What people are describing here is the colloquial definition of "server", being compute hosted in space. Not a broadcast signal that is interpreted on Earth.
See I could agree with the first part. But then you add We have broken our world for the greed of a few. After that I sort of understand why so many folks reject the former – they're rejecting the empty moralizing.
If you truly believe climate change is real then also admit that "We all have broken the world", except perhaps some uncontacted peoples in the Amazon.
Anyone who has ridden in an automobile, a train, a plane, a powered boat has contributed. Anyone who has used or purchased goods transported with any of the above has as well. Anyone who's eaten crops grown with large amounts of industrial fertilizers has contributed (e.g. most of the world).
The oil companies just produce what everyone in the world wants and wants cheap.
If I cut down my plane flight in half that means I'll take a plane every two years, meaning I'll also see my family half as much. You'd also have to include that, since I travel economy, you'd divide my contribution by ~350.
If Taylor Swift cuts her plane travel by half she'd "only" make 51 trips a year [1] on a plane that carries 12 and would still make more money in a year than what I'll see in my lifetime.
IMO, saying that both of us are contributing equally as much to global warming is just unfair.
I didn't say we're all equally culpable. We're not. Yet en masse we're all guilty to some degree.
There's only what 10's of thousands Taylor Swifts in the world. Yet there's billions of everyone else. The majority of greenhouse gasses likely come from the aggregate of everyone.
A personal example: I don't drive. I use public transit a couple of times a year. I am in private cars maybe once every two year. I haven't flown in about 15 years. Clearly this is a contrived example. My energy use patterns are much more typical when using other metrics. That said, it is also the flip side of being a Taylor Swift of the world. There is a point in the developed world where the millions are using much more energy than the thousands.
I said developed world because there are also parts of the world that simply don't have access to my gratuitous level of energy use. To say that they are guilty of contributing based upon the technicality that they are directly or indirectly using a disproportionately small amount of energy is beyond insulting. It is also a blatant way to paper over our responsibility.
> Globally, the poorest 50% emit roughly 4.4 billion tons to 4.7 billion tons equivalent annually, accounting for about 11% to 12% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
The “less-developed” bottom half of the world population still produces about a tenth of the annual co2 production annually.
That means instead of potential climate catastrophe in 10 years it’d take 100 years if the top half disappeared tomorrow. Obviously an overly simplistic argument but its meant to show that the problem would just be slower but not gone if we got rid of the “wealthy”.
Now I don’t believe they’re equally as culpable. Yet I also firmly believe the vast majority would choose the same as us in developed world have if they could.
Ultimately that’s more of my point. What’s happening isn’t due to some evil plot by the ultra wealthy. It’s the result of human nature.
Some unscrupulous ultra wealthy might hasten it by a few years or a decade, but the core problem is human nature and an abundance of fossil fuels.
The “wealthy” are also the most likely to prevent catastrophe by developing renewables, etc.
That didn't come quite through. You seemed to be taking a rather extreme position, while replying to someone who just pointed out the systemic issues, which of course don't absolve anyone of their own responsibility.
> If Taylor Swift cuts her plane travel by half she'd "only" make 51 trips a year [1] on a plane that carries 12 and would still make more money in a year than what I'll see in my lifetime.
Taylor swift travels so much because the people want to see her in person.
There are only about 1.6 billion cars in the world. Only about 20% of the world population has access to a personal car. Less than that have ever ridden a plane, and less than 10% fly with any regularity.
A super majority of greenhouse gases emitted are due to the lives of the top 20-30% of the population (of which unfortunately I am a part). The remaining people's contributions are small. 80:20 rule in full glory.
Worst of all, the 80% are the most impacted by climate change as TFA illustrates.
The biggest hope at this point honestly is that fewer people are having kids and we're on track to halve the world population in another couple generations. Greenhouse emissions cut by half.
The per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Gulf countries have to be cut by a factor of 8-10 to reach sustainable levels. The per capita emissions of EU/China/SEA have to cut by 4 to reach sustainable levels. All within the next 25 years if we want to avoid crossing tipping points.
Halving the population in 50 years is not a realistic plan.
I haven't read up on all the assumptions made for those projections. If something unassumed pops up that makes things substantially worse then the population peak would come earlier I guess. But that's a gamble.
You are conflating participation from equality, yes everyone participates in the system, it takes a lot of privileged to be able to disassociate ones self from the system itself. The power dynamic within the system favors the wealthy, whom have decided that this is the path we are going down.
