> Going forward, the U.S. government will continue its global health leadership through existing and new engagements directly with other countries, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and faith-based entities. U.S.-led efforts will prioritize emergency response, biosecurity coordination, and health innovation to protect America first while delivering benefits to partners around the world.
The funny thing about this administration is that they label existing system as "bad" and "corrupt", use that as justification to abandon it, and then proceed to recreate the same thing different way.
“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
You think they will actually replace it with something similar though. They won't. They have no desire to do that. Even in name. Just like all their other supposed plans - it's just smoke and mirrors and no one will actually do any such thing.
I dunno, reading it in context of the whole statement, "...and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states" deserves a bit of focus. The UN is structurally designed to give China and Russia outsized influence. Coordinating technical matters like healthcare through the UN does seem a bit unwise given that everyone is posturing up for some sort of Cold-war or potential WWIII style scenario. I don't think we've seen much deescalation of tension in the last decade.
Better to leave the bandwidth of the UN free to focus on diplomacy without distractions, the military situation is urgent.
> Coordinating technical matters like healthcare through the UN does seem a bit unwise given that everyone is posturing up for some sort of Cold-war or potential WWIII style scenario.
On the contrary, the fact that we have to coordinate technical matters like healthcare through the UN is a large part of the reason why the Cold War remained cold and we had WW2 within 20 years of WW1 but no WW3 in the 80 years since.
Until the US decided to re-elect a literal madman, the necessity of coordinating on technical matters was obvious to all, which meant these countries weee constantly talking, building relationships and communicating with each other which helped prevent minor conflagrations from escalating.
> The UN is structurally designed to give China and Russia outsized influence.
An interesting assertion. I presume you are implying outsized influence over the US (or do you mean every other country?). I'm honestly curious: can you describe this structural design?
The thing that jumps to mind is the Security Council, which they can parley into diplomatic favours from other people. And the whole point of the UN is that it was the victors of WWII explaining to the rest of the world how international affairs were going to work, so I'd be pleasantly surprised if the special privileges stopped there.
And even without that, the UN isn't really set up to handle technical matters. It is a diplomatic club. The point is to give people a seat at the table without considering their competence.
The Security Council is controlled by the US and its allies (3 out of 5 permanent seats). And the Security Council does not decide on matters of public health like the WHO does. The WHO is staffed by very competent people, certainly more competent than RFK.
The UN has handled several technical matters successfully, including global vaccination programs.
> proceed to recreate the same thing different way
Not a same or similar thing in any way. Everything that is being torn down is being replaced by grifter schemes where all that money is funneled to personal pockets.
I feel AI will have the same effect degrading Internet as social media did. This flood of dumb PRs, issues is one symptom of it. Other is AI accelerating the trend which TikTok started—short, shallow, low-effort content.
It's a shame since this technology is brilliant. But every tech company has drank the “AI is the future” Kool-aid, which means no one has incentive to seriously push back against the flood of low-effort, AI-generated slop. So, it's going to be race to the bottom for a while.
I think "internet" needs a shared reputation & identity layer - i.e. if somebody offers a comment/review/contribution/etc, it should be easy to check - what else are their contributing, who can vouch for them, etc.
Most of innovation came from web startups who are just not interest in "shared" anything: they want to be a monopoly, "own" users, etc. So this area has been neglected, and then people got used to status quo.
PGP / GPG used to have web-of-trust but that sort of just died.
People either need to resurrect WoT updated for modern era, or just accept the fact that everything is spammed into smithereens. Blaming AI and social media does not help.
It'll stop soonish. The industry is now financed by debt rather than monetary assets that actually exist. Tons of companies see zero gain from AI as its reported repeatedly here on HN. So all the LLM vendors will eventually have to enshittify their products (most likely through ads, shorter token windows, higher pricing and whatnot). As of now, not a sustainable business model thankfully. The only sad part is that this debt will hit the poorest people most.
This is the reason I absolutely hate shadcn. The number of dependencies and files you introduce for trivial components is insane. Even tiny little divs are their own component for no good reason. I genuinely don’t understand how front-end developers accept this level of needless complexity.
Shoutout to Basecoat UI[1], so implementing the same components using Tailwind and minimal JS. That's what I am preferring to use these days.
