If you had asked me in 1995 what was the one thing[1] that Boston could change in order to compete with Silicon Valley I would have told you "Make non-compete agreements illegal" Companies in the Bay Area whined about it all the time but it kept the ecosystem vibrant and a lot of technology exists because of that. In the late 90's early '00s a big reason for a lot of 'high profile' people quitting their cushy job and setting out in a startup was because 'management' wouldn't allow them to move forward on an idea that they felt would "disrupt our own business." Those same people could quit, create a start up, and make that idea real anyway. So this is excellent progress for Washington State. I wonder how many ex-Microsoft employees this effects.
[1] I vacillated between this and California law giving ownership of what you worked on in your own time on your own equipment yours, except the latter was pretty effectively neutered by big corps defining their businesses more vaguely.
Massachusetts used to be one of the most favourable states for non-compete agreements, with strong legal protection and support, favouring companies. Not sure if that has changed since the last time I looked (been a few years).
Yes. At the time, non-compete agreements were legal (and commonplace) in Massachusetts. I haven't followed the Boston tech news for a decade so they may have changed that. But I had this exact conversation with Senator Ed Markey who was a congressman at the time. He was in the Bay Area and I was one of the people who were invited to a dinner he held on "Technology and Innovation."
> Framework Laptop is more expensive than a Macbook Air with all around worse hardware.
Is it though? I'd agree the hardware is less capable but if your Macbook anything is really just one 'top case' repair away from being more expensive. RAM failure is 'motherboard replace', the display? it is similarly expensive to replace.
So I would agree that it is more expensive to purchase a Framework laptop than a Macbook laptop, but also feel it is more expensive to own a Macbook laptop than a Framework laptop. Also I just replaced the screen on my FW13 not because it was broken but because they have one with 4x the pixels on it now. That's not something I could have done with the Macbook.
What is the probability of those things failing during the time you have the MacBook? I've had Apple portables since they were called PowerBooks and the only problem I've had that wasn't caused by violence was a battery swelling, and that cost me something like $120 to replace, not a big deal. If you add 5% to the price, that's probably about your expected cost for repairs or premature replacements if you don't have a habit of damaging your equipment.
If'd rather not take a low risk of a big repair/replacement bill and you don't mind helping Big Fruit make a bit more of a profit, you can pay them $50-150/year (depending on model) to take that risk. Multiply that by the number of years you expect to own the device to come up with a "real" cost including repairs/replacements.
My Framework 13 is a bit long in the tooth. I can pay 529 EUR to get a new mainboard and keep the same case/battery/speakers/camera/keyboard/mouse/screen/etc. Or, I can replace the keyboard for 32 EUR.
It's not just repairs, to upgrade a Mac you have to throw away all that perfectly working hardware just to get a new mainboard.
> I can pay 529 EUR to get a new mainboard and keep the same case/battery/speakers/camera/keyboard/mouse/screen/etc.
Or you can spend 50 euros more and get an entire new laptop that is not only much more powerful than your old framework but is almost as repairable: the neo.
At some point your argument begins to work against you, you should just have talked about the keyword repair being cheap. Not how you can get a new motherboard for "only" 530 euros.
> Or you can spend 50 euros more and get an entire new laptop that is not only much more powerful than your old framework but is almost as repairable: the neo.
You forget to mention - less powerful than his old FW 13 with new mainboard/CPU.
I assume he's referring to the AMD AI 340 for 530 euros.[0]
Macbook Neo 31% faster ST speed and a bit slower on the MT.[1]
I wouldn't call the Neo less powerful than his 530 euros upgrade. In fact, I'd much rather have the faster ST speed in this kind of laptop. Most of the apps you're running with this class of laptops will be ST bound anyway.
You can literally get a brand new Macbook Neo using Apple EDU pricing for the price of a slower AMD motherboard upgrade. This is why Framework is an absolutely terrible deal overall. I'm not even convinced that Framework is better for the environment since Apple laptops last extremely long and will very often have second and third hand buyers.
> What is the probability of those things failing during the time you have the MacBook?
and
> ... you can pay them $50-150/year (depending on model) to take that risk.
These things are related, Apple knows what the failure rate in the field for their hardware is, and they "price in" that failure rate into their AppleCare costs. On my iPad pro, that's $90/year.
That said, it is entirely a 'bet' on your part as to whether or not you're in a position to cover costs of repair/replacement in the event of damage. That depends on a lots of factors and includes how much you can tolerate not having the equipment for a while, Etc.
I think the article downplays the element that the attack probably achieved its goal which was not to actually hit something at Diego Garcia, but to show that thing 2500 miles from Iran are potentially targetable by Iran. That starts conversations like the one here and in other fora about whether or not Iran would limit themselves to military targets (Russia doesn't as an example) and if not how could Europe and its East Asian allies protect literally everything with their finite supply of defensive units.
I heard the same about the number and location of French nuclear war heads, or their exact red lines. If you tell the enemy your limit they're gonna sit exactly on it.
Attacks on Israel clearly show that Iran - just like Russia - sees the civilian population as a legitimate target. Question of tactics remains, of course.
Except it would be very weird goal to achieve because it's only give more reasons to bomb whole country into oblivion and justify deployment of ground troops.
They’re at war. The US and Israel are bombing everything anyway.
Strategically, Diego Garcia is a forward operating base for irreplaceable B-52 and B-2 bombers. Placing them at risk on the ground seems like a reckless call, more likely the US pulls those resources back to the US.
I’m not rooting for Iran, but since the US has who they have making the calls, Iran has obvious strategic cards to play - escalation benefits them.
