I think lot of Americans overestimate how much China needs them. (Understandable, I suppose, since the UK made a similar mistake vis-a-vis the EU about 10 years back.)
From a Chinese perspective I expect China’s largest customer is China. These days it’s actually kind of wild how many Chinese consumer products aren’t (and won’t be) available at US retailers. And a lot of them are quite good.
For a while now China’s wanted to reduce its dependence on the US for a variety of reasons. And undermining the US tech industry, whose products the US government likes to use as a cudgel, may serve that goal quite nicely.
It is largest customer for now, but they try to boost internal consumption as well as diversify client-base. US is also competitor, so China is interested US to fade at least in competitive areas.
I've always used a lot of semi-colons in my writing, especially in my technical writing. So I did a search on this pdf for semi colons, and there are 260 in a 264 page document. I then repeated this for the last book I read, Candide by Voltaire, and there were 507 semi colons in a 189 page book.
I read parts of it, being first hand involved in all this, and it seems like it was written by AI to me. If you used an AI to write it or help with it, why not just admit to it?
the argument was that use of semi-colons indicates AI usage..
what do you mean by "being first hand involved in all this"? what part did you take if you don't mind sharing, this was an incredibly interesting turn of events.
You'd know that if you'd done any research at all.
Compare this to Jeff Guo (NPR) or Henry van Dyck (Veritasium) or my contact at the WSJ. They all investigated this story, interviewed key people (more people were interviewed for the Veritasium video than appeared), and fact-checked everything with subject matter experts. The NPR story took about 3 months of work and the Veritasium video took 5 months. I was interviewed in total for over 6 hours across all of them.
These are real journalists who worked on these stories and they produced novel work and new findings. I have huge respect for them, especially after being involved with it and seeing what work it took to add something new to the story. At the same time they managed to tell that story to a lay audience which is another skill in itself.
> You'd know that if you'd done any research at all.
I'm not in the habit of researching the people who respond to me before I ask them about what their role was in something they seem proud of. I thought I was being polite by asking about it.
That's really cool that you were interviewed, which of the interviews do you think most represents your hand in this? I wouldn't mind checking it out. I also really like Veritasium's channel, that's pretty awesome.
ah my mistake, those are a bit uncommon in my writing, I feel like they seem pretentious. i just use the semi-colons because it's closer to the way I pause, and alternate, in my thoughts.
In last month or two I noticed semicolons getting used where previously it would be em-dash, in both cases excessively and often incorrectly.
I assumed some of my coworkers added "replace all em-dashes with semicolons" into their CLAUDE.md as a really crappy attempt at hiding their inability to write a single sentence without assistance.
But prompting an AI adds nothing. Journalism is about research, interviewing the people involved, finding new facts, and then presenting that to your audience in a way they can understand. Getting an AI to write about something is just diluting the signal for future researchers.
You can have an AI help write it while still having done research yourself, they're not mutually exclusive. I'm not claiming whether he actually did that or not.
Like, for me personally, I'm terrible at writing, so I'll gladly have some AI throw together a draft, which I then verify and edit.
exactly. If I am writing a free book with solid information, well, I am not writing it, because I am not writing free books -- I don't have time. But if AI can arrange my data, thoughts, perspective, and articulate it effectively, then I will let AI write the free book. If the book contains new, or previously unarticulated data and insight, then why not? But I see the very thought is hotly contested here.
You think if he gave you the "prompt" you'd be able to produce that book?
Heck, I should put money on this. Start a competition: I give folks a prompt, and tell them to write a book about a subject with AI. I'm the sole judge of quality. Winner gets $2000. Then let's examine the variance in the entries.
In short: using AI is a skill. It's silly to pretend otherwise.
Are you the only reasonable person on HN today? Others are framing this author as some official journalist who must be held to rigorous standards and has violated every rule of the trade, with wanton contempt. The author has failed to produce new data. The author is bad. This seems deranged and extraordinarily unfair. The front page explicitly states the book is for general readers and is non-technical. I do not see anything claiming official original research or boasting academic credentials. No ads. Free. No download registration. Just there. The result of work, tokens, time -- didn't 'just happen'.
