I agree. Artists wonder why more people don't express themselves with art. Writers wonder why more people don't let it all out with words. Car mechanics wonder why people don't fix their own cars. It's not surprising that tech folk wonder why more people don't engage in tech-adjacent activities. Maintaining an independent web presence is a technical hobby.
I think the web is headed in the wrong direction. But what value does an independent web bring people in a tangible way? Maintaining and growing their digital presence in a multi-modal form is extremely simple on the big platforms. Why write a blog no one will ever read on a website no one remembers to go to when you can state your point for one minute in video and let a BigCorp platform do the work for you?
If what you desire is a tiny, curated web full of like minded skilled technologists, like it was before Usenet eternal September, that exists today. You work hard to get 20 people to respond. You can do that now.
I’m perplexed by these “the internet is a piece of shit now” arguments. If you want to run your own email server to email other people who run their own email servers, that’s totally doable. Your addressable market is even bigger than it was in 1990. You just have to mentally accept that the size of and types of people will be similar to 1990.
A possible answer to your first question, at least how it applies to me: At the intersection of art and technology, I realized recently that the Greater Internet was hampering my progress. By which I mean large public content sharing and delivery services.
Imagine if you try to practice a skill you're bad at like pottery, but all the windows in your house are open and random people you don't know come right up to them and stare at your work at arbitrary times. Even worse, it's nearly always dark outside so you can never tell when they're looking anymore. But sometimes, at unpredictable times, you can hear a fist knocking or a random phrase uttered at you from outside.
Even if you don't know their faces or reactions, or even if they exist at all, you just can't help but believe they're thinking something of you. And logic dictates that even if they don't happen to think something bad of your skill, their positivity is only transient as they're still strangers to you.
That sensation breeds paranoia, and I realized if I wanted to hone an artistic skill I needed to discard the Internet entirely and fiercely protect my individuality at all costs. My artistic muse is not to be given away for free so that people can point and gawk at it; it is far too valuable. There is only one me in the entire world, and they are irreplaceable.
I believe this is one of the main reasons most artists keep their processes a secret. Baring your entire soul for the world all the time is exhausting. What is released publicly is only a highly refined and focused sliver of such a soul, and the rest is tightly protected from prying eyes.
For me, the Internet was a red herring to being an artistic person. "Chock full of all the world's information," you understand, but also chock full of many other inseparable elements that are too stressful to be worth it. Thankfully realizing this means I can cut down my smartphone usage to 10 minutes a day at most; far too many important things to work on instead.
The most I will ever accept from the Internet is practical advice on how to accomplish certain techniques, but the rest I had no choice but to discard to have any hope at improvement and positive well-being. That includes professional critique online. I used to hang on to the belief I needed people on the Internet to judge me so I could improve, even if they were actual teachers, but I realized I could just as easily get private lessons in the real world. I feel a better connection to human instructors than chat threads. And a lot of art involves the perception of the world as it really is, not a virtual counterpart to it.
I feel like you've expressed something I've been struggling to put into words for awhile now.
Sometime around a decade ago, a switch flipped for me and "being online" in such a transparent way just felt incredibly uncomfortable for me. And for some reason this drastic change has been so curious to me for awhile. Because I actually am someone who loves discourse. I enjoy talking to strangers and learning about them (in moderation) and I've never had a problem having a pointed opinion and discussing it. Back when FB felt "small" and had a greater balance of text posts vs images/video, I relished posting and discussing with my network.
But like I said, something changed and yes it was around the time that political discourse took a turn to say the least. And while that may very well be a factor, it doesn't fully explain my overwhelming discomfort with the idea of "putting myself out there" online in any meaningful way.
I've been going to art therapy for awhile and this fear has been something I've been exploring. I've been describing it as a "fear of my own narrative being taken away from me and perverted in front of me without any regard for my own actual truth". That's the best way I can explain it. But that explanation has always felt like it was still missing something.
I think your analogy filled in the rest for me though. It's the omnipresent threat of nonconsensual spectacle. Or perhaps just the fear of that threat. And something inside me just being totally opposed to even entertaining that hypothetical even though logically I know "the onlookers don't matter, their opinions don't matter". Just feels like I'm not wired for this era of online identity. Which sucks since for the majority of my life I've felt the opposite.
Sorry for rambling, I thought I was just going to say thanks and move on haha.
Do users pay for LLMs? I haven't seen much concrete data indicating that they do. I don't think the casual utility gains of LLMs have gotten average people so much value that they're paying $20/mo+ for it. Certainly not for search in the age of [doom] scrolling.
I would guess that Anthropic wants developers talking about how good Claude is in their company Slack channels. That's the smart thing to do.