Could be. But won't be. The flying time to target is mere minutes, and taking the plane from zero (not even crew inside) to air takes much longer than that.
Why would Iran end up further isolated due to this war, and out of escalation? (your sentence is slightly ambiguous so I assume that you are referring to it.) If it successfully asserts control over the Strait as it seems to presently be doing, it should be able to negotiate a peace favorable to itself. Even with the status quo, I don't know how that figures into things, but the US has temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil.
I don't follow the news very well, but from what I know the claim that you make isn't very obviously true but needs some evidence for it to stand.
I think this is the elephant in the roomt - in terms of quantifiable goals, Iran is winning this thing. I think they're going to want to punish the US and Israel to an extent where they will be reluctant to feel this particular sting again, and they want to assert their ability to control the strait. And it's working! They're clearly demonstrating that the US cannot simply decide when this is over and dictate terms, because Iran can pinch off an important vein of global commerce and probably sustain that pressure for far longer than it can be tolerated by other economies.
They've already gotten one concession in terms of this temporary sanctions relief, even as Trump frames it as a domestic emergency measure and repeatedly declares total victory each day of the conflict. They also got him to back off on targeting their power plants by promising to retaliate in kind against the power infrastructure of US aligned states in range.
I think the US has the ability to beat Iran in a fight, but it does not have the preparation or the resolve to do so at this time, because this is some halfcocked nonsense plan with amorphous goals that they thought would be over in a week.
maybe they aren't as worried about that as they should be. maybe america isn't as worried about that as it should be.
but, what are you saying? it would be weird for iran to act in a way that might provoke escalation? you mean in the totally unprovoked war israel/america launched against them?
I don't know which country you're from, but in most countries, "our troops may get bombed if we join this war" is a very strong public argument against joining the war.
Just look at Trump's latest attempt to enlist his "allies" into sending warships to the Strait of Hormuz, and what a resounding success it was.
Maintaining peace is not the same as restoring peace. Perhaps the American executive should have extrapolated the consequences of their actions using a model of the real world and not the fever dream they seem to be in. I am all for the Europeans standing their ground and not letting themselves get dragged into a conflagration not of their desiring nor of their making.
Trump and co are finding out that FAFO goes both ways. Much to the cost of all of us, Americans, Iranians, Europeans and the rest of us.
When the Nazi regime proliferated, do you think the allies considered it of their own desire or their own making? Should they have prevented themselves from getting dragged into WW2? Or was it good they allowed themselves to get dragged into WW2 and disarm the Nazi regime?
Suppose the Allies just moved away and made "lebensraum" for the Nazi regime, would you have called it "standing their ground and not letting themselves get dragged into a conflagration not of their desiring nor of their making" ??
I think most people would understand a different course of action when reading "standing ground"...
Of course there are costs that come with peace, and if we postpone those costs for too long, the average expenditure can rise compared to timely intervention.
I'm explaining why a European holds this position, Iran approaching nuclear weapons capability, approaching ICBM launch capability, approaching re-entry vehicle capability is the "lebensraum" we shouldn't tolerate.
Watching from the sidelines disapprovingly, while benefiting in this sense from the US/Israeli mission objectives, and even being "willing to go as far as" effectively posing in a security theater role (since a single shot fired would imply abortion of the mission), wasting tax payer money on symbolic gestures, is what I protested.
But it matters little now, European countries are starting to turn around and think a little deeper than the b-hurt mentioned earlier.
Lebensraum? Lebensraum is a very nice word. Israel has been the only country in this that is engaging in Lebensraum. Europe would have negative benefit in joining a stupid war created by fanatical Israeli and American governments.
I don't vouch for the incentives nor actions of Israel, I vouch for why a nonzero number of Europeans (including me) think Europe should get involved in disarming Iran, and prevent it from attaining the "lebensraum" to threaten Europe with nuclear weapons.
Why not? Then I should in WW2 times have said we must oppose jews and work our hardest to disarm jews and their defenders. Hitler did Lebensraum? I don't vouch for the incentives nor actions of Israel.
You seem to have some kind of hallucinatory issue where you see chemical weapons where there are none, and accuse a country that has never done and shown no signs of Lebensraum of doing so while completely ignoring the only country in that region actively doing Lebensraum.
If you worry about Lebensraum you should be working urgently to control and make toothless the only country thats actually doing Lebensraum, not live in made up stories with of your own making that have absolutely zero even speculative sense and getting scared off of them.
> Why not? Then I should in WW2 times have said we must oppose jews and work our hardest to disarm jews and their defenders. Hitler did Lebensraum? I don't vouch for the incentives nor actions of Israel.
I don't understand your argument?
> You seem to have some kind of hallucinatory issue where you see chemical weapons where there are none, and accuse a country that has never done and shown no signs of Lebensraum of doing so while completely ignoring the only country in that region actively doing Lebensraum.
If you believe such discussion would be fruitful I am more than willing to describe what I see when, and how I collate evidence and arrive at my conclusions. I did ask you if you watched the long multi-segment version of Mahsa Amini at the fashion police, or just a short one.
Also take note that anyone else reading along will think it strange that of all possible manners of dying you mentioned the right mode before I mentioned it to you, basically saying you also see it.
It seems you don't understand the concept of lebensraum, I'm not worried about European lebensraum you seem to be referring to: while we failed to learn our lesson after WW1, the mandatory education programmes after WW2 seem to have worked much better, and European nations haven't been lobbing chemical weapons at each other for roughly 100 years now, it works, and we know it works, we disapprove of Iran's regime, not because of their religion (there are muslims in the West as well), not because of skin tone, nor because of the oil under their feet, we disapprove of Iran's regime because we recognize our former collective selves (by education, since almost every direct witness has withered away by the passage of time).