The Gladwell-style of conceptual-synthesis is the foundation for half the popular-science books in the world, and the bedrock for the majority of general-reader material out there. And this book happens to have a truly fascinating and extremely relevant and rich theme at its core, sufficiently rich that any motivated idiot could churn out half-decent content with. Yet it gets flagged, insulted and framed as abuse of AI, a tool specifically designed as a force multiplier and tool. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, and how dare anyone generate something of value with it.
I sincerely find this all highly suspicious. The only explanation is hypersensitive AI allergy in a highly unstable immune system, or the topic itself is making some nervous and, ironically, insecure...
I could totally understand disagreement, and complaining. But a comment that simply states acceptance of the book as possibly of value, being flagged? Who not hiding something trounces on a friendly comment to flag it? It's gray already, but that's not dead enough? Kill it til it's dead!? I say this because on a completely different post, I mentioned Jia Tan and several of the very concepts highlighted in this book, and I was flagged for it. I have said some stupid shit around here and not been flagged. But this subject really seems to bring out seriously inspired opponents. One would think, gee wiz, security, potentially many lives or billions of dollars or FOSS at stake -- there's no such thing as too much security, by all means, obsess on it, stay focused and talk about it, there are real world dangers here. But no.
Something seems fishy.
Anyway, glad someone had the courage to question the outrage. And I will promptly warn my author friends of the coming witch-hunt and to be very quiet about the tools they're using.
The HN crowd is generally skeptical, but "shallow dismissals", which are specifically called out in the guidelines, are still extremely common. These dismissals are not as clever as they tend to seem to those skimming the comments, but folks have developed a bunch of thought-terminating cliches to empower this: calling anything involving AI "slop" is the most common, but more catchy (but fundamentally incoherent) phrases have also emerged:
> If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I read it?
I mean, fundamentally you read things if they bring value. It doesn't actually matter if a human wrote it. It matters if it is correct and useful. One implementation is to have a human review, but you can imagine others. Fundamentally anyone who reads and leverages the output of AI knows this. The phrase seems reasonable because it is a good refutation of folks literally copying and pasting AI output from their ChatGPT session in the comments, which I think everyone agrees isn't good hygiene for online discussion. Because the guideline is "right" in that case, it seems easy to apply everywhere, but I think that's overly broad.
> I have tokens, too. Just give me the prompt.
As if everything generated with AI is created as a one-shot with ChatGPT. I feel like half the people writing this stuff have no clue how professionals are using AI. The model, reasoning level, skills, tools, harness all matter, and that's even if the whole thing is a one-shot and we ignore all the server-side variables (inference engine, temperature, top_k, quantization level, etc.). If not, it's the product of a (probably extensive) back-and-forth with an AI, possibly changing models for various subagent calls (Kimi K2.7 Code for the plan, MiniMax M2.7 for implementation, Deepseek v4 Flash as advisor, etc.), etc. Orchestration is as important as prompt and context, but the space has a lot of dimensions. This is why you get radically opposed takes on models, harnesses, and the even the utility of AI: everybody is doing different stuff, solving different problems, and reporting results all over the spectrum. There was a guy just today on HN claiming Opus 4.8 was terrible at agentic development, for example, with half a dozen responses asking how s/he could possibly say that.
Anyway, my post was controversial, but overall negative on points. I just don't understand how anyone can actually use these tools and then post in such a black-and-white way about AI use. I spend a ton of time refining my use of AI and I'm getting better over time, but it's a lot of trial-and-error trying various combinations of tools and trying to match them to tasks. Appreciate your response and the discussion.
In posterity, your grayed comment will benchmark the integrity of the environment here. Grayed, dead, undisputed. Out of sight, out of mind, except for persisting anyway ;)
Keep the courage. That's what it was once all about.
I have over 6gb of material resulting from interactions with AI. Even a micro-essay of mediocre quality requires dozens of prompts. Why post dozens and dozens of prompts if the final product is cleaner, and easier to process? I see utterly zero reason.
Edit: One of the things I learned quickly while working with LLMs, is that the quality of the user, the input, determines the quality of the output. Not everyone's input is of equal quality.
You misunderstand Musk's motivation. This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology. One of the main reasons he exited OpenAI was the fact that the other co-founders wanted to create a structure where no one, Musk included, would be able to seize full control of the company. That was the thing that prompted him to leave, which tells you a lot about what he really wanted in the first place.