I would say no. While I pay for chatgpt Claude and perplexity monthly (I don't know why anymore) my wife does not use any at all. She has around 5-10 things she uses on the smartphone, and if she needs something new there is still google.
I have only anecdotal data from non-technical friends and family.
I’m referring to average people who may not be average users because they’re barely using LLMs in the first place, if at all.
They have maybe tried ChatGPT a few times to generate some silly stories, and maybe come back to it once or twice a month for a question or two, but that’s it.
We’re all colored by our bubbles, and that’s not a study, but it’s something.
For most people AI is stuck at GPT 4 and other on par performance wise models. Anecdotally as well, many people that I know that have tried it found it mildly useful, but experience what coders and other tech workers experienced two years or so ago. Lots of hallucinations, lack of context, knowledge, etc. If you went back to those models you would at best feel like it is just a occasional code helper as well; at best an autocomplete or rather.
A lot of the reasoning model improvements of late are in domains where RL, RLHF and other techniques can be both used and verified with data and training; in particular coding and math as "easy targets" either due to their determinism or domain knowledge of the implementers. Hence it has been quite disruptive to those industries (e.g. AI people know and do a lot of software). I've heard a lot of comments in my circles from other people saying they don't want AI to have the data/context/etc in order to protect their company/job/etc (i.e. their economic moat/value). They look at coding and don't want that to be them - if coding is that hard and it can get automated like that imagine my job.
Unfortunately I think it's just statistics killing browser diversity, not conspiracy or collusion.
The math doesn't care about our freedom of choice. Tech savvy users making alternative choices on their web experience are an extreme minority in the sum total of HTTP requests. But the outcome is the same: a narrowing web where only mainstream options function reliably.
The ironic part, as everyone here understands, is that those who actually understand technology enough to use alternative browsers or privacy tools are the ones getting locked out. We're punishing ourselves for our technical literacy by implementing these strategies at these companies. And it really does help the average person who does not think about their browser choices.
It is like the drunk man looking for his lost keys under the lamp because that is where the light is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect). For-profit companies are only able to perceive bleeding edge javascript running browsers because that is their "light". They can't see you and you don't exist and certainly don't matter if you don't execute their code properly.
What I'm saying is that there are more people (who are not tech savvy) not using Chrome than you may think. But you'd never know from the statistics. The collection method for the statistics is inherently biased.
I am reminded of a brief quip in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age where a character comments on remembering a time before "AI" had been correctly rebranded to "PI": pseudo-intelligence.
The valuation-perception-driven hyperbole around these Dunning-Kruger machines does not help the average person trying to bat above their level.
I highly recommend "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022), a documentary about the team maintaining these spacecraft as the end of their mission draws nearer. It adds a tremendous amount of context to articles like this.
The engineering involved in making these spacecraft durable for as long as they have been is truly awe inspiring. As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. I wish it wasn't.
As an OT systems architect I am totally floored. We design and plan for systems lifecycle on a ~20yr scale, with OT hardware (not the controls hardware, that’s closer to 10-20) lifecycle much shorter (~5 yr). Obvious on Earth we can afford luxuries of adopting new things, which actually shortens a total system lifecycle since new tech drives new designs.
I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.
Video games used to be like this. Once you built the "gold master" CD/DVD/cartridge/etc it was out of your hands. It was kinda nice to have a concrete end to the project [1]. Nowadays, everything is on the 'net, you can send patches, dlc, etc and the notion of a game being "done" is murky.
[1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:
Which resulted in the notorious release of Outpost [1]. I think owners of that would have happily accepted a large series of post release patches over that.
Especially when it was cartridge games. I remember when PC games started to get updates and you'd wait for next month's cover disc to get them. I seem to remember Frontier Elite having about a dozen...
I just checked the one commercial game I developed and there are two patches I can see released by Eidos for it.
I'm curious, what was the bug that was so critical the publisher decided it was best to perform such a (what I assume was) costly operation post-distribution?
I'm aware of one game that the company I worked for made that nearly released and that would have broken every GameCube that played it, Nintendo had to pull 50k discs from distribution just before they were sent to retailers and destroy them.
The issue was that one programmer used an unauthorized system call to make the disc drive spin twice as fast, as they thought it was a great way to resolve some of the data streaming issues the game had. And yeah it worked - but after few hours of playing it would kill the GameCube. It wasn't really noticed because no one tests the game on actual discs right until actual gold master is made(usually), and then when the devkits died it was considered a random hardware fault and Nintendo just replaced them.
Honestly it was just before my time at that studio so I don't know exactly how that was done, but everyone knew about it because it cost us a lot of money and damaged our relationship with Nintendo somewhat. The game actually went on to be pretty successful after that, but yeah, would have been a disaster.