HN loves to nit-pick about what "the wealthy" actually means, but in most contexts, when someone complains "the wealthy" did this or "the wealthy" did that, what they mean are a very, very tiny number of people who are not on HN, not in anyone on HN's family, and not intimately known by anyone on HN.
When someone says "the wealthy" are getting rich to everyone's detriment, they are almost never talking about the doctor who lives three doors down the street from you who drives a nice new 911 or the guy who owns 20 laundromats in your city. I think we all know who we're talking about.
Broadly speaking, when anyone says the rich or the wealthy, they mean people richer than themselves. I’ve seen everyone from line workers to multimillionaires do it.
Reminds me of a casual conversation with a 1%, maybe a 0.1%: "we [meaning he and his wife] are not wealthy. All of our friends own a yatch, but we don't".
Are they guiding policy and making decisions at corporations or just living within the existing framework? He's talking about the people shaping the world and future.
Not all people have equal culpability. It's absurd to be like, well you havent successfully waged an eco-terroristic war to overturn the system so you're just as bad as someone actively leading a lobby group to cast doubt on the science, or bribing politicians not to act on it, or even just as someone who votes in favor of people who resist action. In fact it's just another tactic of denialism to say "if you can't personally solve this problem just give up and caring is ineffective so you shouldn't care"
Fossil fuel companies have spent the the last forty years in an organized campaign to prevent the US (and by extension, the world) from taking action against global warming.
There's a great book on the subject called "Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.
It's moralizing, yes, but far from empty. The rich and powerful companies, near-forced to be amoral by our economic system, and run by the greedy by natural selection, have resources to influence policy, public opinion and information availability that others don't have.
If it weren't for oil companies going out of their way to sabotage alternative fuels through politicians, misinformation, and a myriad of other abuses I'd be more inclined to believe you. Not everyone is equally culpable in this, there are many who have been trying to get rid of oil as the main fuel source for a long time.
I worked at a warehouse last year. Managers always breathing down my neck to work faster. Constant stress for 9 hours straight. (Okay, we got a lunch break at least. There are worse jobs!)
It got me wondering. Alright, what's his problem. Well, his manager is breathing down his neck too. It's literally his job to make my day as stressful as possible. Okay, why? You trace that chain and where does it end up? Fat capitalist?
But what else? Well, where's that pressure coming from? It's the customer. If the company stopped whipping us, and let us work at a normal pace, they'd need 40% more employees to cover the work. Delivery costs would increase proportionally, and suddenly grandma would stop buying from us. She'd go to the company that whips their employees. The whole place would go under.
Well, it's just a slice of the picture. It's just the one nobody likes to talk about.
A different slice: went to the supermarket the other day, late on a Sunday. There were two workers in the whole supermarket, both elderly women in their 70s.
Economy sucks here so pensions are bad, they chose to keep working.
But obviously they didn't chose to work on Sunday night. They didn't have a choice there.
If they owned the place, they would have closed at a normal hour.
One of them let out an exasperated sigh when I walked in. More work for her, but not more profit.
I overheard one say to the other, "and then at the end of the month you go to the bank and collect 800 Euros."
two things can be true at the same time. oil and coal before it pulled billions of people out of extreme poverty, but the debt taken on in terms of CO2 will come due. if the gulf stream stops, we're all in for a ride - or worse, our grandchildren.
I'm personally in the 'drill and burn as fast as possible in a mad rush to fusion power' camp so we get a way to fix this shit rather than the 'stop civilization from doing its thing overnight' camp. alas, neither is happening.
You're not taking the comic at face value are you? The orange shirt guy is supposed to be the loser who is just trying to "gotcha" the people in the other panels.
The comic isn't even _always_ wrong; sometimes people are using gotchas or accusations of hypocrisy to dismiss otherwise valid concerns. Importantly, just because someone is a hypocrite, that doesn't mean they're wrong.
But in practice, the comic is often used by as a get-out-of-hypocrisy-free card by people who never want to to take any personal action to practice what they preach. Example:
Alice: I loooove my new iPhone 2026 Supermax XXL, it's at least 0.163% shinier than last years model! Oh but I heard that seven Chinese workers died in the Apple factory and that is soooo sad! I wish that could be avoided somehow. Oh well!
Bob: I agree, working conditions in Apple factories are deplorable. If you want to do something about it, you can consider buying a Fairphone instead, or simply delaying upgrading as long as possible. You don't really need to buy a new phone every year, you know!
Alice: What? You expect me to walk around with last year's model like a poor person? I would literally die of embarrassment. And of course I _would_ totally buy the Fairphone if only it came in rose gold with sequin bedazzling which is an absolute necessity to match my purse.