But he also falsely assumed that OAI would die without his money. Yet, they managed to pull through, and Musk is now on the outside looking in with very little influence in the AI space. xAI is his desperate attempt to get back into the game. That is why he won't give up.
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology.
I think he just wanted to have a sci-fi future, and because many other people think similarly he has tapped into that shared desire and has been succeeding.
Looking at things from the other side, musk is good at making physical things, where other companies are weak.
Grok in a tesla car is actually well integrated and kind of nice. You can ask the car about things to do, and it will drive you there.
Musk itself doesn't make things. He only puts the money, and other people build the things. How many times, they need to work around him or fix his crazy ideas ?
People must stop trying to compare it to Tesla or Tony Stark. He is more like the bad guy of Jurassic Park 2.
Companies aren't funded by one person, even his. After their current round, Blue Origin will have raised more than three times as much capital as SpaceX, and SpaceX is obviously far more advanced and has already gone public.
Rivian used ten times more capital to reach their first delivery and twenty times more before their IPO as compared to Tesla.
It looks like it's not Musk's money making his companies successful.
Musk had around $180M when he founded SpaceX in 2002, and purchased Tesla in 2004. ChatGPT tells me that more than 55,000 people in the world have more wealth than this. So either people who have money choose not to make such risky investments, or they're incapable of it. Probably both. We're very lucky that someone who is both capable of building companies like this and is willing to go bankrupt doing it exists.
Why are those important? Now if he had revolutionized public transport, we might have something to discuss. But instead, he actively worked against that, and was a major force in getting Trump reelected.
Then, after executing a pitch-perfect Hitler salute on a major public stage, he took a chainsaw to US soft power, dooming millions of children around the world to die of starvation and other preventable conditions - including Ebola! - thus getting closer to his idol’s body count. And that’s just one among many other things he did that were almost as bad, including a completely non-transparent rifling through American citizens’ personal data.
No, there is nothing Musk has done that balances the equation. We’d all be better off if he had never existed.
Easy he constantly forces them to cut corners and take risks put their lives in danger "Tesla Has Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands", "Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. "
That's a somewhat valid point about the "move fast and break things" culture at SpaceX. I'm sure there's some correlation between the pioneering, hyper-productive culture at Elon's companies and safety violations, but there's no way you could claim that lax safety standards account for the massive gap between SpaceX and the rest of the entire industry. It's not like they're just pumping widgets out of a factory faster and cheaper. They've revolutionized the cutting edge across all aspects, including design, software, etc. If the best companies could be explained by cutting safety corners, then China would be leading America in everything.
And that was the first I'd heard about high fatality rates for Tesla, so I looked it up. The cars themselves are always rated as very safe, and it seems the reason for high fatalities is just who buys them. Apparently, it's young, affluent, more risk-tolerant people who frequently drive fast on highways.
I'm no ER physician, nor OSHA expert - but if 600 accidents with the sorts of heavy equipment and rocketry that SpaceX does every day included only one death, then my conclusion would be that the vast majority of that 600 were pretty minor stuff. You'd have a lot more bodies otherwise.
Also, Musk is nothing special this way. Honest comparisons would be to cell phone tower workers, steel mills, hazardous chemicals handlers, farmers, and such.
Vs. most people's mental comparison is to working in a comfy office.
I’m a big fan of Musk. One of the few criticisms I have is how xAI is also inconsistent with original OpenAI mission. I had imagined xAI as en effort to correct and fully embody all original values of OpenAI and that Elon says they betrayed. That makes his criticism weaker and I understand why some can think it was all about control. In his words:
"I'm the reason OpenAl exists. I came up with the name. The name OpenAl refers to open source... The intent was - what was the opposite of Google? It would be an open source non-profit."
I sometimes feel xAI wants to live up to those open values so I always celebrate when they decide to engage in open source. They still don’t fully embrace it. Perhaps because they think is not practical or will make them less competitive?
Those numbers always crack me up. If you do the math that way (US funding cuts kill people), imagine how many people we’ve killed by not confiscating all the wealth of our nation and shipping it to Africa!
Harvard (as credible a source as there is in the world): USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
> The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.
So about half a million children died, children who had no other recourse but to depend on this system which was already in place and for which there is no alternative.
If you "crack up" over the death of children, you're lacking some basic humanity.