It was a crash bug, but I'm not really sure the details (and it has been some years...). Even at the time, I wasn't personally involved in it, just heard about it through the grapevine.
But yes, my understanding is it was quite expensive and the publisher was none too pleased (:
That documentary was fantastic. Another good resource is this paper from 2016 on what all the equipment/computing systems on Voyager do and what the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf
Ah. This writeup https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240604-voyager-1-photons-... says that the 70m dish collects 240,000 photons per second, which is about 60 per second per square meter. The 1/sec figure was from the recent outage when Voyager's transmitter glitched and fell back to S-band. Received energy per bit is 4.5e-21 Joule across the whole dish, or 1e-24J per square meter.
Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away. Voyager 2 is over 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth. In fact, due to this distance, it takes over 23 hours to get a radio signal from Earth to Voyager 1, and 19½ hours to Voyager 2.
The US funded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for 20 years with no idea what the next move was, no tangible end in sight, and stakes far lower. The so-called threat of weapons of mass destruction was enough to swiftly defeat Iraq's army, topple its government, and start an unprecedented manhunt for its leader.
Russia has invaded a neighboring country twice and spent the first two years of the war they started threatening nuclear weapons. They disregard all negotiated agreements and treaties, poison dissidents in countries the US is allied with, with impunity, engage in asymmetric warfare against Europe and the US, meddle in elections. The Russian government has nothing but contempt for a rules based world order.
Why, suddenly, is the US cowering back when the stakes are much higher and its direct involvement much lower?
Because this President campaigned on ending the long wars, which he opposed. I'm not sure where the confusion lies because Trump has been very clear about getting the US out of what he views as foreign entanglements.
I'm not passing judgement on it, just noting that what we're seeing is consistent with his campaign messaging.
> getting the US out of what he views as foreign entanglements
The point is our alliances are also foreign entanglements. These idiots didn’t think through that withdrawing from those means fewer weapons (and other) orders from America, more nukes pointed at America and less strategic depth between our adversaries and our shores.
The US hasn't withdrawn from any of its military alliances, and thus far has expressed no plans to do so.
I feel like this is where a lot of NATO commentary gets bogged down. There's a large group of people, conventionally referred to in US media as "the blob" (https://www.vox.com/22153765/joe-biden-foreign-policy-team-r...), who believe that the United States has an affirmative duty to engage in lots of global military interventions above and beyond the actual commitments it's made. I don't think they're lying - people seem to genuinely believe, for example, that the US is betraying NATO by cutting off support for Ukraine when most NATO members would prefer to expand support. But the North Atlantic Treaty simply does not contain a promise to align foreign policy in this way.
> people seem to genuinely believe, for example, that the US is betraying NATO by not supporting Ukraine
You’re correct in this being incorrect.
The informed concern is in Trump and Musk’s coziness towards Putin. That brings up questions around what, if anything, Trump would do if Putin annexed Latvia.
It does, and it would be wise for the US to take steps to defuse those questions. This is why US troops often (and have continued in the new administration) engage in various celebrations and joint drills with NATO allies; there was a detachment of US troops in an Estonian Independence Day parade late last month, which I'm quite confident will not be happening for Russia Day in June no matter how much US-Russia relations warm.
But reasonable questions about the strength of an alliance aren't the same at all as withdrawal from or betrayal of the alliance.
The NATO treaty doesn't imply in his wording any obligation for a military reaction to an invasion of a member of NATO. There's no penalty to just respond with a strongly worded letter, but there's an expectation an ally will react militarly.
Will your allies trust you any longer if you just follow the letter of the treaty? I don't think they will. More critically, nor will anyone else.
The US have historically positioned themselves as "defenders of democracy" and have multiple times used that positioning actively. It's inevitable for an expectation to be there for them to do just that. The US is free to violate expectations and just follow the letter of the treaties it has, it is a sovereign nation after all, but the surprised and frankly childish "we have no obligation!" reaction to the blowback is more unreasonable than the expectations for its support of Ukraine, particularly in how it has been handled politically.
One of the US's most recent foreign deployments is the Iraq War, which was based on a lie and extraordinarily unpopular among NATO members. I think abandoning Ukraine is very bad, and I agree it's unreasonable to expect Europe to be OK with it, but the US's current position in NATO was never based on a foundation of good behavior or uniform foreign policy alignment.
There was effectively uniform foreign policy between the US and its allies for the last thirty years, even under the first Trump presidency, and this included at least a certain degree of interventionism (first Iraq war, Yugoslavia...) which solidified international institutions (differently from the second Iraq war and Afghanistan, which weakened them).