I'm worried about Iran's concept of "lebensraum" involving the capability to threaten Europe with nuclear weapons. Yes Russia, Pakistan, India, China, ... can already do that. Our inability to disarm established nuclear powers should not be confused for acceptance of upcoming nuclear powers. If we can nip those in the bud, we could, we should and I assure you we will.
Yes, you seem to be having some issue with your glasses or monitor today, so I will just write it again to make it clearer.
Israel is the only country in this conflict who has and is engaging in Lebensraum.
I think your problem with your monitor might cover a large swath of the screen so it is beneficial for me to repeat the key text a few more times, so that it has a better chance of getting past your screen's problems:
Israel is the only country in this conflict who has and is engaging in Lebensraum.
Israel is the only country in this conflict who has and is engaging in Lebensraum.
Israel is the only country in this conflict who has and is engaging in Lebensraum.
Israel is the only country in this conflict who has and is engaging in Lebensraum.
>Also take note that anyone else reading along will think it strange that of all possible manners of dying you mentioned the right mode before I mentioned it to you, basically saying you also see it.
That's because its the only logical reading of your brain machinations I can think of when seeing a video of a person fainting, when literally no other news in the world seems to say chemical weapons about her, even if it mentions chemical attacks on other people. Again, you have another weird thing where you feel a country would bring out obscure chemical war agents just to kill a single person. Chemical agents are for the battlefield to kill thousands of people. For a single person, any perfectly mundane poison or chemical is fine even if that were actually the case.
Who said anything about European Lebensraum?
Israel is ALREADY AND EXPLICITLY ENGAGING IN LEBENSRAUM. Israel is the only country doing lebensraum. Iran has shown no interest in Lebensraum. If you are so concerned about Lebensraum, go attack Israel and decapitate their military capabilities.
Both Iran and Israel are governed by religious fanaticism, if you wish to twist and redefine Lebensraum to be something ridiculous it clearly isn't then Israel is engaging in DOUBLE LEBENSRAUM, not just the original Hitleric definition of Lebensraum but also your completely made up imaginary definition of Lebensraum. Again, go launch a military campaign against Israel if you are so worried about that.
Since you love puzzles so much, I will give you a much better puzzle with clear objective answers. Tell me who said this quote, and whether the nations he mentioned have ever threatened his country:
"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force."
It's Martin van Creveld, an Israeli military theorist and military historian.
To my knowledge European nations have never threatened his country, if you mean the modern state of Israel.
If you refer to the holocaust during WW2, then yes multiple European nations were collaborators and participated in the holocaust.
If you refer to earlier events, then also yes, there is a long history of persecution and Diaspora.
As I said, there are many nations that possess nuclear weapons, the non-proliferation treaties don't describe how to treat possessors of nuclear weapons, it describes agreements on how to prevent new nations from acquiring the capability.
Can you please tell me if you watched the long multi-segment video of the surveillance footage surrounding Mahsa Aminis death, or just the single scene of her collapse?
No, you first tell me. Why shouldn't Europe want to completely eliminate and contain Israel when Israeli government and Israeli agents say deranged things like this. Iran hasn't said they want to nuke every single European country. An Israeli did.
Israel is engaging in Lebensraum. You accused Iran of Lebensraun. Iran never did Lebensraum. Israel does. You accuse Iran of threatening Europe with nukes. Iran never threatened Europe with nukes. Israel has threatened Europe with nukes. It is very clear who Europeans should neutralize.
If European countries had to justify every utterance by European historians they'd be busy for a long time...
You just keep ignoring how non-proliferation works, if you find evidence that Israel is approaching nuclear weapons capabilities, approaching mature ICBM capabilities, and if you have evidence that they are not quite there yet, then YES nuclear powers should collaborate on neutralizing the threat. There is disagreement if we are or are not too late on North Korea, hence why many oppose attempting to disarm it. But in the case of Iran it's not too late yet.
All the nuclear superpowers essentially developed their capabilities in sufficient stealth to attain those powers.
As I have stated elsewhere I find Iran and Israel not particularly better than either, and Israel worse in terms of psychotic unprovoked violence to others and things which the other parties they attacked have never done to Israel (poisoning other countries crops via plane!!). In that light, I will be frank, I don't mind Iran getting nukes. If Iran getting nukes puts a balance in the power differential and silences Israel's belligerence and reduces their tendency to attack anything and everything due to MAD like logic that would be a great achievement.
So you are embarrassed that your leaders don't want their soldiers to die in a war started by another country without providing any semblance of justification?
...I'm just glad that European politicians take their soldiers' lives more seriously than the court of public opinions. Well, at least some of them. That's the mark of being an adult.
I am willing to hear you out on this, but the Pentagon employs a lot of personnel, can you demonstrate that the sentiment you describe was actually representative?
Clearly those who do believe in this intervention don't have the same incentive to speak up as those that disagree with it.
It is also rather vague to conflate warnings with disagreement:
They can believe in the validity of an approach but still have the legal obligation to not just inform the president of the values and benefits of such a mission, but also warn him of any potential negative outcomes.
Warning someone about a path of action, is not equivalent to disagreeing with that path of action, it can be their job description to provide such warnings.
That said, I would like to read more about what you are referring to, to make sure we are talking about the same things.
> Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine has been advising President Trump and top officials that a military campaign against Iran could carry significant risks, in particular the possibility of becoming entangled in a prolonged conflict, according to two sources with knowledge of those internal discussions.
"that a military campaign against Iran could carry significant risks, "
specifically
"could carry"
Sounds like people doing their job, and informing a president of potential outcomes, precisely what I predicted above. The media always makes things seem more adversarial than what it turns out to be.
