facebook.
I think Mark Zuckerberg is acutely aware of the political power he holds and has been using this immense power at least for the last decade. But since Facebook is a US company and the US government is not interested in touching Faceebok, I doubt anyone will see what Zuckerberg and Facebook are up to. The US would have to put Lina Khan back in at the FTC, or put her high up in the Department of Justice to split Facebook into pieces. I guess the other hope is that states' attorneys' general when an anti-monopoly lawsuit.
Don't get me wrong, I don't "blame Facebook". I lament the environment that empowers Facebook to exist and do harm. These companies should be gutted by the state, but they won't because they pump the S&P.
Funny, but this kinda implies that some person designed this way. It's a resultant sum of small vectors, with corporate lobbying playing a significant role. Corporate lobbying systemically can't do anything else than try to increase profits, which usually means less regulation. Clean slate design would require a system collapse.
> Corporate lobbying systemically can't do anything else than try to increase profits, which usually means less regulation.
Corporate lobbying can be for more regulation. It can disadvantage competitors. Zuckerberg has spoken in favour of greater regulation of social media in the past. The UK's Online Safety Act creates barriers to entry and provides and excuse for more tracking. I can think of examples, some acknowledged by the CEOs of the companies involved, ranging from British pubs to American investment banks.
From "do you want X? this is how you get X". This invokes an image of talking to a person who decided the how, because they can be questioned on whether they want the X.
Zuck can take his model onto his private island and talk to it instead of trying to be a normal human being.
Don't conflate me with the personality worshippers on HN, I'm not one of them, even though it seems like it to you because I also post here. You won't find a single instance of me glazing tech leaders.
> doesn't mean he's work isn't a net negative to society
Oh he absolutely is.
I'm just saying that it's common in this community to attribute the achievements of big companies to leadership (E.g. the mythology of Steve Jobs), but dismiss all the evil stuff to "systemic issues".
I once ran across Zuckerberg in a Palo Alto cafe. I only noticed him (I was in the process of ordering a sandwich, and don’t really care about shit like that) because he was being ‘eeeeeeee’d’ by a couple of random women that he didn’t seem to know. He seemed pretty uncomfortable about the whole thing. One of them had a stroller which she was profoundly ignoring during the whole thing, which I found a bit disturbing.
The next time I saw him in Palo Alto (a couple months later on the street), he had 2 totally-not-security-dudes flanking him, and I saw at least one random passerby ‘redirected’ away from him. This wasn’t at the cafe though, it wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t go there again.
This was a decade before Luigi. Luigi was well after meta was in the news for spending massive amounts of money on security and Zuck had a lot of controversy for his ‘compound’ in PA.
I can assure you, Meta is well aware of the situation, and a Luigi isn’t going to have a chance in this situation.
The reality in my experience that is any random person given the amount of wealth these folks end up with would end up making similar (or worse) decisions, and while contra-pressure from Luigi’s is important in the overall system, folks like Zuckerberg are more a result of the system and rules than the cause of them (but then influence the next system/rules in a giant Oroborous type situation).
Kind of a we either die young a hero, or live to be the villain kind of thing. But because the only reason anyone dies a young hero is because they lost the fight against the prior old villains. If they’d won (even in a heroic fashion), life would turn them into the old villains shortly.
> he was being ‘eeeeeeee’d’ by a couple of random women
Maybe I'm too old, but what in the world does being eeee'd mean?
>I can assure you, Meta is well aware of the situation, and a Luigi isn’t going to have a chance in this situation.
With all due respect, Luigi was just a CS student with a six pack, a self made gun, and a aching back on a mission.
The Donald himself nearly got got by his ear while he had the secret service of the US of A to protect him, not some private goons for hire, and that was just a random redditor with a rifle, not a professional assassin.
So what would happen if let's say meta's algorithms push a teenage girl to kill herself by exploiting her self esteem issues to sell her more beauty products, and her ex-navy seal dad with nothing more to loose grabs his McMillan TAC-338 boom stick and makes his life mission to avenge his lost daughter at the expense of his own? Zuck would need to be lucky every time, but that bad actor would need to be lucky once.
