LinkedIn is also a great example of this stuff at the moment. Every day I see posts where someone clearly took a slide or a diagram from somewhere, then had ChatGPT "make it better" and write text for them to post along with it. Words get mangled, charts no longer make sense, but these people clearly aren't reading anything they're posting.
It's not like LinkedIn was great before, but the business-influencer incentives there seem to have really juiced nonsense content that all feels gratingly similar. Probably doesn't help that I work in energy which in this moment has attracted a tremendous number of hangers-on looking for a hit from the data center money funnel.
(and before anyone tells me to charge my phone, I have one of those construction worker phones with 2 weeks battery. 14% is like good for a couple of days)
The red apple streams one is good. It shows how developers chase shiny new stuff with no respect for fundamentals. They will say it's less code, and then show you more code.
The apples one is LLM nonsense: the left example doesn’t include any code for the loop, whereas the streams version actually is iterating over a collection.
Regardless, FP-style code isn’t “shiny new stuff”—it’s been around for decades in languages like Lisp or Haskell. Functional programming is just as theoretically “fundamental” as imperative programming. (Not to mention that, these days, not even C corresponds that closely to what’s actually going on in hardware.)
Care to explain the last one? The presentation is weird and stupid, but I don't see any obvious (technical) issue other than the missing bracket on the left, unlike the first two
Iterative example doesn't iterate, mismatches parentheses and brackets. Because of this, the iterative example is shorter and simpler than the "short & simple" lambda example.
Lambda example is to the best of my parsing ability this:
It's interesting to see how LLMs make mistakes sometimes: replacing `->` with `-λ` because arrow sort-of has the same meaning as lambdas in lambda calculus. It's like an LLM brain fart replacing something semantically similar but nonsensical in context.
The 'long' code for checking apples is shorter, but it's missing the external for loop. So I guess you could say it's not (ahem) an apples to apples comparison.
- the apples example on the right side ("Short code") ist significantly longer than the equivalent "Long code" example on the left side (which might also be because that code example omits the necessary for loop).
- The headings don't provide structure. "Checking Each Apple" and "Only Red Apples!" sounds like opposites, but the code does more or less the same in both cases.
Those are so funny that I was forgetting to breathe as I was laughing so hard, man that's excellent haha. Thanks for sharing them, even if we are cooked as a society...
LinkedIn is a masquerade ball dressed up as a business oriented forum. Nobody is showing their true selves, everyone is either grinding at their latest unicorn potential with their LLM BFF or posting a "thoughtful" story that is 100% totally real about a life changing event that somehow turns into a sales pitch at the end...
I short the stock of companies whose leadership is wasting time posting to LinkedIn instead of… y’know… leading their org. The more they post the more I short. Similarly, the less-attached-to-reality the post is the more I short.
I wish I could say I’m making bank off this strategy - but pretty-much all the slopposters (and the most insufferable of the AI boosters) are all working for nonpublic firms, oh well.
Maybe not a winning strategy because a lot of public companies have a comms team that manages the CEO’s LinkedIn. Thereby saving the valuable time of the CEO themselves.
> LinkedIn is a masquerade ball dressed up as a business oriented forum. Nobody is showing their true selves
That's the main trait of almost all social media. A parade of falsity, putting on the show for everyone else, being what you wish you were and what everyone else dreams of being or envies.
LinkedIn is about boasting and boosting the professional life, other social media is for the personal life. More or less equally fake.
Yep! Quit LinkedIn when it went downhill. Has only gotten worse since then. Most social media is filled with AI slop. For someone who grew up in the 90s-2000s BBS/IRC era this sucks!
IMO Microsoft is right at the nexus of opportunity for solving some of the the large _problems_ that AI introduces.
Employers and job seekers both need a way to verify that they are talking to real identified people that are willing to put in some effort beyond spamming AI or wasting your time on AI run filters. LinkedIn could help them.
Programmers need access to real human-verified code and projects they can trust, not low-effort slop that could be backdoored at any moment by people with unclear motives and provenance. Github could help.
etc. etc. for Office, Outlook ...
But instead they've decided to ride the slop waves, throw QA to the wind, and call every bird and stone "copilot".
totally. I'm really getting behind the slight replacement of TL;DR to AI;DR
If you can't be bothered to read your own AI slop, then I'm not reading it either.
> As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.
I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.
I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.
Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.
In Athens, an "idiotes" was a citizen who focused only on private matters rather than participating in the polis (city-state). Because civic participation was considered a duty, this term carried a negative connotation of being socially irresponsible or uninvolved.
