MountDoom

11 ms·

31.
by MountDoom 1y ago
As much as I like to reminisce about the good old days, I'm not sure the thesis is entirely true. In the 1990s, home computers were more conspicuous, but we didn't really have such a variety of designs. Almost every PC-compatible
32.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Taxpayers subsidize data centers in many other ways. These are prestige projects for politicians, so they often get long-term tax breaks and other preferential treatment. I think it's part vanity, part a misunderstanding about the econ
33.
by MountDoom 1y ago
It really couldn't. "Intentional" as it, you destroyed your property on purpose. Not "you were a dumbass and caused damage", not "you didn't apply for a permit and caused damage". Insurance covers stu
34.
by MountDoom 1y ago
I think plenty of folks just have a vague understanding of electrical codes and say stuff like that to impress others. Generally speaking, you're just not supposed to do permanent electrical wiring with extension cords and power strips
35.
by MountDoom 1y ago
> * Fire insurance or well, potential no-payout if your installation creates a fire. This is pretty much a myth. Insurance pays out even if you cause a hazard, as long as it's not intentional (i.e., not insurance fraud). Talk to any
36.
by MountDoom 1y ago
I'm surprised you say that. To flip this on its head, what would be your principled argument to accept ambient surveillance? I don't doubt that license plate readers are used primarily to solve crimes. But the fact that it is coll
37.
by MountDoom 1y ago
For senior engineers with some fiscal discipline, it's great, although it's more great to work remotely. On the more junior end, that $250k goes about as far as $100k in a less expensive region. Keep in mind that the average 1-bed
38.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Yeah, but net worth is weird because for most people, it just measures age. When you're young, you have nothing in your 401k and you have a brand new mortgage, so you're worth around $0. Negative if you have any student loans. Whe
39.
by MountDoom 1y ago
I suspect this has the opposite effect. More daily users == higher valuation, so more profit if the VCs decide to sell. There's no pressure on OpenAI to become profitable yet.
40.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Entry-level total comp for SWEs in the SF Bay Area is probably $250k. A senior dev at a public tech company can easily clear $400k. Really senior engineers at FAANG routinely clear $1M.
41.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Bezos is a 0.0001-percenter. Most of people on HN are probably in the top 1% to 5%. You're in the top 10% in the US if you make $170k/yr.
42.
by MountDoom 1y ago
> Also true of non-tech-adjacent reporters! It's true for everyone . Over the years, I've been on the business end of several "tech outrage" stories that made the headlines on HN, and over time, became a sort of IT c
43.
by MountDoom 1y ago
> Google Docs, Google Meet and Gmail provide a tiny fraction of Google's overall revenue. I don't understand your argument here. Like Chrome and Android, these products exist to establish foothold, precisely so that Microsoft o
44.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Nah. No one is using Meta AI because it's shoehorned into contexts where you don't actually need it. And that's because these happen to be the only surfaces that Meta controls. They know full well they won't win there, w
45.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Possibly, but I don't think that Microsoft apps have the kind of a foothold in the corporate world that they used to have. Sure, if you join a bank or a government agency, or a big company that's been around for 40+ years, you&#x2
46.
by MountDoom 1y ago
All of these teens use Google Docs instead of OpenAI Docs, Google Meet instead of OpenAI Meet, Gmail instead of OpenAI Mail, etc. I'm sure that far fewer people to go gemini.google.com than to chatgpt.com, but Google has LLMs seamlessl
47.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Many parts of Europe solved it in a more low-tech way: street-side parcel lockers unlocked with your phone. Massively reduces delivery cost (i.e., one driver can deliver far more packages per hour), is pretty convenient and safe (no package
48.
by MountDoom 1y ago
> "terrible technical decisions". Another point worth bringing up is that sometimes, that stuff doesn't matter. I see so many engineers get hopelessly invested in technical debates that are, honestly, just silly: it's
49.
by MountDoom 1y ago
I think that's a bit of a scope creep. The study of dynamical systems is obviously important and is sometimes rolled into chaos theory, but it predates it - and tellingly, it almost never concerns itself with chaotic behavior, because
50.
by MountDoom 1y ago
> Yes but with AI, in principle, there is more wriggle room to present a spectrum of opinions on a single topic. I mean, this sounds impartial but isn't. If you have an article on the planet Earth and present a spectrum of opinion
51.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Pages about companies and contemporary politics make up a relatively small percentage of Wikipedia. And what's the realistic alternative? These pages are always going to represent opinions. Traditional encyclopedias usually represent v
52.
by MountDoom 1y ago
You're instinctively ranking TikTok as worse, but I think that parent is trying to say that Duolingo is effectively a waste of time. If you have two ways to waste your time on a phone, what makes one of them worse? If the difference is
53.
by MountDoom 1y ago
I am quite familiar with this space and I will reassert that its by far most significant application is making pretty pictures. The Wikipedia list you're indirectly referencing is basically a fantasy wishlist of the areas where we expe
54.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Not really. Fractals and chaos theory were a bit like blockchain in that it was a "new kind of science" and it was supposed to explain everything, and you could buy pop-science books talking about the implications. And then it sor
55.
by MountDoom 1y ago
> The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less
56.
by MountDoom 1y ago
> In other words, we have two different inflations happening at once CPI is just an index of consumer prices. It's like saying that we have two stock markets because Nvidia is going up faster than Costco. > People who happened to
57.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Pretty long, given that the US had a fully-fiat currency for 50+ years, and many European countries had it for longer than that. Per CPI, your dollar is worth 8x less than what it was worth in 1970. This, in itself, doesn't mean anythi
58.
by MountDoom 1y ago
Eh. YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA p
59.
by MountDoom 1y ago
This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair. The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box came
60.
by MountDoom 1y ago
First, selling generic antibiotics isn't the money-maker you might be imagining. A lot of them are made overseas. Second, try to convince a random family that they should withhold antibiotics and let grandma die of pneumonia and report

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