That is the fundamental of guerrilla warfare. The guerrillas can't win but can loose with very little cost while the cost for the established side to "Win" is an order of magnitude more.
After 9/11 (and long before), the majority of historians and academia warned that the political response to terrorism — the destruction of civil liberties, implementation of mass surveillance, Islamophobia, populism — were a greater threat and risk to our freedoms than the terrorists ever were.
I remember, after the Snowden leaks, when anyone warned that governments could use the patriot act and the various other "intelligence" power grabs to destroy democracy and implement totalitarian dictatorship, they would be deemed insane conspiracy theorists. The hilarious part is most of them (including me) were warning about a distant future... yet it barely took a decade for America to collapse into fascist populism, declare ANTI-FAscists the real terrorists, and turn the surveillance apparatus against them.
"It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind. A website without a chatbot in 2026 risks feeling unfinished, like something's missing. Even if what's missing is a half-broken widget that most visitors dismiss in three seconds. The chatbot has become a social signal, not a tool. A way of saying: we're keeping up."
Releasing the steriles blindly is not enough, you gotta monitor the pest too. This is prohibitively expensive in rainforests and other areas with poor infrastructure.
Okay, maybe you could release the flies in large enough numbers not to need monitoring but I guess it would also be prohibitively expensive.
Not really, the power involved would amount to 12% of the grid which is possible to do at net neutral and has efficiency improvements as doubling in under 5 years. If an industry that needed petroleum and F150s was a fraction as good with improvement every 5 decades, I don't think its environmental impact would be considered.
There”s a certain way people are more afraid of unfamiliar and new things and complacent about the old and familiar. Also I think environment and energy concerns about AI are overblown because of hype, like they are claiming they are building many times more data centers that are being built. A lot of the opposition to AI is based on critics being uncritical about numbers put out to justify the bubble, just like all the talk about danger similarly drives a false feeling of fomo-urgency.
The problem with this kind of armchair economy is that you can argue both ways.
"End of ZIRP and the raise of just-say-no engineers": with capital being more expensive companies need to invest it wisely, therefore the need the judgement of the just-say-no engineer to avoid blowing it on unnecessary stuff.
I would add: Either you are an engineer that management trusts and whose judgement they value, or you aren’t. If you aren’t, you’re in a bad position anyway.
There's a good article about it. Saying no is a budget. In other words you don't have enough veto power to stop all bad projects so you need to be strategic about spending this budget.
It's on stories like these where I honestly just love the HN community and the comment threads.
I was reading the article, and as it went on I increasingly thought "This is one of those articles that sounds like it's saying something insightful ('it has all the right lingo! ZIRP era! Just-say-no engineers!'), but then when you dig deeper, it doesn't resonate with my experience at all when I was knee deep in software engineering in those years, nor do I feel that it in any way accurately diagnoses the immense changes that are currently happening with AI." In other words, it sounds like buzzword bullshit to me, and in the absence of a downvote button on stories, I'm glad the community is calling it out.
Higher interest rates indicate higher urgency, meaning short term investments with fast payoffs. Throw in LLMs that play into that urgency and you get a mass production of AI slop. It doesn't matter if the AI project is a failure, since it failed fast enough to go and do something else. Doing the right thing from the get go is something that only matters for long term projects with significant initial investment.
A DPI firewall at a place of education had a whitelist of allowed domains that you could connect to from the internal network. One entry in the whitelist was "microsoft.com".
I installed a web proxy on my VPS, which was accessible under a domain name like "computerthings.example", created a subdomain called "microsoft", and voila: "microsoft.computerthings.example" was good enough to match "^microsoft.com.*" and allowed us to bypass the block for the next two years.
Ah, a rare situation where you have to put your URL in angle brackets for it to be parsed correctly here: <http://foo.com/update.exe?> (Not that it matters in this case. Also I would’ve guessed the angle brackets would disappear, but apparently not.)
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