This term evolved into the modern "idiot" which we are familiar with.
It means just because you now have an interest in politics, it doesn't mean you will be able to convince anyone of your points of view, or have any impact in whatever level of politics you're joining.
The thing is that taking an interest in baking a cake doesn’t actually feed anyone. If you’re not going to spend your time baking (i.e. actually get involved in politics, to drop the metaphor), then what’s the point?
My interpretation of the statement is that you can't ignore forces that affect you, even if they bore you. However loudly or frequently you declare or think "I don't care for gravity" matters not as it exists outside of your awareness or acknowledgement of it.
No, that is the meaning of grand-parent's comment, which makes sense to me, even passively because one has be to aware the environment they move in.
Taking parent's cue of assuming lack of agency - you can even replace "politics" with "the weather", and gp's comment still makes sense, parents inverted riposte does not make sense under its own priors. We can't change the weather, but it's prudent to know which days to carry an umbrella.
If one civilization is taking revenge on another I don’t think they would show that much nuance.
For one thing, wouldn’t everyone claim they were against their old polis? How would the invaders have any idea who was an idiote?
I just don’t believe it’s at all easy to avoid the fate of your nation , and I especially doubt that the politically ignorant have a better chance of avoiding that fate than the well informed.
> The counter extermination was only 5% of Athens total population, or so historians say, so it seems like a lot of nuance was shown.
That fact alone doesn't demonstrate nuance. It's possible that 5% of the population was innocent and treated as scapegoats, or chosen randomly, or that anyone high profile regardless of guilt was chosen to die.
Unless there's data on who was actually innocent or guilty, the mere fact that extermination was selective doesn't mean it was in any way accurate.
Funny seeing people pushing for other people becoming more active in politics with the assumption that “being more involved” means with their political fights, then get worried when the other side grows or intensifies.
I find the "no one could have seen it coming" crowd extremely tiring, they usually always say that about something anyone who paid a tiny bit of attention could see coming.
It's genuinely baffling to me why business owners pay so little attention to the politics that will directly impact their business.
The entire tariffs thing was incredible obvious to me (I am Australian) and I only check in on US politics for 10 min a couple of times a month, any less and it would be zero.
Trump in 1987 in a full page ad in the New York Times: "It's time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours. ... Tax these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America's economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let's not let our great country be laughed at anymore."
Trump in 1989 talking to Diane Sawyer: "he would impose a 15% to 20% tariff on Japanese imports".
Trump in 2011 in his book "Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again": "I want foreign countries to finally start forking over cash in order to have access to our markets. So here’s the deal: any foreign country shipping goods into the United States pays a 20 percent tax. If they want a piece of the American market, they’re going to pay for it. No more free admission into the biggest show in town — and that especially includes China."
Trump at a rally in Vegas in 2011, referring to China: "Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25%!"
Trump in 2018: If the Europeans are "not going to treat us fairly... then we're going to tax all those beautiful Mercedes-Benzes that are coming in."
Anyone who didn't think tariffs were coming is a fucking moron.
Too harsh. Trump was president once before, and didn't impose 150% tariffs on anybody. You don't have to be a fucking moron to assume he'll behave similarly in his second presidency. Trump says a LOT of things that he doesn't end up doing.
Tariffs were a huge point of debate in his first administration. The government had to pay $30 billion to farmers to offset the impact of tariffs.
> China implemented retaliatory tariffs equivalent to the $34 billion tariff imposed on it by the U.S. In July 2018, the Trump administration announced it would use a Great Depression-era program, the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), to pay farmers up to $12 billion, increasing the transfers to farmers to $ 28 billion in May 2019. The USDA estimated that aid payments constituted more than one-third of total farm income in 2019 and 2020.
Meanwhile, here in Australia I spoke with small business owners (cafes, gyms, etc...) about their preparedness for the COVID lockdowns before the first one we had. All of them just had a wide-eyed look and a mumbled "Lockdowns? Really? Here? You think so?"
More than half of them went bankrupt.
One guys kept dumping money into a new gym buildout mere weeks before the months-long lockdowns commenced.
Realistically, everyone always seems to think everything was predictable but I have maybe a handful of friends who sold the Russell 2000 futures short and then rebounded long who made millions off the various tariff trades. Ironically, Ukrainian and Russian. Ex-HFT but just doing very normal click trading. So I don't get it. Why isn't everyone who can predict the future so accurately a (deca-)millionaire?
There are two different kind of “prediction” mixed up here.
The thing which was easy to predict is that Trump is going to continue his trade war against China. It is also easy to predict that in a trade war companies who manufacture some product in China and sell it in the USA will suffer.
That prediction is enough for one to stay out of that kind of business. But it is not enough to do trades and profit from it.
If you could predict that Trump is going to announce x tarrifs on y tomorrow at z time that is much more likely to lead to succesfull trades. That is hard to predict.
Just because you believe X is going to happen doesn't mean you can make money in the market off of that information, that requires judging what _everyone else_ thinks will happen and thus how the market is priced. You could just as easily get stuck in the situation where the market as a whole was expecting it to be worse than it was and didn't move far enough for you to make your money back.
It would have been very hard to find a counterparty that didn’t think Donald Trump was going to raise tariffs prior to his inauguration. He was very transparent about this (though the exact amount has fluctuated pretty wildly). Hard to make money when nobody else is taking the other side of the bet.
Isn't the problem that he can do it single-handedly ? Tariffs are usually something a given gover ing body needs to vote on & they are supposed to be implemented with a reasonable timeline.
Being able to set tarrifs and other stuff basically at random in real-time with no oversight is the main issue IMHO.
Plenty of things are predictable in the sense that one can bucket them. Tariffs were very predictable because we know the pedo has that unilateral lever and talks about wielding it. But who would have predicted that out of all the stupid tariff things that might happen, it would be things like tariffing allies, tariffing uninhabited islands, TACO tariffs, or a giant board with “reciprocal tariffs”? It requires not only predicting specific stupidity, but taking an aggressive position.
Whoever was holding aggressive poly market positions on “POTUS poops pants at presser” is a millionaire now. We all know he wears diapers and has massive flatulence, but who would have predicted that specific thing?
All the main retailers like Walmart, Costco, Home Depot/Lowes etc. should band together and pull out the tariff costs as a separate payment line on the bill like sales tax. They shouldn’t include it in the bill and pull it out to be paid at time of sale.
The Trump administration has made it very clear on multiple occasions that any company that does that will find that every law that affects them and has some amount of administrative discretion will suddenly be interpreted maximally against them.
They couldn’t realistically take on Walmart, Amazon, Target, Lowe’s, and major grocers all at once. They’re just not organized enough. We’ve already seen them give up or flop in court when challenged.
Tariffs are applied to the price the importer pays. Listing them separately would thus give away the reseller's markup. That's far more than the tariffs for most importers from China. Often you can look up the same item on Alibaba and find what the reseller is paying.
> Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not
I'd argue it's the other way around. Politics is downstream of everything else. In other words, it's easier to predict the politics of tomorrow based on the culture today than it is to predict the culture of tomorrow based on the politics of today. I'd go as far as to argue that political details are almost irrelevant except in the most extreme cases where political figures change culture (Constantine or Hitler for example). The current political climate is the result of the cultural climate, and if it wasn't, the people in office would have never been elected in the first place.
National politics doesn't teach you any more about how the world works than the politics of your workplace or your school.
What I find particularly galling is that he failed to learn perhaps the most important lesson: Maybe he wouldn't have these kind of problems if he hadn't outsourced his manufacturing to China but kept in on-shore instead.
You should check out Michael Lynch's blog series about building TinyPilot.
He tried to source from America companies first, but the products were actually worse and much more expensive than his Chinese vendors.
He has one blog post which details the quality differences, and the Chinese vendors were much better than the American ones. The American ones also took longer and we're less communicative to him than the Chinese vendors.
Last Trump term, a small business making PC cases locally in california went out of business because of steel tariffs. I'm not sure that local manufacturing in small batches is much safer given there's aluminum and other material tariffs this time too?
Other than the back and forth / lead time issues on checking issues, what do you think a local manufacturer shop in the US would do better? If the takeaway was needing to specify stuff in the design phase earlier that's kind of a universal manufacturing lesson I think.
> what do you think a local manufacturer shop in the US would do better?
The post documents issues like some assembly workers stuffing so much wire into the post that not enough protruded to make a connection. I will hope that in the US the workers are paid enough that they notice/care that the result can be connected. Or the managers.
Do you want documented experiences of Chinese manufacturing repeatedly attempting to cut corners? Like substituting inferior goods to increase their profit margin even after the initial product line is running smoothly.
The example - the cable not extending far enough from the post to make a connection - was explained in the article as something he failed to specify properly. Not a failure of the manufacturing partner.
For this not to be a problem a worker would have to notice it and put two and two together, then investigate further and then persuade their supervisor to raise it with the customer and get a change made to the spec.
While enjoying your faith in the rigour and attention to detail of the US assembly line worker, I think this example tells exactly the story the article says it does - that you have to specify everything.