Your comments make it clear that you are a propagandist and maybe even a bot. I assume that you can comprehend English, but are choosing to be obtuse. If that is not the case, and you still cannot understand the warnings, ask Claude or some other AI to help you.
Iran doesn't have nukes and had agreed to never build any, they fully complied with all audits.
You seem extremely confused, its really strange why you aren't demanding completely bombing and destroying the actual nukes in the only Middle Eastern country that has illegal nukes.
Hah, I'm so used to thinking about these missiles as conventional that I forgot it actually means Iran was building the capability to nuke Europe. Or more accurately - to deter Europe with nukes while they export terrorism globally.
The only Middle Eastern country that has illegal nukes and doesn't deny the theories that they would nuke the whole world, including innocent countries when they felt "threatened" and they feel threatened by anything and everything, is not Iran.
It's not just about Iran, there are videos of some Israeli people bragging about how they throw rocks and fire grenades and rockets at Palestinian settlements, its quite clear that some people including elements of government and military have become quite deranged, which is all the more concerning given their lack of comment clarifying they don't believe in Samson option. Obviously if it was a question like "Do you think Jews control the world and own all the banks?" would be ridiculous question unworthy of an answer, but asking if the Samson option is real or false is a perfectly reasonable question especially given Israeli elements like Pollard are claiming that more extreme version of the option as true. The modern Israeli government has a policy of declaring anything and everything antisemitic, and obviously, the next step after "knowing" something is sufficiently anti semitic is some kind of military action as evidenced by the events of past few years.
Iran has always obliged with inspections of its nuclear program. It has never built any nukes. It had agreed to stop refining nuclear materials in negotiations, and then America and Israel backstabbed it and attacked Iran during the negotiations, to also speak nothing of the various times Israeli military action killed negotiators in progress.
In light of all this, it is now upon you to tell me which is false and which is "trolling".
Do you believe Israel doesn't have illegal nukes?
Or are you thinking Israel hasn't yet clarified or denied the extreme version of the so called Samson policy?
Why would wanting to die for a war caused by America and Israel be a "show of strength", that'd instead be a show of being fucking chumps esp after America continually insulted and threatened them. I do think Europe has a potential good role they can commit, and that would be in solving the major nuclear threat in the Middle East: to make public and decommission or transfer in safe keeping all the illegal nukes Israel has.
Do you? Your whataboutism and dismissing concerns about this war as being butthurt is the dumbest and most morally bankrupt response anyone can make. I absolutely condemn the Iranian regime for what they have done, but that in no way excuses what the Israeli and US regimes have done. This was an unnecessary, unprovoked, world-destabilizing and ultimately counterproductive war. Please stop
LMFAO I had tried to engage him since he was insisting so much I thought he might have something of substance. This is what I got at the end of that hole:
Obviously, I heartily condemn all attempts by Iranian government to execute peaceful civilians in foreign countries just like I heavily condemn Israel's illegal assassinations of peaceful civilian scientists in Iran and worldwide. In both cases, the perpetrators must be brought to a neutral country and punished.
> I am not asking you if you condemn what happened to her, I think everyone condemns the fact she died in the hands of the regime,
to which you respond:
> Obviously, I heartily condemn all attempts by Iranian government to execute peaceful civilians in foreign countries
So you change the question from "what actually happened to Mahsa Amini?" to "would you condemn?" even though I predict that any responder already agrees with me and condemns her death in the hands of the regime.
Mahsa Amini was not in a foreign country from the perspective of Iran.
That's nothing, Israelis happily kill their own Prime Ministers. But obviously I condemn Iran and I condemn Israel killing peaceful civilians, the law and the morality applies to all. I mentioned killing civilians in foreign countries as it is strictly worse, as bad as killing innocent people in your own country is, at least it also does not involve the violation of sovereignty and peace of random foreign countries.
It is well known that IDF also uses civilians as human shields, so it is quite strange that you only mention the evils and immoral acts committed by one country and not both. None of the countries in that region are very nice by Western standards.
If it is the ICCPR, then it appears Israel is also a signer and as I said Israel is equally prone to violations of human rights on and off of its territory. So again I do not see what was the point of specifically calling out Iran for it.
I am referring to a different treaty, which you would realize if you took over from beedeebeedee to look up the video of Mahsa Amini's death and analyzed it critically.
All I can see is a video of a woman supposedly fainting and then this being declared her death.
If you are trying to insinuate some absurd nonsense like this is evidence of chemical weapons, then be straight. I don't see anything about her cause of death other than speculating police brutality.
This doesn't mention Mahsa and claims this was done without the state's knowledge by random actors. And that it's most probably some random household agent not nErVe gAs.
Again, you tell me what is the significance of all this to the Iran-Israel war which Israel started not Iran. Both countries are shitholes, I don't have any particular love for either.
Since we are doing wild theories, let us add some more of our own.
Mossad and its private arms are doing covert operations to corrupt European elections, oh wait, they are already doing so.
Israel is spraying chemical weapons on neighboring countries crops, oh wait they are already doing so.
Israel has 400 nuclear warheads, oh wait they already do.
Strange, I didn't seem to need to go to even speculations and unverified theories to get to these. I wonder how far we can get the tally if go into speculations.
> By such definition, all of science is "sealioning"
You are taking an overly literal interpretation of my comment and offering more sophistry in response. Apologies for the short reply but none of the rest seems relevant.