Even if they didn't agree, EU nations and Canada at least sent their soldiers to die in Iraq and Afghanistan anyway.
Why are you surprised people expect such policy alignment after thirty years of it?
Why are you surprised people consider this a betrayal of what NATO stood for in the past, as a proxy of the democracies of the west? Just because there is no violation of the letter of the treaty?
I'm not sure why you keep saying "surprised". I'm not surprised. But it's not the case that EU nations and Canada sent their soldiers to die in Iraq; France in particular sided with Russia to block the Security Council from authorizing military action, leading to substantial tensions with the US and widespread disapproval from the public on both sides. European demonstrations against the war remain one of the largest mass movements in history.
I don't think it was surprising that the Iraq War led to anti-American sentiment, I don't think it's surprising that the current about-face on Ukraine is leading to anti-American sentiment, and I won't be surprised when it happens again in the 2040s.
> But it's not the case that EU nations and Canada sent their soldiers to die in Iraq
They did, not all of them but many did. On Canada I may be wrong, sure. I believe even Ukraine has KIAs in Iraq.
> France in particular sided with Russia to block the Security Council from authorizing military action, leading to substantial tensions with the US and widespread disapproval from the public on both sides. European demonstrations against the war remain one of the largest mass movements in history.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars broke the model the US and EU had been trying to push until that moment, alienating the south of the world from it and providing certain countries with a justification for their future actions. France had the right of it in the UN assembly.
People were angry back then for similar reasons they're angry and shocked now, and once again it has to do with expectations.
I also don't believe the Iraq war alone is not really enough to deny the alignment between EU and US foreign policy in the last 30 years or so anyway. You won't have complete agreement with 30 nations involved ever.
> But the North Atlantic Treaty simply does not contain a promise to align foreign policy in this way.
I think this in your original comment highlights your surprise at what those people believe, or at least your not understanding it?
Yeah, agree that's what is happening. My original question wasn't rhetorical in nature. I would really like to know what would secure victory without escalating it to involve American troops on the ground and/or potentially a nuclear exchange.
I would as well. It's unclear to me what would change the picture there. Do they just need more of the same (155mm artillery shells, drones, tanks, etc.) or are there qualitative things that need to change?
This speaks to the fact that I haven't seen any clear "this is how we win it" proposals. I could understand why the details would be classified, but I've not seen broad strokes, either. Has anyone else?
I don't need a lecture on Russia's character. What I was curious to learn from you, or anyone, what could be done differently to defeat them? How would Russia respond if we send more advanced weaponry? Does Ukraine have the men to fight?
I'm getting downvoted but honestly looking for answers.
You can’t fully defeat a nuclear power. You can, at best, drive it back — if you’re willing to pay the price.
And that price means Europe will have to absorb a dramatic, sustained drop in quality of life — plus forced mobilisation.
Even the Poles - the most serious player in Europe right now — only have about 200,000 troops.
The British and French combined have maybe 40,000 soldiers actually capable of high-intensity combat. That’s enough for, what - four weeks of real war?
After that, there will be no volunteers. That means a draft.
So the real question is: Are you ready to be drafted to “defeat Russia”?
It’s a war of attrition now, which is a war of will and logistics. Can anything be done differently? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Isn’t victory under these circumstances making the war so costly that your opponent must find a way out?
The US was doing that. Russia’s will has won out over the US’s, that is a defeat, and we can only hope next time it isn’t the same.
War of attrition. I thought we'd be further along after three years of sanctions and weapons but I wonder if Ukraine has the manpower to keep it up. From what I understand, Ukraine is drafting men ages 25-60 which may signal they need boots on the ground soon.
Ukraine probably does not. Is Russia willing to risk the possibility of US/EU troops ending up on the other side of the trenches? Probably we’ll never know now, and maybe that’s better. But is it better that Russia knows maybe three years and the US might call it quits?
My country, Norway, shares a border with Russia. We have 5.5 million people. Would the US abandon us because we’re running out of troops? That’s the question we’re asking ourselves.
The realistic answer is to say that Ukraine is going to be supplied with weapons for as long as needed, case closed. The whole Russian strategy after the initial blitz failure was to wait for Trump to get into power, who telegraphed to anyone with the brain, that he doesn't care about Ukraine and loves Putin very much. Russia can't do it forever, but it focused on appearing "strong" until the elections, the bet that paid off for them. Now imagine they were facing a prospect of non-friendly US administrations for decades, they would've already stopped.
Except Putin doesn’t need to outrun America — he just needs to outrun Ukraine.
