Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | ciconia's commentslogin

The document under discussion:

https://github.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills/blob/...

I find the whole premise of writing some vague instructions, feeding them to a stochastic parrot and expecting a solid engineering process to materialize out of the blue quite ridiculous.

Any sufficiently advanced "AI" technology is indistinguishable from bullshit.



> The liquidity that flooded the tech sector didn’t just inflate valuations; it inflated teams, egos, and expectations.

Yes it's kind of obvious to anyone who's looking at the actual work being done: the constant churn of OS updates, the JS-framework-du-jour, apps being updated constantly...

It seems to me like a lot of this is just busy work, as if engineers need to justify having a job by being releasing inconsequential updates all the time. Bullshit jobs anyone?

I for one would really like things to slow down, we all deserve it!


Because it's important to recognize sometimes when someone you disagree with is right about something, I would like to note that Musk sacking most of the Twitter staff has not made the site unable to stay up. (The site has got worse for other reasons)



I'm not sure but I'm guessing gray water (or treated waste water) is not suitable for cooling purposes? Particle charge in small pipes and scaling may be a problem. Also, collecting gray water or channeling treated waste water - depending on the location that might be a problem.

Not that I'm in favor of using drinking water for cooling slop factories, but I guess the reason we don't see waste water being used for cooling is cost (unless governments start mandating that...)


I believe (happy to be corrected!) it's the same reason juice has little to no fibre: particles in the liquid could potentially clog the data centre cooling systems. But Google should just include the filtering cost as part of their operational expenses




This analogy is flawed. The conversion formula between Fahrenheit and Celsius is fixed. Not so for currencies.


They are two separate issues, you don't look at the returns on SPY vs every currency.


If you are in USA and invest outside USA. Do you look at returns in USD or in nominal value of the market you invested in? Say there is hyperinflation where you invested. You should be extremely happy. After all the nominal value of your investment is massively up. Even if USD value is now fraction...


If you are outside the USA, then you absolutely do. Returns are denominated in the base currency but it doesn't paint the whole picture.


Meanwhile the US is all about "drill baby drill", and the EU is still hedging its bets. Say what you will about the Chinese regime but they seem to be much more pragmatic and forward thinking than western democracies.


I much prefer democracy (the lack of large scale human rights abuses is a big plus) but one can't argue that with the fact that a multi-generational one-party system CAN encourage a refreshing degree of long-term thinking. This is a good example. (Of course, examples abound of the opposite--also in China)


> (the lack of large scale human rights abuses is a big plus)

Got some news for you on that front.


The best argument for democracies, are their possibility of peaceful revolutios and this problem might become very relevant for china too.

You can compare the early US with present china. Both countries had/have great potential for economic growth, and everything went well for its citizens as long as the pie got bigger. The interests of the elites and the working class were aligned by that. Once the interests of these two groups diverge, democracies become relevant again. That's why the tech oligarchs are so afraid and politically engaged, to distract us with the have-nots below us.

Today, china just has the better aligning plan, while the west is struggling to keep it's democracies. IMO any reasonable trajectory for sustainability and social stability is a contradiction to western elites, who cannot think outside their status quo, while china just builds it. I really wish china well and that they dont develop such an arrogant international stance like the west.


> (the lack of large scale human rights abuses is a big plus)

Inside the country at least...


Indeed


I'd honestly turn the argument on its head. It's China that is being democratic, in the most literal sense. Giving the people what they want, clean energy, cheap stuff, infrastructure simply by satisfying market demand.

It's the largest western, ostensibly democratic nation that is run by some combination of occult neoreactionaries, techno-elites and pseudo-royalty all of which seem to have lost connection to immediate reality in pursuit of annexing territories, bringing about the singularity or what have you. It is ironically China who is more short termist and notably better off for it

I would actually much prefer if the US was run by people who fix potholes in the streets than something that resembles Dune's House Harkonnen


Neither is democratic. Democratic is direct rule of citizens, or at least some significant fraction of citizens. Only Switzerland is partially a democracy nowadays. Western countries are oligarchies, where elected elites are ruling however they deem necessary, but possibly with some caution because of elections. China is not even an oligarchy, it's a despotic regime, completely severed from the citizens.


It's not market demand. The government is ordering the construction of solar and wind farms without regard to the market demand or to the citizens residing in the locations where the solar farms and wind farms are to be built.

That's the exact opposite of democracy and capitalism.


It's a rational way to deal with their energy needs, reduce pollution and their impact on the climate.

They have small gas and oil reserves if I remember. Unfortunately, if they were sitting on Venezuela or Russian style reserves or oil/gas the story might be different. But unlike Europe, the Chinese can see that being beholden to foreign states to keep the lights on is asking for trouble.

They seem to have avoided the ideology the big fossil fuel companies push in the west to make fossil vs green a political/class discussion, not a rational one. Rationally it makes most sense for a nation to generate their energy needs in a way they control with wind/solar/nuclear.


It's not small -- China is the world's 4th largest oil producer. They domestically produce about 75% of their demand.


This number is wrong. Instead, ~70-75%[0] of China's oil demand is met by importing.

[0]: "2024年,中国...石油对外依存度71.9%,同比下降0.5个百分点。" (In 2024, China's ... dependence on foreign oil was 71.9%, a year-on-year decrease of 0.5 percentage points.)(https://finance.sina.cn/2025-01-24/detail-inefzsek2941040.d....)


you can't just go redefining terms until they mean what you want them to mean. You can say "China meets the wants of most of its citizens" (in which case, citation needed...) but that is definitionally not democratic. Democracy is a system, and a process can or cannot be democratic (within or outside a democratic system).


>you can't just go redefining terms until they mean what you want them to mean

Sure I can. There's obviously no one meaning of the term. The Democracy of the Greeks has very little to do with the Democracy of Rousseau, or the 21st century. The Chinese themselves consider their system democratic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism).

And you can make the case that a system that delivers the will of the people has a stronger claim to the term than a system that merely exhausts itself in staging democratic processes with no regards to outcomes.

This is funnily enough even happening within Western societies where people are branded pro or anti-democratic usually based on their affiliation. Laying exclusive ownership to the term is simply a rhetorical tool.


Well, you CAN, yes, but then nobody knows what the hell you're talking about and at that point why should we even care


I take issue with "the lack of large scale human rights abuses."

Are you ignorant or just deliberately ignoring the genocide of the Palestinian people with an estimated 680,000 dead (~30% of Gaza) that occurred with widespread support of almost every western democracy?

China may be an authoritarian state but I would argue their large scale human rights abuses are far tamer than what these so called western democracies have been doing for the past 2 years and the direction we're headed.


Yes, I'm not including deaths in the colonial periphery. That's a rather different dynamic to the domestic question. Your criticism of this simplified view is a valid and welcome addition to the conversation, though.

The West's post-colonial exploitation and suppression of the global south does strike me as a feature of unfettered capitalism more than the political systems "back home".


China has invested heavily in all forms of energy including coal and oil, not just green energy.

It's pretty biased to highlight only the increases in renewable energy.


The others are a rounding error in comparison to renewable energy. Yes, they've added a considerable amount of coal electricity generation capacity but not very much coal electricity generation production. It's production that emits CO2, not capacity. Coal plants that sit around not burning coal are relatively harmless.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: