- crime finds a way. any means of semi anonymous and/or non recourse value storage and exchange will suit. iTunes/play store/steam prepaid cards and accounts, money orders, western union, etc.
Agree with you it would be different, crypto is global, most of the accessible alternative methods are localized to varying degrees.
- having been to VNP watching Kilauea burp lava, as well as to Iceland and watching one of the fissures burp lava near Grindavik - each experience had a lot of similarity, but also each uniquely different.
You could be dropped in either island near the active eruption areas on some roads and if you didn’t have anything other than landscape clues you’d be hard pressed to tell which one you were on. The fresh-ish lava fields (less than 100 years old) look the same, big black rocky expanses of volcanic rock with little or no vegetation. Iceland’s mosses and grass would be a tell, whereas in Hawaii when life starts to take hold it has a much more jungle look to it. But otherwise, the sulfur smells, steam vents in the active areas, etc are very similar.
I have to say the big island of Hawaii and Iceland are two of my most favorite places on the planet, alongside Alaska. All very rural, not over developed, and an immersion in a raw version of the natural world that is largely abstracted away from us where most of us live.
- I feel like their analogy could have worked if they had pushed a little further into it.
The RNN and LSTM architectures (and Word2Vec, n-grams, etc) yielded language models that never got mass adoption. Like reel to reel. Then the transformer+attention hit the scene and several paths kicked off pretty close to each other. Google was working on Bert/encoder only transformer, maybe you could call that betamax. Doesn’t perfectly fit as in the case of beta it was actually the better tech.
OpenAI ran with the generative pre trained transformer and ML had its VHS? moment. Widespread adoption. Universal awareness within the populace.
Now with Titans (+miras?) are we entering the dvd era? Maybe. Learning context on the fly (memorizing at test time) is so much more efficient, it would be natural to call it a generational shift, but there is so much in the works right now with the promise of taking us further, this all might end up looking like the blip that beta vs vhs was. If current gen OpenAI type approaches somehow own the next 5-10 years then Titans, etc as Betamax starts to really fit - the shittier tech got and kept mass adoption. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but who knows.
Taking the analogy to present - who in the vhs or even earlier dvd days could imagine ubiquitous 4k+ vod? Who could have stood in a blockbuster in 2006 and knew that in less than 20 years all these stores and all these dvds would be a distant memory, completely usurped and transformed? Innovation of home video had a fraction of the capital being thrown at it that AI/ML has being thrown at it today. I would expect transformative generational shifts the likes of reel to cassette to optical to happen in fractions of the time they happened to home video. And beta/vhs type wars to begin and end in near realtime.
The mass adoption and societal transformation at the hands of AI/ML is just beginning. There is so. much. more. to. come. In 2030 we will look back at the state of AI in December 2025 and think “how quaint”, much the same as how we think of a circa 2006 busy Blockbuster.
- Totally agree that the money doesn’t vanish. My point isn’t “buybacks literally destroy capital,” it’s about how that capital tends to get redeployed and by whom.
Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders, which are already disproportionately wealthy and already heavily allocated to financial assets. A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled into more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc), not into large, lumpy, real world capex that employs a bunch of electricians, heavy equipment operators, lineworkers, land surveyors, etc. AI infra does that. Even if the ultimate economic owner is the same class of people, the path the money takes is different: it has to go through chip fabs, power projects, network buildouts, construction crews, land acquisition, permitting, and so on. That’s the “leakage” I was pointing at.
To be more precise: I’m not claiming “no one would ever build anything else”, I’m saying given the current incentive structure, the realistic counterfactual for a lot of this megacap tech cash is more financialization (buybacks, M&A, sitting on balance sheets) rather than “let’s go fund housing, transit tunnels, or new aircraft.”
- agree the capital could be put to better use, however I believe the alternative is this capital wouldn't have otherwise been put to work in ways that allow it to leak to the populace at large. for some of the big investors in AI infrastructure, this is cash that was previously and likely would have otherwise been put toward stock buybacks. for many of the big investors pumping cash in, these are funds deploying the wealth of the mega rich, that again, otherwise would have been deployed in other ways that wouldn't leach down to the many that are yielding it via this AI infrastructure boom (datacenter materials, land acquisition, energy infrastructure, building trades, etc, etc)
- To further your point - I mean honestly if this all ends up being an actual bubble that doesn’t manifest a financial return for the liquidity injectors but instead a massive loss (for the .01% who are in large part putting the cash in), did humanity actually lose?
If it pops it might end up being looked at in the lens of history as one of the largest backdoor/proxy wealth redistributions ever. The capex being spent is in large part going to fund the labor of the unwashed masses, and society is getting the individual productivity and efficiency benefits from the end result models.
I’m particularly thankful for the plethora of open source models I have access to thanks to all this.
I, individually, have realized indisputable substantial benefits from having these tools at my disposal every day. If the whole thing pops, these tools are safely in my possession and I’m better because I have them. Thanks .01%!!
(the reality is I don’t think it will pop in the classic sense, and these days it seems the .01 can never lose. either way, the $1tn can’t be labeled as a waste).
- Absolutely, me as well. I think the key here is that Apple is selling a platform that is used for a multitude of purposes, often including running software from third party developers. If you’re selling a platform device in large numbers you should have the choice codified by law of either continuing software support to some degree or releasing an unlock kit for it. You should not have the option of effectively abandoning and bricking it, if that’s the route you must go the buyer should get the option of a full purchase price refund at that point in time.
- sadly apple silicon and Tahoe may have delivered a knockout punch to the future of oclp. the dortania team has said apple silicon support is more or less out of the question at this point. with Tahoe ushering in the first large batch of deprecated intel machines with the t2 chip, it’s tbd if dortania will be able to ship something to get them to Tahoe. sad days and may soon mean we’re having the same convo about older Mac’s as we are about old iPhones and iPads.
- I love the website. You’ll find some strong opinions here, I wouldn’t make changes based solely on the HN crowd’s curmudgeonly takes.
- Pretty sure that was the case. I heavily use Tailscale at work and have been working steady on multiple VNC connected clients over Tailscale Wireguard tunnels without issue. Just wrapped it up for the day and hit the ‘ol watering hole (hackernews) to see this. I didn’t connect/disconnect or have to use the portal during that time period, but my in place connections were fine.
- Not to mention no macOS app. This is probably unimportant to many in the hn audience, but more broadly it matters for your average knowledge worker.
- A future where we carry and manage just one device could be incredible. That said, today, even if iOS weren’t so locked down and more capable of that, I think I’d find myself frustrated. I run on device local llm’s on my iPhone and a heavily quantized 3b parameter model starts to cause the iPhones thermal management to heavily throttle after just a few prompts with light tokens, to the point it’s slower than 1 token per second for inference or response, and the phone gets hot to the touch. Maybe the rumored half iPhone half iPad device could be the eventual platform from which something like this emerges.
- Same is true in Iceland. It’s just the established norm. Much less costly vs installing gates and barriers and payment terminals and easier to add paid parking to non traditional locations where constricting entry/exit to barrier’ed lanes would be a challenge or impossible. Shifting the payment experience to the user’s smartphone. It’s still a bit foreign to visitors from places where this isn’t the norm but for Iceland and Icelanders it works well and is a non issue.
To be fair, the relationship between the Icelandic people and their government and their corporate class is wildly different vs that in the US in 2025 to say the least.
- Yes, profoundly true and sadly profoundly not understood by most. Levers can be pulled for near term quantitative gains at the expense of long term qualitative experience. ERP systems and the like largely measure the quantitative, all things pegged to the almighty dollar. Most orgs have no such system or competency (with the exception of siloed martech systems) for measuring the qualitative. And the customer journey isn’t set up in such a way to reliably and consistently throw off the needed data in the first place. I’ve been preaching that orgs looking for true longevity need to make measuring experiences and sentiment a core competency, so the qualitative impact of levers being pulled can be measured and reported on in realtime, allowing short sighted decisions to be backtracked, and ideally, long term, putting functional guard rails in place that prevent those decisions from being made in the first place.
- I think it's fair to say the MD11 has had a difficult time, but I would caveat that it performs well for an aircraft of its vintage, and is still an acceptably safe aircraft. There have been something in the neighborhood of 2.4 million successful missions completed with the MD11, and around 12 hull losses with fatalities, around 14 hull losses total, over the 35 years the MD11 has been flying. Yes, it's below average compared to modern wide bodies (a330, a350, newer 777/787) which are incredibly (truly incredible to me) safe.
I do expect this incident will accelerate the retirement of the balance of the fleet that is still flying and the MD11 will complete its disappearance from the skies in the US before the end of the decade.
- A lack of effective resiliency and redundancy at all of the major US airlines makes air travel feel like a bit of a coin toss in terms of whether you can expect to get where you need to go on any given day. In the past 3 years each of the big 5 have had multiple full ground stops due to multi-hour/multi-day system failures. They get heavy coverage during and in the immediate wake but consumers and the market tend to forget relatively quickly. As such there just isn't enough consumer or regulatory pressure on these airlines to invest the actual resources required to build more effective fault tolerance into their operations. I'm afraid this is just going to be part of life in US air travel for the foreseeable future.
A small excerpt of the memorable ones or where I was personally affected, but there have been many more over the period:
Holiday 2022 Southwest system collapse July 2024 Delta 5 day outage August 2025 United weight and balance outage June 2025 American outage October 2025 AWS outage impacting AS, AA, UA, DL
- The diversions were almost certainly for this reason. Crew scheduling, weight and balance, passenger manifests, flight plan filing with ATC for IFR, etc are all handled before takeoff, once it's in the air there's not much ground systems involvement required. But if all gates are occupied with outage impacted planes and space is tight or non-existent to stick more birds on location, have to drop it somewhere with room for dead birds. Could have also dropped it in a location with more anticipated crew availability when ops resumes, however much less likely given the outage ops likely didn't have a handle on that info or the ability to be planning ahead like that.
- I think it’s a quiet but deliberate strategy to keep macOS the spiritual successor to NeXTSTEP. While many of Jobs principles are under pressure at current day Apple, his ghost lives on.
- I bought the base model shortly after launch. It went from the coolest piece of tech I had ever handled to in a drawer untouched for at least a couple weeks. It probably would have mostly stayed there or been sold on eBay, until... right at a year ago I was in stopped traffic and hit by a distracted driver at highway speeds. Two broken hands, fractured sternum, head injury with vision issues, life changed in an instant. Fast forward a few weeks - hurt, bored, unable to use a computer comfortably I started using it to mirror my Mac with a lap desk & a Magic Keyboard/trackpad. It was a godsend, I was able to comfortably use my computer, communicate, watch TV, etc. Now, today, I'm mostly recovered, but I still use my VP daily, when not in meetings it's my preferred interface to my Mac, working without it feels like I'm missing a critical piece of the interface.
The real issue at hand here is that it’s difficult to impossible to discover why, or raise an effective appeal, when one runs afoul of Google, or suspects they have.
I shudder to use this word as I do think in some contexts it’s being overused, I think it’s the best word to use here though: the issue is really that Google is a Gatekeeper.
As the search engine with the largest global market share, whether or not Google has a commercial relationship with a site is irrelevant. Google has decided to let their product become a Utility. As a Utility, Google has a responsibility to provide effective tools and effective support for situations like this. Yes it will absolutely add cost for Google. It’s a cost of doing business as a Gatekeeper, as a Utility.
My second shudder in this comment - regulation is not always the answer. Maybe even it’s rarely the answer. But I do think when it comes to enterprises that have products that intentionally or unintentionally become Gatekeepers and/or Utilities, there should be a regulated mandate that they provide an acceptable level of support and access to the marketplaces they serve. The absence of that is what enables and causes this to perpetuate, and it will continue to do so until an entity with leverage over them can put them in check.