There’s a finite number of Ukrainians, and an even smaller number of Ukrainian men actually willing — or physically able — to fight.
20% of the population already left, and around 1.5 million of them went to Russia. Another 15% are stuck under occupation.
Ukraine’s demographics were already a disaster after the WW2 wipe-out, the Soviet collapse, and 30 years of economic decline and emigration. Now they’re drafting 18 to 60-year-olds just to keep units filled - at 40%.
So what happens in a year or two, when there’s no one left to draft?
The Poles aren’t volunteering to die en masse, and they’re the only EU country with anything resembling a real army — and even that is one-fifth the size of Russia’s.
So who’s holding the line then?
The US Army? The Marine Corps?
Is anyone actually ready to send Americans to die in the Donbas?
Russian economy doesn't have enough juice to "outrun Ukraine" under the sanctions regime and the war intensity they maintain to impress the Westerners. It's not a "year or two", it's a decade at least.
Keep Ukraine on life support for a decade, hoping Russia collapses under sanctions?
Cuba’s still standing after 60 years. Iran after 40. The USSR took decades to fall — and none of them had China bankrolling their survival.
Russia’s economy bleeds, but it’s not cut off. China sends tech and machines, India buys the oil, and Europe keeps quietly paying top dollar for gas through backdoors.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s population shrinks, its economy is wrecked, and its army can’t fight without Western money, Western weapons — and soon, Western bodies.
Because if you actually want to push Russia back — not even collapse it, just push it back — that means European and American troops on the front line. Conscription, mobilized economies, the whole package.
Without a sustained meat grinder to chew up Russian forces, Russia just consolidates and digs in — with China keeping the whole thing afloat.
And if the West isn’t ready for that, who exactly do you think will still be standing in 10 years?
The only guaranteed winner? China — with Russia as a client state, Europe as a deindustrialized theme park, and America too exhausted to stop them.
If this is a game of who bleeds out last, Ukraine’s already done, Europe bleeds out first, Russia bleeds to its usual stupid level — and China walks away without a scratch.
The Westerners have been tirelessly making excuses about how it's impossible to defeat Russia for a while now, so forgive me for not being impressed, but the proposition is quite simple really — if you don't want to support Ukrainians fighting for themselves against Russia today, Ukrainians will be sent to fight poles and others for Russia tomorrow. Of course as it's clear now, the US wouldn't defend Poland either, fighting Canada is the new geopolitical priority, so there's that.
Agree that China is a winner of it all simply by virtue of not being mad, but as they like to say in Russia — it's not the evening yet.
Funnily enough, this is exactly Putin’s own logic — just flipped.
“We had to support those rebel Ukrainian states so Ukrainians fight them, not us.”
“We had to preemptively disarm Ukraine, or we’d be fighting Ukrainians inside Russia within five years.”
As for China — surely they’d be nervous if Taiwan was one-third of their population and shared a land border.
Ukraine isn’t just a border state, it’s alt-Russia, as Taiwan is alt-China (and so was Hong-Kong). A competing civilizational project trying to jump off the imperial train and build a Polish-style normal nation-state — and that makes it an existential threat. Not because Ukraine is strong, but because it offers Russians a dangerous glimpse of an alternative path — a Russian identity without the empire.
> Funnily enough, this is exactly Putin’s own logic — just flipped
Except Ukrainians ask the West for support to fight for themselves, so the West is given a rarest opportunity to do a morally right thing while furthering its own interests.
French land army is 77k total, with maybe 30k actually combat-capable — the rest are admin, logistics, and training. Add 9k Foreign Legion, but only a fraction of that is high-intensity capable.
With rotations, France can probably field about 15k troops on an actual frontline — and after that, it’s draft time.
For comparison:
* Russian armed forces: 1.1 million.
* 500k deployed in Ukraine.
* ~300k on the active frontline right now.
In terms of real land warfare capacity, France is in the same weight class as Belarus or Romania — and about 20 times behind Russia.
Even if you argue technical edge (better equipment per soldier), France has zero industrial mobilization capacity and no modern large-scale combat experience.
Ukraine needs to sustain significantly lower tempo than Russia and there are other options than boots on the ground. Simply flying in and shooting down slow-flying drones inside the Ukrainian airspace would probably give Ukrainian economy years of "runway". And any breathing room in the economy translates into more available manpower in the military and Ukraine still has millions available.