That is true, but I did not use your comment to define sealioning. Instead, I offered a definition and said that it matches a particular behavior. To claim that I am including scientific research in that definition is to claim the behavior in question as such. Hence, why I disregarded the rest of that comment as further sophistry: you seem to be arguing because you want to appear smart or correct more than you want to be so. As I said in my initial comment, you do not need to intend to troll in order to troll.
Not really. Because no one in Europe wants to bomb Iran into oblivion, if for no other reason but the fact that the Europeans (and Turkey) would face another massive refugee crisis.
The only people wanting to continue this war are the U.S. and Israel (and maybe Saudi Arabia?) and even Trump is clearly looking for an off ramp.
This is most likely a way for Iran to tell Europe to do what they can to end this otherwise they will drag Europe into this mess as well.
The war is extremely bad for business for Saudi Arabia and has already cost them enormous amounts of money. It is causing damage to their oil refineries that will take years to repair.
The only person who gains anything out of this is Netanyahu and his friends. Everyone else loses, including the Israeli people.
Europe to do what to stop the war? EU cant even stop war on their own borders. And we seen what Trump buddies think about EU in their leaked Signal chat.
Also it's not like EU and UK actually have any military capacity to bomb Iran even if they wanted because again everything they do have is going to Ukraine already.
I've been hearing similar things from a lot of different directions. The underlying issue about "you cannot replace time" is one that is good to internalize early. A number of people I know who "missed" their kids growing up because they were working hard to make lots of money. You can't go buy "time with my kids when they were growing up."
Agentic coding very much feels like a "video game" in the sense of you pull the lever and open the loot box and sometimes it's an epic +10 agility sword and sometimes its just grey vendor trash. Whether or not it generates "good" or even "usable" code fades to the background as the thrill of "I just asked for a UI to orchestrate micro services and BLAMMO there it was!" moves to the fore.
I think Steve was correct in that Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000 was functional but it wasn't particularly elegant. But the part I think Steve missed was that elegance may get the "ohhs and ahhs" but functionality gets the customers. Back when NeXT was a thing a friend of mine who worked there and I (working at Sun) were having the Workstation UX argument^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussion. At the time, one component was how there was always like 4 or 5 ways to do the same thing on Windows, and that was alleged to be "confusing and a waste of resources." And the counter argument was that different people would find the ways that work best for them, and having a combinatorial way of doing things meant that there was a probably a way that worked for more people.
The difference for me was "taste" was the goal, look good or get things done. For me getting things done won every time.
This. Windows 9x-2000 GUIs were probably the pinnacle of OS UX, but were utterly ugly and boring as UIs. Their looks were unimpressive and boring, but they got the job done and they were easy to use and worked well. Windows 95 was like a 90 cents spoon - not particularly appealing, but extremely useful
Pretty awesome. The only thing I would change is to put a USB battery between the usb wall power and the D1 mini. That way for power outages of < a couple of days or so you're clock will be fine.
Okay I'm thinking of a very Shenzen kind of gizmo for your car that projects a bright red laser "keep out" box on the road in front of your car which is adjusted in size for your current speed.
We have something like that in eu with road markings. Both for clear weather and fog/rain. They mark some of the lines differently, and tell you how many lines you should have between you and the car in front. I think they were first trialed and then printed in several places.
There's a couple of bits of motorway in England with that, I'm pretty sure the M6 and the M1. There are white chevrons painted on the road and you keep two of them between you and the car in front.
Also "Keep Two Chevrons Apart" is going to be the name of my specialist Citroën breaker's yard.
Cool. But I'm thinking this box floats in front of your car on the road in real time. See you're driving and ahead of you on the road is this box. At night it might interfere with your night vision, might have to workshop that a bit.
I think a lot of people would just consider that a challenge.
On the occasion when I am towing our travel trailer, it is really incredible how unsafe that makes other drivers act around me. They will jam themselves in front of me at all costs, with no consideration for physics.
I see this happen to semi trucks on the highway. People interpret big open space as a place to merge. As you say, people have no consideration for why there might be a large space in front of a semi. A 50k lb+ truck hitting the back of a ~4k lb vehicle is not pretty.
Can't wait to get blinded by lasers when cars are going over bumps and speed humps.
I know you were probably writing tongue in cheek, but that is one of those "solutions" that doesn't stop bad actors and makes good actors more miserable than usual.
Like LED headlights :-). It would kind of be a concern except that geometry in in your favor. The angle down they would have to shine + the size related to speed would result in the lasers pretty much always hitting the street except perhaps if you were at the top of Gough[1].
I really reasonate with this post, I too appreciate "Good Code"(tm). In a discussion on another forum I had a person tell me that "Reading the code that coding agents produce is like reading the intermediate code that compilers produce, you don't do that because what you need to know is in the 'source.'"
I could certainly see the point they were trying to make, but pointed out that compilers produced code from abstract syntax trees, and the created abstract syntax trees by processing tokens that were defined by a grammar. Further, the same tokens in the same sequence would always produce the same abstract syntax tree. That is not the case with coding 'agents'. What they produce is, by definition, an approximation of a solution to the prompt as presented. I pointed out you could design a lot of things successfully just assuming that the value of 'pi' was 3. But when things had to fit together, they wouldn't.
We are entering a period where a phenomenal amount of machine code will be created that approximates the function desired. I happen to think it will be a time of many malfunctioning systems in interesting and sometimes dangerous ways.
There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value.
Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. That works as a business.
But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
In a normal world, at this point companies would say, "hmm, well we thought it could be amazing but it just doesn't work as a product or a feature of a product because we can't sell it for enough money to both cover its operation, and its development, and the capital expenditures we need to make every time someone signs up. So a normal C staff would make some post about "too early" or whatever and shelve it. But we don't live in a normal world, so companies are literally burning the cash they need to survive the future in a vain hope that somehow, somewhere, a real product will emerge.