Yes, and imagine if we doubled the USAID funding! Or even quintupled it! Why, if we borrowed a(nother) trillion dollars, imagine how many lives we'd save!
My point is that it's all fake math. If we're killing people by not funding aid programs, then we're killing even more by not funding more. How much are you personally sending to Africa? How much more could you be sending? Imagine if you borrowed to do it? You can't do the math that way. While tragic, those people have no demand on our treasury any more than Vladimir Putin does. We may be less benevolent than we once were. We are also much further in debt than we once were -- to the point of threatening the Republic's viability. The US didn't kill a half million children any more than France, or Spain, or Great Britian, or China did by not sending the same money. It's all fake math.
Even if we agree with the premise that cutting funds to save people is the same as killing people (I do not believe this), those don't include how many deaths were reduced by cutting USAID. The funds wound up fueling awful things around the globe.
Once you factor in everything, the cuts are a huge net gain in my estimation.
I know that this is a tall order, but consider that this might not actually be “objective”, and that instead, you’re substituting your opinion for facts.
(You don’t need to enumerate all of the things you believe justify the statement. I’m well familiar with them. I’m just trying to make you understand that there’s a layer of subjectivity here.)
You are wrong. I understand the sentiment, and I do not use the word lightly. Elon has an incredibly long track record of showing us who he is. He is a racist, unequivocally
Scroll through his twitter account and you won't make it more than a couple days without something racist
Also, after Elon bought Twitter, when people called me the n-word and I reported it, moderation said no rules were broken and no action would be taken. Before he bought twitter that was not the case, they'd be banned. So you can buzz off with this nonsense. I won't break any rules and say what should be said.
No he doesn't. There's a lot of bullshit surrounding him. Things are taken out of context.
I will say this, he believes in things about race that are controversial. For example that races may have different IQs. But you have to realize we don't actually know if races have different IQs. The idea fits common sense though... if races can LOOK different... what black magic suddenly makes them completely equal in intelligence when the same genes that govern looks also govern intelligence? We don't have hard evidence on this so right now the best we can say is we don't know but measured evidence and common sense points to the possibility of intellectual differences.
This, in itself, is not actually racist.
He does believe individual meritocracy so meaning even though he believes race correlates with certain stereotypes (like intelligence) he feels that people on the intellectual level need to be judged by merit and not by race.
Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?
The genes that control skin color don't control fast twitch muscle, but we know sub Saharan Africans have more fast twitch than the rest of the world. What magic skin color gene affects fast twitch muscle? None.
It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
>Why would you think the same genes control intelligence and skin color?
I mean the same genes on the entire DNA strand. Wholistically all of those genes define who you are.
>It turns out, a population can select for more than one gene at a time. Crazy.
Uh yeah? So.
>What we don't know is what genes individuals carry. That's why racism is stupid. Elon would agree.
What do you mean individuals? We CAN measure genes of an individual FYI. And if we can measure genes of an individual we can also measure them for groups and come up with generalized figures and correlations.
True. But you are voted down because not everyone can face the truth. So just lie a little and say "we don't know" even though the truth is we know enough to know that some races are on average more intelligent then others.
People have biases around this stuff and most people can't think critically so if you want them to be receptive you have to lie a bit.
Trump is objectively terrible, corrupt, and feeble-minded, but the lack of self-awareness on the other side is darker. For your platform to be so bad, so out of touch, that you lose to that? And the DNC takeaway was "No, we were perfect - it's the voters who are wrong."[1] I'd rather have one terrible president than support a party that doesn't even believe democracy should exist when it disagrees with them.
I wouldn't trust any numbers that came out of USAID. Mr Beast drilled hundreds of wells, built hundreds of houses for mere few million in Africa. If USAID really did sent 130 Billion in the last 20 years then there literally would be unlimited houses and unlimited wells already completed. Yet to my knowledge only a few solar wells, no houses have been built by USAID.
Mr. Beast? LMAO. A ridiculous comparison in terms of development project implementation.
(And I am no fan of USAID, whose real chief mission was creating dependency on the US and overthrowing independent governments.)
No, I don’t trust USAID, and it’s telling that that was your takeaway from my comment. I was pointing out the obvious differences between an institutional development project approach and that of a parachute-in “charity” looking to create as many trophy projects as possible. The latter do not care about creating local capacity to maintain the infrastructure, among other things.