> I was curious to learn from you, or anyone, what could be done differently to defeat them
Russia doesn't have infinite capacity, their primary strategy was to take as much as possible at all costs as fast as possible, while waging info campaigns against the far right, in the hopes that Trump would come to power and cement a deal with them. If that option goes away, it strictly reduces Russias exit strategies. They can't escalate, because the west has more leverage and more options, it would be zero sum at _best_ for Russia. The West would likely hand them Crimea for peace, but giving them all of Donbas is too large a victory for Russia. The post WW2 orders foundational principle is that appeasement of land grabs leads to stronger positions for the grabber - see Hitler's numerous escalations before his full on attack as an example. Ideally you don't wait until the attacker is on your door step before fighting back, that's what this whole debacle is about.
Some of the options could have been:
- Continue on, but with aligned support from the left and right (read: Russian psyops campaign vs the US right failed). Probably enough on its own.
- Pressure China (tariffs) to pressure Russia
- Pressure Europe to increase commitments
- Offer Russia Crimea (already done ages ago, when their position was stronger)
- Setup an increasing schedule of more advanced weaponry
> How would Russia respond if we send more advanced weaponry?
AFAIK they haven't responded to the last several increases; what would they respond with? The Nuke is their last card, and in addition to pulling in more Western support would alienate the other players (India, China) who have their own leverage on Russia. IDK overall it seems like the only major limitation here was the psychology of Trump's party.
And what exactly is "The West" these days? A glorified open-air Continental museum, a failed British Empire with an army the size of Belarus, and a bickering hegemon half-convinced it should retreat to regional power status, house divided and all.
Europeans are still high on their own supply, fantasizing they’re global players, when in reality they’ve got no money, no energy, no industry, no credible army, no unity, and no diplomatic weight — not even within their own borders.
Europe spent decades as an American piggy bank and a strategic liability. Now the bill’s come due — and Uncle Vlad is doing Uncle Donald a favor, playing the bogeyman just well enough to scare Europe’s capital and industry back into the safe harbor of the New World.
And if Russian pressure helps deliver "MAGA in four years" by triggering capital flight from Europe to the US — is Ukraine really too steep a price for such a valuable service?
> the only major limitation here was the psychology of Trump's party.
The party that has 50/50 chance of winning the elections has been communicating to Putin all this entire time that they will hand him Ukraine when they win. Now they conclude that this strategy didn't help Ukraine and therefore it's time to hand Ukraine to Putin. Brilliant strategy, I wish them to enjoy their Russian friends who will definitely not screw them over very soon.
As one platform chases profits and loses its soul, another resurrects to welcome the nostalgic refugees. The eternal cycle of digital migration continues.
does it though? do you really expect this to be a success? people will just stay on reddit like they always do. twitter has been taken over by one of the most hated people in the world and they appear to be doing better than ever user-wise
I think current Reddit is very different from what Digg was. Reddit is too much user generated content (i.e. the exact same AskReddit questions asked on a weekly basis) and not enough cool links/videos anymore. At least on the non-logged in homepage. If Digg is exclusively links, it'll definitely have a place imo.
obviously it massively depends on what subs you follow, but yes this is the problem with reddit. it's completely antithetical to long-form content that builds over time.
I find it utterly bizarre that some Americans seem to be under the delusion that the US ceasing its military support for Ukraine will somehow save lives. It is the same kind of delusion that causes President Trump to list off the US presidents under which Putin has disregarded its negotiated deals with, but obviously that would never happen under his watch.
I suspect that this exchange will become an infamous moment in history. Utterly shameful.
If the US stops support would the war end? I don't really think so, but maybe. If it did, though, I would guess lives would be saved. That doesn't seem like a delusion.
How? If all support for Ukraine crumbles and russia just plows ahead, do you think the ukranian population would be safer?
The only "less lives" approach would be if russia retreats in an agreement to keep the previous separatist regions they annexed while accepting some sort of buffer inside Ukraine from them on, which Zelensky would agree in the form of bases or nato membership. Which Russia will never go for.
Recently I've been asking myself, what do web browsers and the web look like in twenty years? I've been applying this to all "free" software (e.g., VSCode) released by the large tech companies who ultimately are incentivized by profit.
I really have no clue, but as far as I can see the answer is never better. More centralized, more bloated, more invasive, less choice, and less freedom.
I've always held AOL fondly. You paid per month, and get access to a giant ecosystem including forums, chat, email, news, zines, games, etc. Mostly ad free as I remember.
In fact, when NetZero became a thing, people mostly weren't interested. They were turned off by the stupid permanent ad bar, and the lack of community.
I wish something like AOL would come back around. Charge me $20 a month, give me a community, email, etc. Don't dare show me an ad.
We're just now getting back to pay for no ads, but its 5 dollars here or there for disparate services.
Man, AOL was ahead of its time. All it needs today that it didn't have was the 'wall', 'profile', whatever. And of course vid/pic sharing.