> I genuinely don’t understand how front-end developers accept this level of needless complexity.
in my anecdotal experience as a bit of an old fogey with a greying beard, the enthusiastic juniors come along, watch a video by some YouTube guru (who makes videos about code for a living instead of making actual software) proselytizing about whatever the trendy new library is, and they assume that it's just what everyone uses and don't question it. It's not uncommon for them to be unaware that the vanilla elements even exist at times, such is the pervasiveness of React bloat.
Please name some names of these performative developer/engineers. I want to know how many are on my bingo card. Ill start, something imegen and tnumber geegee.
I don't really keep up with these Tech/Soft tubers, but watch a video on occasion. Can't really say I find something-imagen guilty of this, but like I said I watch the occasional video, not the stream. What I've watched from him is generally about what he agrees/disagrees with and he also tells you why he thinks that. Often reading articles/blogposts. Not to dismiss your opinion, but I would put him in the entertaining with substantive arguments category.
IMO software education/tainment suffers much worse though. They teach you how to do X in only this specific way with these specific tools, generally sponsored. Not the admittedly far more boring basics to do it yourself, or how to actually use these tools in a broader sense.
I'd never heard of basecoat but it looks great. IMO this is what Tailwind UI should have been. It was utter stupidity that they forced you to use their preferred shiny new JS framework of the week for UI components.
> I genuinely don’t understand how front-end developers accept this level of needless complexity.
I call it 'Shiny Object Syndrome' - Frontend devs tend to love the latest new JS frameworks for some reason. The idea of something being long running, tried and tested and stable for 5-10 years is totally foreign to many FE devs.
Despite its age JS and its ecosystem have just never matured into a stable set of reliable, repeatable frameworks and libraries.
Why attempt something that has abundant number of libraries to pick and choose? To me, however impressive it is, 'browser build from scratch' simply overstates it. Why not attempt something like a 3D game where it's hard to find open source code to use?
This is definitely correct. I had a dream about a new video game the other day, woke up and Gemini one-shotted the game, but the characters are janky as hell because it has made them from whole cloth.
What it should have been willing to do is go off and look for free external assets on the Web that it could download and integrate.
There are a lot of examples out there. Funny that you mention this. I literally just last night started a "play" project having Claude Code build a 3D web assembly/webgl game using no frameworka. It did it, but it isn't fun yet.
I think the current models are at a capability level that could create a decent 3D game. The challenges are creating graphic assets and debugging/Qa. The debugging problem is you need to figure out a good harness to let the model understand when something is working, or how it is failing.
Also graphics acceleration makes it hard to do from scratch rather than using using the 3D APIs but I guess you could in principle go bare iron on hardware that has published specs such as AMD, or just do software only rendering.
Before leaving the house, I find it helpful to imagine the median intelligence level in my geographic area (local, or country as a whole) and then recall that about half the population has a level below that point.
The issue isn't intelligence per se. It's ignorance (often willful ignorance), dogmatism, media illiteracy, political illiteracy, etc. There are many intelligent (but evil) people in the Trump administration and not every Trump voter is a dunce. Framing them all as stupid isn't useful, because it doesn't help us understand and counteract what's happening.
For many Americans (on both sides) politics is not about policy.
It's about tribalism and nihilism. Decades of political disfunction (defined by the failure of elected leaders to enact policy broadly supported by voters) has lead to a loss of faith in the ability of government (as currently structured) to deliver anything. If government (and other institutions) have failed to deliver anything to someone, it's understand why they may not care about its destruction.
Do not underestimate latent European fascism, which is easily promoted using the same issue: immigrants. Most countries have a not-quite-majority for doing their own version of Ice, including shooting civilians.
I keep reading in the news that Trump now polls the lowest ever for any US president, then I check Nate Silver and he's been hovering around the same value for the last 90 days or so.
You mean the big companies who still haven't moved away from abominations like SAP and Oracle? The ones where you require twenty approvals to get a small pilot done? Instead of moving to saner and cheaper alternatives, they would just say, "hey, why don't we just start making our own software?" Every effort like this—if it had any takers—will fail spectacularly.
I get it people are skeptical about the future. But I can't imagine any scenario where people would like taking responsibility of building and mantaining their own software for everything vs. paying marginal amount of money (relatively speaking) to let someone else take the headache.
I can imagine a future where it will be possible for a family to host their own essential services ... There got to be something between homelabs and cloud services bc the gap is too big.