Agreed - if you read any Elon books that’s a part of it. He always had someone to prove himself to from his dad to the world. It’s almost Michael Jordanesque except business wise.
Not true - I don’t hate him in fact I have a fucking poster of the guy lol I just read a few of his books and look at the facts - you’re not just a “regular guy” at that level he says so himself in the Walter Isaacson biography. Being compared to Michael Jordan isn’t an insult - but it’s not a big compliment either - the gift is also a curse.
Honestly, this is exclusively about money. xAI and X were complete money pits, Tesla's brand was tarnished and SpaceX was the only remaining untainted brand but it has an obvious problem.
Starship didn't turn out to be the obvious victory that Musk had in mind. He basically threw away the Falcon 9 mindset of incremental progress and is instead trying to use a completely different methodology on what amounts to be a vertically stacked shuttle.
Just look at the first thing SpaceX did after selling more than $60 billion worth of shares during the IPO: They borrowed another $20 billion to turn the junk bonds (11% to 16%) from X and xAI into lower interest (5%) long duration (2030s to 2040s) debt. They're probably saving a billion USD per year just from the debt restructuring alone and the IPO lets Musk keep funding the endless money pit that Starship represents.
What happened to the rule about steelmanning? I know it's chic to post super hot takes about what we assume a persons intentions are, and I know there are plenty of "if you can't see how bad they are you're the problem" type justifications; I know the supposed goal of empathy is tossed aside at first hint of disagreement whether real or perceived, and I know there is "evidence" of justification for hatred/dismissal. Yet still there is self-righteous presumption bandied about in a negative way that violates that steelman rule. Justified of course by the idea that there are no negotiations with terrorists, no association with Nazis, no forgiveness or understanding given to the Other.
Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country? Does this blame go for the rest of the year, decade, or century?
Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
> If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
> How does this work?
Okay, since the topic at hand is steelmanning, that is, replying to the strongest possible argument, let's practice that.
I invite you to watch this video, which is a short lecture that indeed exposes the strongest argument for this exact proposition.
There were a lot of voters who didn't want those cuts. So they complain. Is that what swing voters thought they were getting?
The government spends like 1000 billion on the military, a couple/few 10s of billions on aid is just being charitable. And projects soft power, buying good will. And was probably well used by the cia.
And then there's the philopher Peter Singer, who would say that not helping other people is immoral. Most people wouldn't go that far, but some do. Some religions ephasize such things.
> Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country?
This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.
The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.
The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.
If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.
I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.
I don’t know, does global cancer research shut down when you stop giving the $500? Do kids immediately stop receiving treatment?
USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.
We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.
We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.
But if we never had, those deaths would have been happening that whole time, wouldn't they?
Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.
I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"
Maybe the deaths would have happened, or maybe these places would have become self sufficient or received aid elsewhere. There’s really no way to know.
But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.
Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.
Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.
You make a pretty fair point there. It would have been better to announce a timeline even if it's like a year. If nobody wants else to help, at least we would have forced our allies and enemies to all go on the record that they won't.
The people at risk witout the aid, though, are more comparable to a drug-addicted teenager who has criminally negligent parents than a truly-disabled grandma. Hopefully we can save a little bit of the blame for those local kleptocrats, who have been absorbing aid from all available sources and failing to properly govern since the creation of most of these countries. (Yes, I agree with you that our current iteration of government are mostly kleptocrats themselves).
I don't think that one USAID tracker website is very reliable, sadly. I also believed this. A bunch of programs were rolled into the state department, and for instance mortality stats for South Africa are significantly upwards-diverging from their model. Now SA is an unusually well-put-together African state, but the study could have modeled this and didn't, so I don't think it should be taken as gospel until more countries report in.
> This was never about money for him, but about control over a key technology
It's very comforting to know for those reasons he'd never be able to become POTUS; although there's still a way, I hope he never gets to know about it. Otherwise, he'll make it a fascist land.
There is also a simpler explanation that does not make Musk looking like an evil wrongdoer - Musk is working on human-shape robots, for this he needs AI.
BTW. Musk started electric cars revolution (which is supposed to help the planet?), he made space flights way cheaper and accessible, his Starlink/Starshield saved Ukraine from being defeated right away by Russia, but, because of his political views, he is considered an evil man.