Nobody saw this coming. Trump's first term might have been crazy inside US, but outside... it's the least interfering US govt we've had in a while for the world. So as far as geopolitics is concerned, he is right.
Throughout 2024, Donald Trump has proposed a series of tariffs on all goods coming from outside the U.S. or on goods from specific countries. His recent proposals include:
• An across-the-board 10 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.
• An across-the-board 20 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.
• A 60 percent tariff—“or higher”—on all goods imported from China.
• An additional 10% above any additional tariffs on imports from China.
• A 25% tariff on products imported to the United States from Mexico and Canada.
Yes, everbody who was paying any attention at all saw this coming.
First term Trump didn't quite have as many toadies willing to follow him no matter where he takes them. They also weren't quite so willing to blatantly violate the law and dare someone to do anything about it.
Second term plans were all written down for anyone to read but still far too many didn't believe it.
Classic hindsight bias. In fact, you could be paying a lot of attention to politics and still think tariffs were not going to go so high. Here's [1] a betting market that regularly was below 5% chance of tariffs above 40% on Chinese imports in first 100 days of Trump's second term.
Polymarket isn’t a source for this, lol. Maybe google trends, since there’s no reason to manipulate it. There were also reasons to anticipate the amount of the tariffs, and the absolute stupidity of the tariffs (still reeling from the Heard and McDonald islands tariffs lmao).
This is a strange position to take. Sure, Polymarket has warts, but that doesn't mean it's not a very good source for consensus opinions about the future from the past. Do you think this market was manipulated?
Open, public non-academic prediction markets basically exist to be manipulated by people with insider knowledge.
Filter out all the noise of people random ass guessing what will happen in the future and focus on people making big bets late in the game. That's your important "prediction".
See: Anonymous person who made $400,000 betting on Maduro being out of office, etc.
I'd be surprised if there weren't already people running HFT-like setups to look for these anomalously large late stage trades to piggyback their own bets on the insider information.
If you're so much of a better predictor than Polymarket, then why don't you put your money where your mouth is and make a killing off those manipulators?
I'm doubtful that knowing how much politics matters, but only in a vague way, would have been enough to help them. Could someone who was obsessed with following the Trump administration's every move have predicted the tariffs in advance? I don't think financial markets priced them in?
This isn't about timing the market by being clairvoyant about the timing of a madman's tariffs.
This is about taking reasonable risk calculations as a small business with extremely high tariff exposure, when a president who did a bunch of high tariffs last time wins and election and says he'll do it again.
Sure multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions didn't run for the hills because they get paid when it goes up and paid when it goes down.
Yeah, I find it curiously delusional, but the reality seems to be a segment of the population just refuses to accept the drastic change in pace to political change.
No, knowing that Trump really likes tariffs is not enough to know specifically how he's going to do it. (And which laws he's going to break to get there.)
They were very much priced in, you had retailers purchasing a lot of imports in Q1 to prepare for them. What wasn’t priced in was the scale, which is what resulted in the initial sell off in April until the administration walked back the steepest rates
You could also say politics is downstream of other forces that are less global and more local. Some people choose to stay aware of their more local forces rather than the grand ones.
That's not what that image means at all. If you look closely, you'll even see 3 additional colors, plus white, from the 4 I'm guessing you identified.
Those are ERCOT load zones, a distinct concept and all within the ERCOT interconnection (grid).
On the markets side, Texas is made up of ERCOT, and then has portions in (descending order) MISO, SPP, and the non-market West.
In terms of "grids" Texas is mostly ERCOT, and then the Eastern Interconnection with a small smidge of Western Interconnection in the far west in El Paso Electric's territory.
That's cool to see, obiously Fermi has had them as someone else mentioned.
I grew up in Kane County, in the 90s it was the edge of the suburban-rural interface of Chicagoland (used to be the last commuter rail stop from the city).
Random fun tidbit is the WW1 code-breaking[0] that took place there as well, which today remains an acoustics lab[1].
there's something seriously wrong with this archived link. It's not staying still for one moment. It's constantly twitching and the text scrolls to weird positions. It's unreadable because of this.
Is it the archive at fault or is the original webpage this way?
Works for me here, and in 90% of the cases where someone complains of annoying page behaviour (cookie banners, revenue optimizations, subscription solicitations, "click here to ...", paywalls, ads, et alii ad nauseam).
Seriously, just disable JavaScript on unknown/untrusted/undeserving sites. It makes the web tolerable.
Is there actually a whitelist of sites where it's OK/necessary to enable JS ? I'd love to use that (although, I don't know how to load that list into safari or chrome.)