I remember when moving off AOL to broadband, my family hated it despite the speed. They thought it was clunky and stupid to have to download separate programs or visit different websites to do one thing at a time, in what was in AOL an integration.
FB is probably closest to that experience today, but of course is ad and data driven, and somehow still doesn't feel very community like.
I'd love to see a new, electron based AOL type service come about today. It'd cost a crapton to get the network and content up to attract any user base, else I'd try it myself.
As an avid AOL user, that is the worst version of the internet. I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet. Whatever some large corporation had paid AOL so they could build a shitty little Visual Basic type app that controlled everything you looked at. There were no ads because the entire experience besides the chat rooms and IM was an ad. It was a lot of people's first email accounts but spam blocking was so bad back then I count that as advertising.
I remember being blown away by discovering people would randomly make private chats and trying to guess at what the chat name would be for things I was interested in as a kid. Then I remember having my mind blown that AOL had a built in browser where someone had built a website, not a keyword, that actually had my niche interest that no one in real life did. Then I discovered you could download a much better version of that experience called a browser.
Your idea is just Facebook where you can't link out and is fully corporate controlled. Which I guess is actually Twitter.
I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
> I remember keywords and thinking that was the internet
Is it really that different from having the .com of a word today?
> I think you long for the Internet where people had hobbies and interest because they enjoyed them, not because they thought they could make money by talking about them.
I struggle to see how you got to that conclusion, but it's an absolutely true statement nonetheless so I cannot complain.
It reminds me of that meme, maybe called the midwit meme?
On the left you have the dumb guy, saying AOL does everything. On the right you have the hooded guy, saying AOL does everything.
In the middle you have the crying guy saying no you should use Netscape browser, and ICQ for messaging, and usenet for forums, and dogpile for search, etc.
I can say my family never once paid for AOL or cared about its basket of features. But we did pay for NetZero for a long time until broadband become more affordable in our area.
Its not just the internet. Its almost everything in your life. Financialization of products and services seems to keep pushing products to get cheaper while providing additional supposed 'value'. In reality, you are usually paying more for less but are fooled into believing that you are getting more.
I was reminded of this recently by comparing an old 90s Toyota to the latest models. The 90s cars were over-engineered and 30 years later, had more breathing room to keep going. Meanwhile the latest stuff is all plastic pieces that have been engineered to perform many tasks using just one piece. The idea was that they could focus on making that one piece as robust as possible and still save money on reducing parts and making the operators life easier during assembly (no one cares about the plight of the repairman). All in the name of saving costs to keep the product competitive in the face of the declining value of fiat money.
Well even though its supposed to be better, the new stuff still sucks. People are holding onto their old cars, we lost so many wonderful 2000s cars due to cash for clunkers. The designs and colors are also more boring.
How do you fight this?
Well as software people we have an out: Homemade software and open source. Homemade software allows us to cut the cruft out of products that companies add. We pay for in our time but if it is important enough to us then it has to be done.
This applies to everything: You can make your own food instead of accepting the declining garbage from takeout/restaurants, you can buy raw materials and do your own woodwork/electronics/metalworking.
Even something like cars can be somewhat pushed back on. Communities form around popular cars to document and better understand the issues prevalent with certain models. Use this info to self select on a vehicle that has a large community and to help anticipate problems that can be coming down the pike with that particular model.
Again, no one has infinite time so you have to decide for yourself what things are important to you and take back control while trying your best to minimize nonsense in other areas.
VSCode is still a very competitive text editor even without its proprietary plugins.
Ootb VSCode is already a superior experience to Emacs, which I only begrudgingly move away from because of subpar TypeScript + JSX support like 6 years ago. However, after I started using VSCode for work there was just no going back. I use VSCode a lot for text manipulations. I find its regex search replace much easier than using sed in the terminal. Multiple cursors, Git integration, beautiful diffs, command palette is just like Emacs M-x.
Without its proprietary plugins it's still a great gift to the public and forks like Cursor is a good showcase of that. Thanks to monaco almost every web editor nowaways have great usability, syntax highlighting and the keybindings that I'm familiar with.
I think the bigger joke of the century are open source beneficiaries that only take and give nothing back, but still have the audacity to demand for things and hound open source developers to implement what they want. You can't have your cake and eat it too
Agreed. Open source is great, but the only way we build the software world we want to see is by supporting the software projects which align with your values. Using software is not supporting it; contributing to it is, but that simply isn't viable for many people; paying for it also is, and that's viable for most people, especially software engineers.
As a European myself, I would prefer them to put less emphasis on collaboration and more on actually doing something's with the resources available to them and making that freely available. Collaboration will happen naturally and without having to coordinate.
