I find it amusing that Trump ran with the promise of "no new wars", and then immediately tries to change the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by a hollow promise from Trump at this point.
As an outsider, the extent and depth of the contradictions are really fascinating, OTOH repeated to the point that nothing surprises anyone anymore.
I keep thinking what's the psychology behind this that makes it work and if they are mostly in on the act or if they really rely on many "useful idiots" like their political opponents keep suggesting.
The discussion around useful idiots became concerning for me as I'm learning to respect people even in the most "don't look up"-like situations, trying to understand their individual motives without judging them. The main problem in political discussions, I figured, is the fact that we have 2-3 groups we try to fit people into.
Unfortunately, useful idiot is a valid phenomena but much of what we observe in the US is disempowerment. The congress people believe that they don't have power outside the president's benevolence and hence does not assert their constitutional powers. The constitutional court is either partisan or outright corrupt and does not work as a corrective. The execution branch are ready to serve the president and not their assigned duties or the law. Many ordinary voters do not feel personal responsibility for acting, but prefer to rely on whoever promises them emotional validation instead of forming and empowering their communities. This is not a single thing, this is a combination of effects that influence and amplify each other.
I find it amusing that Franco ran with the promise of "justice for those with clean hands," and then immediately enacted the Law of Political Responsibilities to institutionalize the summary execution of tens of thousands of his political opponents.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by a hollow promise from Franco at this point.
>I find it amusing that Franco ran with the promise of "justice for those with clean hands," and then immediately enacted the Law of Political Responsibilities to institutionalize the summary execution of tens of thousands of his political opponents.
Tony Hoare was on my bucket list of people I wanted to meet before I or they die. My grad school advisor always talked of him extremely highly, and while I cannot seem to confirm it, I believe Hoare might have been his PhD advisor.
It's hard to overstate how important Hoare was. CSP and Hoare Logic and UTP are all basically entire fields in their own right. It makes me sad he's gone.
You've probably tried this already, but just in case: If you can find a copy of his PhD thesis it's likely (or at least would be likely without the information that you've had trouble tracking down his advisor) to have some mention of his advisor's name in it.
When I met him unfortunately I didn't realize how important he was (1987). The place where I worked used formal methods to verify the design of an FPU, in collaboration with the PRG. iirc the project was a success. I never heard of formal methods being successfully used again until TLA+ a few years ago.
David May was my PhD supervisor and always spoke very highly of Sir Tony Hoare.
Edit: I’m also lucky enough to have worked with Geoff Barrett, the guy that completed that formal verification (and went on to do numerous other interesting things). Some people may be interested to learn that this work was the very first formal verification of an FPU - and the famous Intel FPU bug could have been avoided had Intel been using the verification methods that the Inmos and University teams pioneered.
I actually had two PhD advisors [1]; Jim Woodcock and Simon Foster.
Both of them are legitimately wonderful and intelligent humans that I can only use positive adjectives to describe, but the one I was referring to in this was Jim Woodcock [2]. He had many, many nice things to say about Tony Hoare.
[1] Just so I'm not misleading people, I didn't finish my PhD. No fault at all of the advisor or the school.
I remember Jim Woodcock as really inspirational - he was working with my PhD supervisor in 1987. We were working on a variant of Z for specifying what, today, we would call CRDTs. I was also lucky enough to meet Tony Hoare the same year and discuss those concepts.
“Inspired by” is an understatement of the century lol. David May and Sir Tony worked very closely together to enable the architecture to be as pure a runtime for CSP as you could get - at least in early versions of the architecture and accompanying Occam language. It expanded and deviated a bit later on iirc.
Source: David loved to tell some of these stories to us as students at Bristol.
It’s also worth highlighting that the mathematical purity of the designs were also partly the problem with them. As a field, we’re still developing the maths of Effects and Effectful Algebras that are needed to make these systems both mathematically ‘pure’ (or at least sound to within some boundary) and ALSO capable of interfacing to the real world.