Was the VPT site not working for you, so you had to resort to archive.org? Original link https://vptdigital.com/blog/honey-detecting-testers/ . Anyone having trouble -- contact Ben Edelman (easily found by web search) and I will genuinely value the opportunity to get to the bottom of what is wrong.
Your diagnosis is correct. VPT has been most focused on building our testing automation, then improving reports and dashboards. We knew this spike of traffic was coming, but we didn't finish sufficient WordPress optimizations. Apologies.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems called dibs on next last year by saying they’re gonna have a Dominion (Virginia) commercial site up and running in the early 2030s.
Second US organized market to do so, and third in the region, after NY(ISO) and Ontario (IESO).
With HQ there as well, it’s actually quite a large coal-free chunk of grid.
What will be interesting is the extent to which offshore wind and imports from HQ will be able to materialize according to plan. OSW is having a hatchet being taken to it in the US currently, and imports from HQ into NY and NE have been way down recently while big new lines are also built.
Not exactly in the ISO forecasts, but very much supported by state policy has been the rapid expansion of behind the meter solar in New England. Really taken the edge off of summer days in particular, although also susceptible to smoke from Canadian wildfires.
Not the most exciting markets day-to-day, but interesting long-term things happening.
imo, that's basically the dirty secret of grid data, post 9/11 it seemed as if everything went behind the CEII wall, but in reality it has always been that if you're a legacy player or have the money you can make sure you have access to everything.
It's a thorny issue and something I ponder in my day-to-day[0]. We're members in ISOs where it makes sense, and can provide CEII data once we've confirmed customers already have access, but I would love to be able to show some of it publicly. It's also odd how things vary from market to market. Transmission outages: public everywhere, except ERCOT, where they're considered Secure. Generator bids: anonymized and delayed by up to 90 days everywhere, except ERCOT, where it's 60-days and not anonymized at all (yes, ERCOT is different wrt to FERC jurisdiction).
Years ago I worked at a market monitor[1], and we got everything, just cloning the changes to ISO databases overnight every day, second-by-second PI (plant information) data, it was awesome. The potential advantages from data asymmetry are big enough that there are multiple companies with physical sensors out in the world measuring power lines in different ways to try and reconstruct grid activity in real time, and then others doing it entirely from access to CEII and a deep understanding of how the grid function. But all of this is heavily oriented towards traders, not developers, although I would use trading tools when developing projects because they were the most advanced.
They’ve steadily expanded over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was real. It’s not just calculators, TI chips show up in a lot of military hardware in particular.
Which is why they are not planning to make cutting edge semiconductors in the new plant but "foundational semiconductors" aka old nodes that now cost pennies
If you want to build a fleet of infantry drones and you want to source components from the US there’s a lot of these and many others to buy. Not sure if there’s $60B of them there but they’ll figure out how to waste this much I’m sure.
Well if you look at how Feds has being pumping money into Musk's bank account and what brought down the SVB, then $60B may not be that much. At this point as the country that can prints/(adjust db ledger) $60B is nothing.
With MESI cache coherence, maybe you could migrate the whole workspace for your subroutine into a line of your core's L1D cache, and make it perform like hardware registers while retaining the pleasantly parsimonious TMS 990 architectural semantics?
Also already building a new fab up in Sherman, Texas.
Fabs have pretty decent electricity demand, I actually sited a battery against that one after we did a bit of modeling with the new load vs the solar flows in the area. Siting just means make a land deal, figure out easements, and start working its way through the queue. Might not ever get built though, lot of money and hurdles in the way ha.
Every time I see an industrial announcement like this power is the first thing I think of - where it’s gonna come from and what impact it will have on the existing grid.
Most of these projects invest heavily in renewable energy, becuase the scale makes it cost efficient. During the Biden era, there were a bunch of additional incentives to push for renewable investments in these projects, on top of Texas's very generous renewable tech incentives - most ONG companies began investing heavily in renewables all the way back in the 2000s because they're ENERGY conglomerates first and foremost.
If you have a beating pulse and a strong renewable tech IP, you will raise a seed successfully from the Saudi PIF or Cheveron Ventures even in this market. Sadly, this is HN, not Bookface, so most ideas are bad ideas. Sucks too because it was a very fruitful demo days - one of the more impactful over the past several years.
It's not like LinkedIn was great before, but the business-influencer incentives there seem to have really juiced nonsense content that all feels gratingly similar. Probably doesn't help that I work in energy which in this moment has attracted a tremendous number of hangers-on looking for a hit from the data center money funnel.
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