For most software products I use, if the company spent a year doing nothing but fixing P2 bugs and making small performance improvements, that would deliver far, FAR more value to me than spending a year hamfistedly cramming AI into every corner of the software. But fixing bugs doesn't 1. pad engineer's resumes with new technology, or 2. give company leadership exciting things to talk about to their golfing buddies. So we get AI cram instead.
I think it is more externally driven as well, a prisoners dilemma.
I don't want to keep crapping out questionable features but if competitors keep doing it the customer wants it -- even if infrastructure and bug fixes would actually make their life better.
Last time I saw results of a survey on this, it found that for most consumers AI features are a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. That is, if they are looking at two options and one sports AI features and the other doesn’t, they will pick the one that doesn’t.
It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.
Consumers is nice, but far more important are the big corporate purchases. There may be a lot of people there too who don't want AI, but they all depend on decisions made at the top and AI seems to be the way to go, because of expectations and also because of the mentioned prisoner's dilemma, if competitors gain an advantage it is bad for your org, if all fail together it is manageable.
My job is like that, although it's mostly driven by my direct boss and not the whole company, but our yearly review depends on reaching out to our vendors and seeing if an AI solution is available for their products and then doing whatever is necessary to implement it. Most of the software packages we support don't have anything where AI would improve things, but somehow we're supposed to convince the vendor that we want and need that.
>It’s possible AI just seems more popular than it is because it’s easy to hear the people who are talking about it but harder to hear the people who aren’t.
I think it's because there's a financial motivation for all the toxic positivity that can be seen all over the internet. A lot of people put large quantities of money into AI-related stocks and to them any criticism is a direct attack on their wealth. It's no different from crypobros who put their kids' entire college fund into some failed and useless project and now they need that project to succeed or else it's all over.
I’m not sure that really explains how people get onto hype trains like this in the first place, though. I doubt many people intentionally stake their livelihoods on a solution in search of a problem.
My guess is that it’s more of a recency bias sort of thing: it’s quite easy to assume that a newer way of solving a problem is superior to existing ways simply because it’s new. And also, of course, newfangled things naturally attract investment capital because everyone implicitly knows it’s hard to sell someone a thing they already have and don’t need more of.
It’s not just tech. For example, many people in the USA believe that the ease of getting new drugs approved by the FDA is a reason why the US’s health care system is superior to others, and want to make it even easier to get drugs approved. But research indicates the opposite: within a drug class, newer drugs tend to be less effective and have worse side effects than older ones. But new drugs are definitely much more expensive because their period of government-granted monopoly hasn’t expired yet. And so, contrary to what recency bias leads us to believe, this more conservative approach to drug approval is actually one of the reasons why other countries have better health care outcomes at lower cost.
Currently if someone posts here (or in similar forums elsewhere) there is a convention that they should disclose if they comment on a story related to where they work. It would be nice if the same convention existed for anyone who had more than say, ten thousand dollars directly invested in a company/technology (outside of index funds/pensions/etc).
A browser plugin that showed the stock portfolios of the HN commenter (and article-flagger) next to each post would be absolutely amazing, and would probably not surprise us even a little.
I doubt obsolescence anticipation has anything to do with it. That’s how tech enthusiasts think, but most people think more in terms of, “Is this useful to me?” And if it’s doing a useful thing now then it should still be doing that useful thing next year as long as nobody fucks with it.
I would guess it’s more just consumer fatigue. For two reasons. First, AI’s still at the “all bark and no bite” phase of the hype cycle, and most people don’t enjoy trying a bunch of things just to figure out if they work as advertised. Where early adopters think of that as play time, typical consumers see it as wasted time. Second, and perhaps even worse, they have learned that they can’t trust that à product will still be doing that useful thing in the future because the tech enthusiasts who make these products can’t resist the urge to keep fucking with it.
I strongly felt this way about most software I use before LLMs became a thing, and AI has ramped the problem up to 11. I wish our industry valued building useful and reliable tools half as much as chasing the latest fads and ticking boxes on a feature checklist.
This is exactly what I was thinking about my current place of employment. Wouldn't all of our time be spent better working on our main product than adding all these questionably useful AI add ons? We already have a couple AI addons we built over the years that aren't being used much.
100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.
They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granularly toggleable. Only refer to the chatbots as "Copilot," other use cases should be primarily identified on a user-facing basis by their functionality. Search Assistant. Sketching Aid. Writing Aid. If they're any good at what they do, people will gravitate to them without being coerced.
And as far as Copilot goes, if they are serious as me it as a product, there should be a concerted effort to leapfrog it to the top of the AI rankings. Every few weeks we're reading that Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, or DeepSeek has broken some coding or problem-solving score. That drives interest. You almost never hear anything similar about Copilot. It comes off as a cut-rate store brand knockoff of ChatGPT at best. Pass.
>Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment.
I'm surprised that they haven't changed the boot screen to say "Windows 11: Copilot Edition".
they somehow made it worse and use a less capable version with smaller context window.
The only potential upside for businesses it that it can crawl onedrive/sharepoint, and acts as a glorious search machine in your mailbox and files.
That's the only thing really valuable to me, everything else is not working as it should. The outlook integration sucks, the powerpoint integration is laughably bad to being worthless, and the excel integration is less useful than Clippy.
I actually prefer using the "ask" function of github copilot through visual studio code over using the company provided microsoft copilot portal
I think this is a really good take, and not one I’ve seen mentioned a lot. Pre-Internet (the world Microsoft was started for), the man expense for a software company was R&D. Once the code was written, it was all profit. You’d have some level of maintenance and new features, but really - the cost of sale was super low.