He didn’t start Tesla, he bought it. To his credit he probably saved it. But we also don’t have the counter factual.
“Because of his political views”
This is a beyond charitable take. He brought in a chainsaw to the US gov (literally and figuratively), after buying his way in with trump with his 250M donation to create a new part of gov that was not democratically assembled. This isn’t just him tweeting a perspective.
not to mention his current 'Tommy Robinson' political opinion spree is sufficient to have very serious objections to his political opinions. I'd no more associate with him than I would Henry Ford at the height of his Dearborn Independent stuff or Theodore Bilbo etc. Of course a person's views can be so bad that they take on a moral dimension, that seems very obvious.
Founding a start-up with VC money, dumping the bag into someone else's lap, and then riding off into the sunset is a very different skill set from actually growing and running a company that is no longer early stage.
Look at Zuckerberg. He may have been good as a founder, but if he didn't have super voting shares, and if Meta's cash flow from their ad business wouldn't mask how poor his strategic decision making has been, he would have been pushed out as CEO years ago.
It's too many releases now. At some points, the numbers just become noise. I think most people will stick to the LTS releases, but even those come out every two years.
The numbers have become meaningless noise already. This release should've been called 26.1, then 27.0, 27.1, 28.0 and so on. Year.version. How Canonical does it with Ubuntu.
The current numbering scheme is annoying and distracting, bears no information yet is still error prone.
I think you mean "(Year % 100).version". Or is it "(Year - 2000).version"? Pardon me for being overly pedantic, but ever since Y2K it really bugs me when someone refers to a 2-digit number as "the year".
I believe that's by design: applications are encouraged to upgrade often. That's usually a smooth process for standard-conforming applications.
Applications that need to move slower can stick to LTS versions. LTS hopping has become a little bit more viable since the interval has been shortened to two years, i.e., four major versions.
> I believe that's by design: applications are encouraged to upgrade often.
I'm not sure what's your thought process here. I'm not saying they should have a release every 2 years instead of every half a year, but that their numbering scheme is bad.
It makes upgrading harder. If they'd just put the date in the version field, people would know how old the software is (this applies to every software btw not just Java and Ubuntu).
Their current versioning system doesn't help anyone in any imaginale circumstance.
> If they'd just put the date in the version field, people would know how old the software is
Does it tell you anything? If this "software" just bumps the date and never provides anything meaningful it is useful to you? It's about the substance.
The official guidance is very simple and straightforward: upgrade regularly and keep eyes open for the few actual things that could cause trouble. If a project cannot keep up it can always stick to LTS versions. That's it.
When I encounter a version number I mostly want to know either:
- what are the major characteristics of the program
- how old is the program
Traditional software versioning helps in the first case: they bump version after a big event (new feature, rewrite, etc). Date based versioning helps in the second case. (I prefer date based versioning over traditional or semver.) Their numbering system doesn't help anyone in any case. It's just... there. A noise.
E.g. just this article title on HN: "Java 27: What's New?" doesn't tell you whether Java 27 is old or new. "Java 26.1: What's New?" would.
> doesn't tell you whether Java 27 is old or new. "Java 26.1: What's New?" would
How does 26.1 tell you that? Because you "assume" it is a date? It also still doesn't? How do you know the new 1 isn't 26.100?
> Traditional software versioning helps in the first case: they bump version after a big event
They pretend to. It's given most developers headaches in terms of you have to have something to bump the version so either they make something up or never do it and so fails your test either way.
At the end of the day either:
You care: a quick check won't hurt. It's twice a year.
With each new Java release the previous one becomes instantly unsupported (meaning that it receives no security updates), unless you pay Oracle (or another vendor). So you are forced to update if you want security updates (or run only LTS releases, or pay a vendor).
Rust releases are just compiler toolchain, maybe some new syntax features. Java includes the JVM which is subject to way more security issues and needs much more frequent updating.
There are some actual removal of feature too (breaking backwards compatibility on purpose). But those come with deprecation warnings for years before the actual feature is removed. And even then quite often it is still possible to enable with some feature flag for a version or two.
Patches are released continuously. The upstream versions get them immediately and they are then backported to LTS versions. Whether the patches actually become available simultaneously I cannot say without.