Transputer and Occam were, in this sense, too early. A rebuild now combining more recent developments from Effect Algebras would be very interesting technically. (Commercially there are all sorts of barriers).
I've been on/off working on a Forth compiler for the NES. It will be open source soon enough but I'm not happy with the code right now as it's extremely messy, repetitive, and buggy, but I think it's turning out ok. I am resisting the urge to use Claude to do all the work for me, since that's depressing.
I've also been working on a clone of the old podcasting website TalkShoe. It's nothing too complicated. It's mostly an excuse to learn a bit more about Asterisk and telephony stuff. I'm hoping to have something fully usable in about a month or two.
I forked the main MiSTer binary due to some disagreements I had with Sorg in how he's running things [1]. My fork was largely done by Codex and Claude, but the tl;dr of it is that it has automatic backup of your saves, tagging and versioning of your saves, and it abuses the hell out of SQLite to give better guarantees of write safety than the vanilla MiSTer binary gives you. I've been using it for a few weeks now and it seems to work fine, and it's neat to be able to tag and version saves.
I think that's mostly it. I'm always hacking on something so there might be a straggler there.
I'm not opposed to AI automating away stuff no one liked doing, or even more utilitarian things in general, but robots posting on social media and discussion sites seems antithetical. I don't know what the point of talking to a robot would be when I could talk to Claude if I wanted to do that.
I'm not even 100% sure why people are doing Show HN for low-effort stuff shit that was done in 45 minutes in Claude. I guess it's trying to resume-pad or build a brand or something?
Here to say I'm one of those people who did my first Show HN recently, and it was 100% due to the lowered activation energy to build something awesome with Claude. Not 45min, but took about 6 hours of my time, and benefitted from testing against a 10yr old firmware codebase at my startup.
So I guess I'm saying, the ideal rate of Show HN posts has probably gone way up. Unfortunately its also resulting in lower SNR. Not sure what to do about it tho.
> I'm not even 100% sure why people are doing Show HN for low-effort stuff shit that was done in 45 minutes in Claude. I guess it's trying to resume-pad or build a brand or something?
When I was 21, I moved out of my parents house and moved from Orlando to Dallas for a girl I met on the internet. We were together for about six months and then she broke up with me. Additionally, like two weeks later I got fired from my job.
I hold no grudges my ex girlfriend for that, I was far from an amazing partner, but I was now living in a new city where I knew basically no one, with no job to get out of my apartment, with no family nearby, and no money to artificially figure out ways to entertain myself. I had never in my entire life before that felt so alone. Days simultaneously felt ridiculously long and yet time seemed to also lose all meaning and it would feel like a week would go by without me even realizing it. When a job interview would come up, it would be the highlight of my week, primarily because it was an excuse to talk to another human.
I had friends from Orlando, of course, good friends even, and I would chat with them on Skype, and I would call my parents over the weekend, but of course they all had to work during the day and so most of the day I was purely alone.
It was dreadful. It felt like all I could do was apply for jobs, play through games on a SNES emulator, and learn new programming languages to try and make myself competitive in the job market.
I eventually found a job, with coworkers that I actually really liked. There was a married couple that I think liked me but also felt kind of sorry for me, so they would invite me over to their house on weekends to play video games and watch Game of Thrones, and I am eternally grateful for them. They were friends when I really needed friends.
I never really figured out how to be alone; I eventually met my girlfriend (now wife) and I haven't really been "alone" in the same way since then.
Private in that they're not owned by the taxpayers or government. Amtrak would be an example of a "public" company in the sense that I believe that the poster was describing.
These words have meaning already, and what they said makes no sense due to that. A public company has many obligations a private company doesn't, and more limitations on what it can do.
I don't think so; I know a lot of them are in charge of multiple companies, which sounds like they work a lot, but I think it signals just as much that CEO really isn't that hard of a job.
Elon is the CEO of like four or five companies I think, while also ostensibly heading a government agency. If you can have four or five full time jobs, then they are not full time jobs.