Bob: Okay but these seem like really petty reasons to keep buying Apple products. I find it difficult to take your complaints about working conditions in Apple factories seriously when you're not willing to make any sacrifices or lifestyle changes yourself to improve the situation.
Alice: Oh, I see. You're one of those "gotcha" guys. [Link to comic] Here, this tells me you're just a smartass, and I can do whatever I like while complaining about whatever I want. After all, I'm _just_ like the medieval peasant who wants to improve society somewhat.
I don’t know, GPT-5.5 has been very effective for me. It’s not perfect but the quality of refactoring it can do is awesome.
Previous models both GPT and Claude would struggle with the larger picture more. Pretty quickly they’d do one off hacks. Eventually they’d code themselves into a wall if you weren’t careful.
Haven’t hit that wall with GPT-5.5 yet. New changes or improvements on a GUI library I’m building seem to be constant in time per feature.
Though I’m talking only 10k’s of LOC. Also I’m using Nim which is both strongly typed and concise.
I’m seeing a similar improvement with Opus 4.8, which is acting like an engineer that cares about correctness. The harder the problem the better it seems to do.
I think a golden age of software is just starting for indie software. It’s just going to take a while to see the first really good results.
I'm wanting to build pieces of software that I've been wanting and often working on for years. These new models are making it possible for me to scale my work to build it.
True. But in the physical world, ideas (or memes, if you will) are bound to people and can only survive, if the carrier survives. The idea of curing headaches with striking your head with a hammer does not spread, because the carrier dies. On the interweb, that connection is no longer there. An idea is independent and can spread without direct human involvement. We are like a tundra species finding itself in a rainforest: completely unprepared, lacking both immunity and the ability to keep up with the environment as it changes.
Araq the Nim creator is working on a rewrite of the Nim compiler called Nimony that'll become Nim 3.
It's making fast progress and will provide the basis for a proper LSP! Nimony already supports incremental compilation and parallel which are key pieces for good fast LSP.
Additionally running GPT-5.5 on medium sometimes gives me better results than high mode. On any of them I still have to push the models in the right direction.
Nim also has top notch meta programming, probably more so than Zig. You can easily do loop unrolling, specialization, etc. For example Constantine, which is a constant time crypto library that outperforms C, etc.
To me programming Rust feels so limiting due to lack of good compile time meta programming with types. That’s the key.
How can you create constant-time code with Nim when none of its backends support it (e.g. LLVM may turn an apparently-constant-time code into non-constant-time assembly)?
You can see all the details at: https://github.com/mratsim/constantine , but to answer your "how" question briefly here, something Nim shares with most (all?) "systems programming languages" is "easy" integration with assembly languages -- whatever the backend for "most" compiled code is (whatever that "most" even is - weighted by any number of measures of static source size or dynamic instruction counts). Of course, hand-rolled assembly can cost you a lot in portability/effort to port to new platforms/etc.
The entire concept of the "performance of a PLang" in terms of the run-time of programs written "mostly in it" is rather seriously under-specified, TBH. This is (or should be) uncontentious in spite of the slew of articles with titles like the one for this thread.
Exactly, Constantine generates assembly output and links that into normal Nim objects (e.g. C). That can then used in Nim or in Rust, Go, etc.
From its "Why Nim" in the readme:
- Assembly support either inline or a simple {.compile: "myasm.S".} away
- No GC if no GC-ed types are used (automatic memory management is set at the type level and optimized for latency/soft-realtime by default and can be totally deactivated).
- Procedural macros working directly on AST to create generic curve configuration, derive constants write a size-independent inline assembly code generator
I have tried Nim meta programming (to make a tree vaguely like the one used by Zed), and the tooling support of pretty dreadful. I ran into multiple compiler crashes or simply unhelpful and confusing error messages, alongside LSP hangs.
Yesterday I did some testing on the cost to solve the same simple problem on openrouter with different models using cline. Simple problem but it had a few nuances to solve it properly and so required reasoning.
After reading comments like this I was expecting (hoping?) that DeepSeek or similar would be cheaper.
However I was surprised that DeepSeek v4 cost about 5.5x GPT-5.4 to solve the problem.
That doesn't sound right. Were you using the actual Deepseek provider? The one time I spent 3 dollars on Deepseek in a day, I had 615k output tokens, 96M cache hit input tokens, and 5M cache miss output tokens.
> FBI deputy director Paul Abbate called Crooks's activity on social networking services antisemitic, anti-immigrant, extreme, and espousing political violence.
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