The rule does exist, but in all of World Cup history, it has been used once for this purpose over 50 years ago. During a tournament, it is understood that a red card means an automatic suspension for at least the next match. That is something that is universally applied. FIFA are clearly breaking with precedent here by using an obscure rule to lift the suspension of the host nation's player, which very much looks like favouritism.
FIFA also used the rule to allow Cristiano Ronaldo to play in this World Cup. Ronaldo got a red card in a World Cup qualifier, last November, for "violent conduct" (an elbow). It would have kept him out of the opening match for Portugal in this World Cup. He was issued a suspended suspension, under Article 27, allowing him to play.
So what? It has now been used twice. I challenge anyone who's a soccer fan to look at the play that led to the red card and say "Yeah, that deserved a red card" with a straight face.
The outcome was fair. That was a scandalous red card and a rule that exists to be sparingly used in situations like that was triggered. Hopefully it will keep being sparingly used but they should not hesitate to overturn unjust punishments that are clearly against the spirit of soccer.
Why are people so upset about it? Is Belgium afraid to face the full US squad? If Belgium wins, which is the most likely result, nobody will be able to say "the US could have won if it wasn't for that red card!"
Doesn't seem fair that Belgium has to alter their game plan the day before the match because FIFA dropped a totally unexpected decision 4 days after unequivocally stating there was no appeal process for the red card suspension.
> Gee, we're not talking about Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo here
He's their leading scorer.
His exclusion seemed kind of important to you a couple posts back. Along with the Secretary of the Treasury, and the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize recipient.
I'm also not saying he makes no difference. I'm just saying he's not good enough to deserve some complex plan from Belgium. A small tweak on their plan and they will be good to go. He's a good player but no superstar.
Zuckerberg was never a great strategist. The only good strategic decisions that he was ever made were the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp. Almost everything else was either completely misguided, way too late, or executed so poorly that it could never work.
Meta is basically the Temu version of Google. Google also goes wrong a lot, and they are mostly resting on their big successes from years ago, but they still at least have the people and ability to produce top tier results every once in a while, while Meta was always second rate.
Zuckerberg may not be a great strategist, but your two exceptions (WhatsApp and instagram) easily cover all the failures. This is sort of like saying “he’s a bad hitter, except for the grand slam”. Or more appropriately for HN, like saying “he’s a bad venture investor, other than the two fund returning investments.”
For Meta, it was never really clear why they even were in the AI race in the first place, since pretty much all of their products are B2C and don't really profit from integrating powerful AI models. And for all of their internal needs, they could easily use models created by someone else, which is orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to compete on building your own SOTA model.
> it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal
You are not even getting rid of that, you are just replacing them with a different set of middlemen in the crypto ecosystem who are demanding substantially higher fees than, say, a Wise does.
It's a very weird comment as people who actually use crypto (not flipping or holding) are those who without other viable choices. They're not replacing something. Those transactions would simply not happen without crypto.
Notice that the parent comment didn't use the word replacing.
Yep, they can open a wise account to send money, but they cannot receive money using WISE, they have to open a business account to receive money and they cannot open one in their countries.
Wise demands a massive fee through bid-offer spread, they're more expensive than many regular retail banks for FX conversion. They're basically running a deceptive advertising campaign due to customers not knowing about bid offer spread.
Wise is even worse than "zero-fee" stock trading platforms like Robin hood who do payment for order flow. At least PFOF is more competitive and regulated and you're only getting a few basis points stolen from you instead of like 80 basis points.
From my own comparisons, when converting, say, $1000 USD with Wise the spread+fee is about half of any of the banks that I have accounts with. Where Wise takes a huge cut is if you convert $10 at a time.
There are pretty big markets in these countries because of crypto and even then it never reaches the native currency a lot of the market uses either us dollar or euro. Businesses are glad to accept dollars and euros for most bigger purchases especially p2p marketplaces. The myth that you have to off-ramp crypto is no longer true.
That depends though. I recently bought a car in south America and they were willing to take USDT through Bianance Pay. As a US person I don't have access to that so ended up having to wire transfer. I don't know why they wouldn't accept a Bitcoin deposit which they could have easily converted to tether but I suspect it's just a momentum and learning curve thing.
Why would they possibly want their largest customer to flounder?
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