But as they said, this is less about producing value then it's about signaling
I don't get this. At the beginning of the press release they cite eurohpc. Before eurohpc, it was probably announced with a similar press release. And then it existed
I don't agree with that. We had two powers dividing Europe in two, placing their own armies all over the place and doinglg their best to convince the other party that the world would be destroyed if it dared to attack. That was what brought us peace. Collaboration in the form of the various European international organizations was a consequence.
Making another war in Europe was basically impossible. We had one in Yugoslavia which was not aligned with the two blocks and anyway only after the USSR lost the cold war.
The idea is that EU countries do not see themselves at rivals, this is very different then our entire history where everyone had an issue with their neighbors (there are exceptions of neighbors not having any conflicts). Most educated Europeans are now considering the entire EU as a similar culture and not want to start a fight to kill each other for some historical land, the exception are the uneducated or just low IQ people that fall for extreme nationalists that push for "Make our country a great empire again"
Your point is about the Cold War, nuclear weapons prevented nuclear alliances to attack each other, it did not prevent say two NATO non nuclear members to start conflicts.
ARPANET and its successor TCP/IP already provided the fundamental networking infrastructure. Various hypertext systems were also being developed independently in and before the 1980s, like Ted Nelson's Xanadu project and Bill Atkinson's HyperCard. The key ideas of linked documents and markup languages were "in the air" so to speak. However, CERN provided some unique conditions that helped the WWW succeed where other systems didn't. It had an immediate practical need - helping physicists share information across institutions. It was developed in an open, non-commercial environment that encouraged sharing. CERN made the WWW technology freely available without royalties. The international nature of CERN helped drive early adoption across countries.
Without CERN, I think we would have eventually seen some form of hyperlinked document system emerge from either academia or industry, but it might have been more proprietary or fragmented.
Theoretical research in itself is one of the actual values. Any real-world application from CERN are purely incidental (albeit welcome).
The other values include redistribution of wealth, support for businesses, job creation, sustaining internal intellectual capabilities without depending on the whims of fickle corporations, and probably many others that I can't think of for now.
See Artemis for an answer to how NASA is doing. They’re in trouble. Post Apollo they became very ineffective at big space projects. I say that with respect as an aviator who has benefited much from their past and ongoing work.
I guess the main point is that NASA is forced to have contracts to verious USA states because of politics,
but you have robots on Mars, space probes outside the Solar System, and other ambitious plans that are announced and discussed not revealed in a PR conference where the CEO removes a blanket and shows you the latest robot and fanboys chear.
I understand MAGA and Elon fanboys are attacking NASA and claim that master Elon can do it better so the government should give Elon all the money, no auctions or checks to be done. I mean all Elon promises were fulfilled on time and on budget , right ?
> maybe there was no reddit like people commenting back then?
Huh?
The EU is often criticized for its lack of competitiveness due to its highly regulated environment, low investment numbers, risk aversion, and slow moving bureaucracy. This announcement hits all of these points. I am European as well, and it just makes me sad? It is more of the same. This doesn't look like a serious effort to propel Europe to the cutting-edge or even the conversation. It's just enough to say we're doing something, without a high risk of calling it a failure if nothing ends up being delivered.
Europe doesn't lack talent or initiative. If you look at the top AI research institutions out there, a great many of them are composed of researchers who originated from Europe. What is the US offering them that Europe is not? That is many things, none of which are are actively being addressed in the EU. There's a high likelihood that academic beneficiaries of these funds will end up in the US due to the absurd salaries and cutting edge positions.
I prefer the regulated EU environment. I value my privacy and think the EU is doing the right, long-term thing. I don't mind the reduced salaries here -- I worked in the US for years but returned back to Europe because I share its values. But there's no point in pretending the EU will be a serious contender in this environment.
> unless Hacker News has a lot of readers who might contribute to this effort
But it obviously does? Maybe not people who "want" but definitely many who "might".
If anything this is one of the better places to advertise, and certainly more interesting than another "Hooli (YC99) is hiring to democratize breathing".
>It probably should not be number 2 on Hacker News, unless Hacker News has a lot of readers who might contribute to this effort
I agree, but some EU people want to share it and USA guys and EU skeptiks want to shit on it. Probably we should post a wikipedia article about CERN and have Elon fanboys explain how Elon can do it it better while his bit* Trump could make our eggs cheaper.
I think the web is headed in the wrong direction. But what value does an independent web bring people in a tangible way? Maintaining and growing their digital presence in a multi-modal form is extremely simple on the big platforms. Why write a blog no one will ever read on a website no one remembers to go to when you can state your point for one minute in video and let a BigCorp platform do the work for you?