Not quite there yet but Yunohost is a fantastic attempt to get closer to this ideal. Install the OS - and the basic self-hostic-use-case apps are all just there to click and install. From Immich to Kodi to Wordpress and what not.
With IPv6 (and/or NAT-forwarding) it was already possible to host stuff.
However, E-mail's horrible protocols and spam-blocking security monopolies mean you're stuck with one of the big cloud providers, even if you could automate/solve e-mail server complications.
Good luck. To have something that a regular family could use would require remote access from the company for troubleshooting, updates, maintenance.
So you get all of the downsides of cloud hosting (company employees can still remote in), with none of the upsides (all the hardware is now geographically distributed, instead of one big building) with the privilege of paying for it instead of being "free" like facebook/google.
Yeah, I am disappointed by how shallow it is. Lexing, Parsing, AST would apply to nearly every programming language and not SQL alone. There’s no mention of how the parsers actually work on the code level, which would have made it an interesting read.
I want to believe people who feel they are 10x more productive with agentic tools but I can’t help notice how there’s lot of doing things that don’t need to be done at all. Either that, or doing them superficially as the article shows.
Looking at that list, the top three companies are essentially about building apps without writing code. The next one is about helping developers write code. Perplexity is the only real outlier, and even that not by much. I am by no means an AI pessimist, but I can't help think where are all the awesome companies in other sectors that this technology is supposed to unlock.
I understand that many industries will take years to adopt. Fine. But about sub-sectors in tech—gaming, design, data? What is happening beyond "make software development easier"? Is it because ChatGPT like apps are enough for most people?
There's a loop between adoption of a technology and adaptation of a technology. For some domains that loop is fast, the adaptations prove to be easy and the feedback from adopters is easy to get. For other domains it's slow, especially towards the end of the process of going from something interesting to something useful. A good example of a slow loop is self driving, it's hard to get feedback about self driving in safety critical real world situations... another example is medicine.
The other issue is that the value is more or less all in the LLMs (at the minute). For example, I built a data engineering toolkit using LLMs, it created synthetic data from examples, it created ingestion pipelines given different source filed and a target, it created data test rules. I liked my little toolkit and some people were impressed, but the value was all in the models that underpinned it. The crust of clever bits that added value was thin, very thin. Ok, we used the llms to generate some python that then created the synthetic data and testing rules to reduce costs, we had three or four "agents" that worked together to create the pipelines. We decorated target code with open provenance code to create provanance... But just by saying these things or letting you use the toolkit and you seeing what it made - that's enough for any half competent person to relicate it (with AI assistance) in an afternoon, or maybe a couple of afternoons. Maybe.
So, to create a viable company is going to take significant effort (if you can think of a value add) because the value add still has to be real.
I tried this. One week in, I got used to grayscale as well and my screen time was back to the baseline (maybe only marginally affected). After nearly a decade of trying these tricks, hacks, and gamified interventions, it’s clear to me why they rarely work: they fixate on the symptom (screen time, social media use) rather than the underlying problem. Your mind craves to feel engaged/challenged in something. So, the actual problem is finding meaningful activities to replace your empty screen time, which isn't necessarily easy.
If you want to reduce your screen time, the boring old discipline is much more sustainable approach. Put the phone down and replace it with a book, or puzzles, or hobbies, or time with people.
So, I haven't tried it yet, but grayscale was a part of my plan as well. The other part was reduced refresh rate (e.g. 4-8 Hz) to force reading-only.
Re: back to baseline. Are you sure you actually have a problem with your screen use? I feel like grayscale is mostly for people who can't stop Instagram scrolling/YouTube habits.
That's true. I came off too dismissive. I like the advice, I was just disagreeing with:
> it’s clear to me why they rarely work: ...
and
> boring old discipline is much more sustainable approach
I like the idea of trying a more holistic approach, but grayscale doesn't have to contradict with that. Some people (myself included) can use grayscale as a tool alongside other things.
Proxyman is 100x value for 2x the price. I am not even kidding. Native UI, shortcuts, cert installation helper tools. And script editor to programmatically edit requests is so much better and powerful than Charles' request editor.
The funny thing about this administration is that they label existing system as "bad" and "corrupt", use that as justification to abandon it, and then proceed to recreate the same thing different way.
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