In the Internet age (the likes of Google and Netflix), it’s not much different, but now the cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth - we’re talking physical infrastructure. The cost of sale is now more expensive, but they can have significantly more users/customers.
For AI companies, these costs have only increased. Not only do they need the physical infrastructure, but that infrastructure is more expensive (RAM and GPUs) and power hungry. So it’s like the cost centers have gone up in expense by log-units. Yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can still access a huge potential customer base, but the cost of servicing each request is significantly more expensive. It’s hard to have a high profit margin when your costs are this high.
So what is a tech company founded in the 1970s to do? They were used to the profit margins from enterprise software licensing, and now they are trying to make a business case for answering AI requests as cheaply as possible. They are trying to move from low CapEx + low OpEx to and market that is high in both. I can’t see how they square this circle.
It’s probably time for Microsoft to acknowledge that they are a veteran company and stop trying to chase the market. It might be better to partner with a new AI company that is be better equipped to manage the risks than to try to force a solo AI product.
> cost of doing business is increased to include data centers, power, and bandwidth
Microsoft Azure was launched in 2010. They've been a "cloud" company for a while. AI just represents a sharp acceleration in that course. Unfortunately this means the software products have been rather neglected and subject to annoying product marketing whims.
They've had cloud products for a long time, but I don't think that Microsoft fundamentally changed. I still see them organized and treated as an Enterprise software company. (This is from my N=1 outside perspective.)
ChatGPT says that "productivity and business processes" is still the largest division in Microsoft with 43% of revenues and 54% of operating income (from their FY2025 10K). The "intelligent cloud" division is second with 38% revenue and 35% operating income. Which helps to support my point -- their legacy enterprise software (and OS) is still their main product line and makes more relative profits than the capital heavy cloud division.
Yeah. Hyperscalers who are building compute capacities became asset heavy industries. Today's Google, MSFT, META are completely different than 10 years ago and market has not repriced that yet. These are no longer asset light businesses.
> But with "AI", not only is it not a product in itself, it's a feature to a product, but it has OpEx and CapEx costs that dominate the balance sheet based on their public disclosures. Worse, as a feature, it demonstrably harms business with its hallucinations.
I think it depends on how the feature is used? I see it as mostly as yet another user interface in most applications. Every couple of years I keep forgetting the syntax and formulas available in Excel. I can either search for answers or describe what i want and let the LLM edit the spread sheet for me and i just verify.
Also, as time passes the OpEx and CapEx are projected to reduce right?
It maybe a good thing that companies are burning through their stockpiles of $$$ in trying to find out the applicability and limits of this new technology. Maybe something good will come out of it.
The thing about giving your application a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it is, then your application has a button that costs you a cent or two every time a user clicks on it.
For the usecase of "How do I do thing X in Excell" you could probably get pretty far with just adding a small, local LLM running on the user's machine.
That would move the cost of running the model to the end user but it would also mean giving up all the data they can from running prompts remotely.
It would probably also make Office users more productive rather than replacing them completely and that's not the vision that Microsoft's actual customers are sold on.
Fair. But I sure wish we could instead solve this problem the way we did 20 years ago: by not having Web search results be so choked off by SEO enshittification and slop that it’s hard to find good information anymore. Because, I promise you, “How do I do thing X in Excel?” did not used to be nearly so difficult a question to answer.
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.
Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.
The comparison to the dotcom bubble isn't without merit. As a technology in terms of its applications though I think the best one to compare the LLM with is the mouse. It was absolutely a revolution in terms of how we interact with computers. You could do many tasks much faster with a GUI. Nearly all software was redesigned around it. The story around a "conversational interface" enabled by an LLM is similar. You can literally see the agent go off and run 10 grep commands or whatever in seconds, that you would have had to look up.
The mouse didn't become some huge profit center and the economy didn't realign around mouse manufacturers. People sure made a lot of money off it indirectly though. The profits accrued from sales of software that supported it well and delivered productivity improvements. Some of the companies who wrote that software also manufactured mice, some didn't.
I think it'll be the same now. It's far from clear that developing and hosting LLMs will be a great business. They'll transform computing anyway. The actual profits will accrue to whoever delivers software which integrates them in a way that delivers more productivity. On some level I feel like it's already happening, Gemini's well integrated into Google Drive, changes how I use it, and saves me time. ChatGPT is just a thing off on the side that I chat randomly with about my hangover. Github Copilot claims it's going to deliver productivity and sometimes kinda does but man it often sucks. Easy to infer from this info who my money will end up going to in the long run.
On diversification, I think anyone who's not a professional investor should steer away from picking individual stocks and already be diversified... I wouldn't advise anyone to get out of the market or to try and time the market. But a correction will come eventually and being invested in very broad index funds smooths out these bumps. To those of us who invest in the whole market, it's notable that a few big AI/tech companies have become a far larger share of the indices than they used to be, and a fairly sure bet that one day, they won't be anymore.
I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.
I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.
I have zero doubt that AI will eventually make many people lots of money. Just about every company on earth is collecting TBs of data on everyone and they know they're sure they can use that information against us somehow, but they can't possibly read and search through it all on their own.
I have quite a few doubts that it'll be a net positive for society though. The internet (for all of its flaws) is still a good thing generally for the public. Users didn't have to be convinced of that, they just needed to be shown what was possible. Nobody had to shove internet access into everything against customer's wishes. "AI" on the other hand isn't something most users want. Users are constantly complaining about it being pushed on them and it's already forced MS to scale back the AI in windows 11.