Given that, I suspect that they're able to find plenty of time for themselves.
Adding on to it, They use SerpAPI which (sort of) scrapes google and then they do their work on top and this is also how they allow your customizability features to be added too in search if i remember correctly.
Kagi is great if you need great customizability and filters and if you wish to support the future of Kagi/products like these.
And Duckduckgo is great if you need a Google alternative which "just works" without costing money* if you are frugal.
Either way, both options are good and its best to leave Google if/when possible.
The best feature of both of these and brave-search to some degree is that all three support bangs. !yt leads to youtube and !hn leads to hn.algolia.com :) and !sr and so so many more. Bangs might be the best feature that google users might be missing. It just saves so much time.
Not the person you're replying to, but something that has bothered me about him (and a lot of SV tech), is how they did rapid over-hiring in 2022, then a year later fire a bunch of people, while he claimed he took "full responsibility", but still got a nice happy bonus that year. I'm not sure I know what "taking full responsibility" actually means, because to me it seems like if you have to lay off thousands of people in a year, that would be a good reason to not get a bonus.
These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies.
I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.
The "I take full responsibility" thing has been entirely meaningless.
I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.
Yeah, that's the thing; if he's acknowledging that it was his decision to do this, then maybe he shouldn't be getting bonuses and maybe be fired? Why are the regular schmucks the ones being punished for his terrible decisions and not him?
Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off? I think that's why he got the bonus, actually! I'm sure the layoff was difficult for him as well: he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.
No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google. Like when an employee leaves, you wouldn't say they're "punishing" the employer.
> Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off?
It probably was the right decision to lay everyone off. What was not the right decision, and this should have been obvious, was hiring 10+k more employees than you actually need because you assume that this free money will last forever. He was almost certainly aware and signed off on this mass hiring. Other companies didn't make this mistake; Tim Cook didn't take a bonus that year to avoid mass layoffs.
> he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.
He probably did, because he's a bad CEO. He was right to lose goodwill.
> No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google.
No, there isn't a legal promise or anything, but people go to these BigCos primarily for stability. If you want an exciting job with lots of interesting new things, it's much easier to find that in a startup, but startups can be frustrating because they're inherently unstable. This is partly why startups tend to be made up of very young people; it's much easier to deal with volatility if you don't have a family.
You're obviously not "entitled" to a job, but the people who run Google aren't complete idiots; they know people are joining BigCo because they think it's going to be relatively stable. They depended on that in order to do all this overhiring.
Well I hope people won't perceive this (nonexistent) stability in the future.
I'm not trying to "absolve" Google, nor do I think they're guilty. They used their reputation to hire people. It turns out that needs to be updated. Perhaps in the future they will do things to improve their reputation again? Who knows...
It just feels a little victim-blamey. Google manipulated thousands of people, and they got screwed in the process. Should they have known that big corporations are evil? Maybe, but I'm not going to blame someone who was misled by dishonest people.
If you're agreeing that they misled people by using their reputation in a way that's dishonest, how are they "not guilty"?
I agree Google's reputation misled people. But importantly, I don't think Google can be held accountable for their reputation and for what other people believed.
To give a somewhat contorted example: If people believe you give 1 Bitcoin to anyone who can recite the whole Beowulf, they will perhaps spend a lot of time learning Beowulf, forgoing other things. Then they find out you in fact have not promised them that and that you have no such obligation. I don't think you've misled them! Do they have a right to be angry with you? Or should they have checked with you what the precise conditions were before upending their life?
If I happily let them waste their time reciting Beowulf on purpose under false pretenses then I would be a douchebag.
Google knew that people would join based on a perception of stability. Did they hire 10,000 people knowing that they would fire them six months later? If so, they are jerks. If not, then they are so categorically idiotic as to think that they will just have free money for forever and interest rates would never ever go up. In either situation they are bad.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by a hollow promise from Trump at this point.
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