I'm not advocating for violence btw, my comment was purely hypothetical.
Pretty much anyone without presidential quality security clearing the place ahead of them stands to get clapped Franz Ferdinand style by anyone dedicated enough to camp out waiting.
And yet, Mr. Trump is up there trolling the world like he loves to do, and Zuck is out there doing whatever he wants.
The reality is, all those ex-navy seal Dad’s are (generally) wishing they could make the cut to get on those dudes payroll, not gunning for them. Or sucking up to the cult, in general.
The actual religious idea of Karma is not ‘bad things happen to bad people right now’, the way we would like.
Rather ‘don’t hate on king/priest/rich dude, they did something amazing in a prior life which is why they deserve all this wealth right now, and if they do bad things, they’ll go down a notch - maybe middle class - in the next life’.
It’s to justify why people end up suffering for no apparent reason in this life (because they had to have done something really terrible in a prior life), while encouraging them to do good things still for a hopefully better next life (if you think unclogging Indian sewers in this life is bad, you could get reincarnated as a roach in that sewer in the next life!). So they don’t go out murdering everyone they see, even if they get shit on constantly.
There is no magic bullet. Hoping someone else is going to solve all your problems is exactly how manipulative folks use you for their own purposes. And being a martyr to go after some asshole is being used that way too.
This is also why eventually an entire generation of hippies turned into accountants in the 80’s.
Using the entropic model you seem to indicate (which I also favor), us vs them seems to be the lowest energy state.
It’s certainly possible to not be there at any given time, but seems to require a specific and somewhat unique set of circumstances, which are not the most energetically stable.
I think post malthusian trap its very possible to have enough resources for everyone and thus no reason to be an oppressor; from a cultural context you have books like the pedagogy of the oppressed which aims to educate one out of the goal of becoming the oppressor.
"I can assure you, Meta is well aware of the situation, and a Luigi isn’t going to have a chance in this situation."
Luigi was a dude with a 3D printed gun.
I have LASERs with enough power to self-focus, have zero ballistic drop, and can dump as much power as a .50cal BMG in a millisecond burst of light which can hit you from the horizon's edge. All Zuck needs to do is stand by a window, and eyeballs would vaporize.
Mangione is going to either die rotting in prison, or preferably get sent to the electric chair. His life will be wasted. Meanwhile, UNH is continuing to do business as usual. One way or the other, mangione will die knowing his life was wasted, and that his legacy is not reform but cold-blooded murder.
Call it a “day of rage” or just babyrage but we build systems so our bus factor can increase above 1. Just killing people no longer breaks them. It makes someone nothing more than a juvenile murderer.
I don’t really care what lasers you have, I’d suggest you choose a different legacy for yourself.
> I only noticed him (I was in the process of ordering a sandwich) because he was being ‘eeeeeeee’d’ by a couple of random women that he didn’t seem to know. He seemed pretty uncomfortable about the whole thing.
Pretty funny considering that Facebook's origin story was a women comparison site, or this memorable quote:
> People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks.
Have you ever ordered a really good steak, like amazing. And really huge, and inexpensive too.
And it really is amazing! And super tasty.
But it’s so big, and juicy, that by the end of it you feel sick? But you can’t stop yourself?
And then at the end of it, you’re like - damn. Okay. No more steak for awhile?
If not steak, then substitute cake. Or Whiskey.
Just because you got what you wanted doesn’t mean you’re happy with all the consequences, or can stomach an infinitely increasing quantity of it.
Of course, he can pay to mitigate most of them, and he gets all the largest steaks he could want now, so whatever. I’m not going to cry about it. I thought it was interesting to see develop however.
Personally, I see it as poetic justice. He started off on objectifying women with FaceMash, he doesn't get to cry about being objectified and drooled over himself.
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