Sell the risky stock that has inflated in value from hype cycle exuberance and re-invest proceeds into lower risk asset classes not driven by said exuberance. "Taking money off the table." An example would be taking ISO or RSU proceeds and reinvesting in VT (Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund ETF) or other diversified index funds.
What tomuchtodo said. When I left Sun in 1995 I had 8,000 shares, which in 1998 would have paid off my house, and when I sold them when Oracle bought Sun after a reverse 3:1 split, the total would not even buy a new car. Can be a painful lesson, certainly it leaves an impression.
Eh, the top ten stocks in that fund are Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Broadcom, Google, Facebook, Tesla and TSMC. I propose looking for an ex-USA fund to put part of your investment into. Vanguard has a few, e.g. https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi... . You still get TSMC, Tencent, ASML, Samsung and Alibaba in the top 10, but the global stock markets seem less tech-frothy than the US.
Stocks are fine for diversification, just stocks that have a different risk factors. So back in the 90's I had been working at Sun then did a couple of startups, and all of my 'investment' savings (which I started with stock from the employee purchase plan at Sun) were in tech of one kind or another. No banking stocks, no pharmaceutical stocks, no manufacturing sector stocks. Just tech, and more precisely Internet technology stocks. So when the Internet bubble burst every stock I owned depreciated rapidly in price.
One of the reasons I told myself I "couldn't" diversify was because if I sold any of the stock to buy different stock I'd pay a lot of capital gains tax and the IRS would take half and now I'd only be half as wealthy.
Another reason was my management telling me I couldn't sell my stock during "quiet" periods (even though they seemed too) and so sometimes when I felt like selling it I "couldn't."
These days, especially with companies that do not have publicly traded stock, that is harder than ever to diversify. The cynic in me says they are structured that way so that employees are always the last to get paid. It can still work though. You just have to find a way to option the stock you are owed on a secondary market. Not surprisingly there are MBA types who really want to have a piece of an AI company and will help you do that.
So now I make sure that not everything I own is in one area. One can do that with mutual funds, and to some extent with index funds.
But the message is if you're feeling "wealthy" and maybe paying your mortgage payments by selling some stock every month, you are much more at risk than you might realize. One friend who worked at JDS Uniphase back in the day just sold their stock and bought their house, another kept their stock so that it could "keep growing" while selling it off in bits to pay their mortgage. When JDSU died they had to sell their house and move because they couldn't afford the mortgage payments on just their salary. But we have a new generation that is getting to make these choices, I encourage people in this situation to be open to the learning.
The blockchain hype bubble should probably be pretty near in memory for most people I would suspect. I thought that was a wild, useless ride until Ai took it over.
> at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do
The revolution already happened. I can't imagine life without AI today. Not just for coding (which I actually lament) but just in general day to day use. Sure it's not perfect but I think it's quite difficult to ignore how the world changed in just 3-4 years.
That's just so strange to me. In my experience, it hallucinates and makes things up often, and when it's accurate, the results are so generic and surface level.
Yes but I use it as a substitute friend, gf, therapist, dumb questions like "how 2 buy clothes and dress good and is this good and how to unclog my toilet shits"
> Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.
Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.
> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.
> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology
> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked
> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died
("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.
It's happened before.
Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.
Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.
should be really easy to conjure up examples then. where every single business leader has been wrong about a new technology to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
I find it very easy to believe. The pressures that select for leadership in corporate America are wholly perpendicular to the skills and intelligence for identifying how to leverage novel and revolutionary technologies into useful products that people will pay for. I present as evidence the graveyard of companies and careers left behind by many of those leaders who failed to innovate despite, in retrospect, what seemed to be blindingly obvious product decisions to make.
And this is the broken mindset tanking multiple large companies' products and services (Google, Apple, MS, etc). Focus on the stock. The product and our users are an afterthought.
Someone linked to a good essay on how success plus Tim Cook's focus on the stock has caused the rot that's consuming Apple's software[0]. I thought it was well reasoned and it resonated with me, though I don't believe any of the ideas were new to me. Well written, so still worth it.
The investor being the customer rather than actual paying customers was something I noticed occurring in the late 90s in the startup and tech world. Between that shift in focus and the influx of naive money the Dot Bomb was inevitable.
Sadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.
In particular it's the short term stock price. They'll happily grift their way to overinflated stock prices today even though at some point their incestuous money shuffle game will end and the stocks will crash and a bunch of people who aren't insider trading are going to be left with massive losses.
Buybacks lead to stock price increases and are indistinguishable from dividends in theory, and in practice they are better than dividends because of taxation.
The problem I have with that logic is that it still doesn't really give any sensible reason for why the stock should have any economic value at all. If the point is that the company will pay for it at some point, it makes more sense for it to be a loan rather than a unit of stock. I stand by my claim that selling a non-physical item that does nothing other than hopefully get bought again later for more than you sold it for is indistinguishable from a scam.
> top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong
There's another post on the front page about the 2008 financial crisis, which was almost exactly that. Investors are vulnerable to herd mentality. Especially as it's hard to be "right but early" and watch everyone else making money hand over fist while you stand back.
every time these companies make a mistake and waste billions of dollars it is well-publicized. so there is plenty of data that they are frequently and preposterously wrong.
name a technology that every single top tech company has invested billions of dollars in and then has flopped. the metaverse does not count unless google, amazon, microsoft etc was also throwing billions into it.
right because copilot is bad, that must mean no one uses chatgpt, or claude code, or gemini. they only have billions of MAUs, people must really hate it
[1] I vacillated between this and California law giving ownership of what you worked on in your own time on your own equipment yours, except the latter was pretty effectively neutered by big corps defining their businesses more vaguely.
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