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Comment Re:nope. not again. (Score 1) 21

It's the original founder at least, Kevin Rose. I had a look at the relaunched I-can't-believe-it's-not-Reddit version and it was...ok'ish. But yes, they were unprepared for the bots in the main forums and unfortunately the place never got big enough to have any traffic in the smaller ones.

It's ironic - I looked at Reddit before The Great Migration following Dig...err...3? whatever the fiasco revision was. Like many others, I moved when that version of Digg appeared. I was interested when Digg said they were coming back, because Reddit has become a bit tiresome other than the smaller, subject-specialised subs. Alas though, never took off.

Comment It’s getting useful. (Score 1) 24

I needed to create a program to retrieve solar generation plants, select a plant from a gui, enter date ranges, cost info, then pull daily usage data from inverters and meters. The API inconsistently mapped endpoint names making it hard to find where the data lived.
Claude code sorted it all out in about an hour. It built test harnesses to verify correct endpoints. It built the gui and good looking excel outputs.
Built a really well documented .md and repo for checking into our internal gitlab.
I haven’t written or reviewed a line of code, as it is only an internal app to be used by one accountant in our business.
AI is getting shockingly good at least for small problem spaces.

Comment Meanwhile, at Carnegie Mellon... (Score 4, Interesting) 137

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment If only it were _for_ the neighborhood (Score 1) 162

If the data center is primarily intended for use by (exclusively or nearly exclusively) the people in the neighborhood, sure, it could make sense. I know this is quaint and out-of-date but one can imagine a neighborhood squid cache, NNTP server, modern Netflix cache, etc for the neighborhood. Have it be connectable by a high-speed neighborhood LAN, to share the 'hood's WAN.

Just a classic neighborhood network coop, but with some added caching services, which is what would cause it to be called a "datacenter" instead of a "router." ;-)

As if that would really happen. And that's sure not what this is.

Comment The usual question: what did they do? (Score 1) 45

Once again, I'm not shocked by the percentage laid off, but I'm shocked by the number of individuals. If 700 people was 14% of their workforce, then this company had about a hundred times as many employees as I would have guessed. Not that my guesses are particularly well-informed, but when I look at what this company's product appears to be and compare it to my own experiences, I can't help but make guesses that are apparently 99% off! (I'm that dumb!?)

What do employees at these large companies do all day? Why were they hired in the first place, or why weren't they laid off many years ago? I just don't get it.

I don't mean it as a put-down of their products, but on the surface it just doesn't look like their thousands of employees do anything bigger or more complicated than my dozen-developers-sized team (which is, itself, much larger than the teams I've been on in previous decades). Is everyone's productivity just .. eaten up by labor-not-scaling problems? Do I need to really read the Mythical Man Month instead of treating it as distant folklore that I'll some day get to?

Or is the answer in some other direction? Part of me thinks I should just drop it, and accept that I really don't know jack shit about the profession I've had for the last 40 years.

Comment Before I condemn it... (Score 1) 184

I can't really say it's bad for it to be doing these seemingly-bad things, until I know the answer to this: what is the app's intended purpose? Why would/should a person use it?

If it's intended to inconvenience/expose/punish users for trying to find out things about the White House, then maybe the application is doing the right thing.

Comment Good start (Score 2) 166

Even if this crazy minimum-age shit weren't happening, it's generally a good idea to give incorrect information. Have one birthday for site x and a different birthday for site y. Use one of your parent's birthdays here, and a celebrity's birthday there. Pollute the public data and cause confusion.

If minimum age laws help to encourage data public data pollution (all of which arguably shouldn't be public at all anyway), then at least one good thing will have come out of it.

Let's get it up to 84% of parents helping their kids bypass age checks.

Submission + - A completely unfair, subjective take on the latest laptops 1

davide marney writes: I am in the market for a replacement laptop. I need a snappy machine with a high-resolution screen because I do a lot of detailed work. Off I go to the nearest box store. After testing a baker's dozen Windows, Chromebook, and Apple laptops, here is my purely subjective take on how they compare:

All the Windows laptops have invested in adding AI features at the expense of hardware. I found only two machines that I would call snappy and with a high-resolution screen. The price floor for this level of hardware was $3,200. Every single laptop below that level was sluggish. We all know how Windows performance sags with age. If they're this slow brand new ... ?

All the Chromebooks were pitifully underpowered. While I admire ChromeOS for its efficiency, simplicity and no-maintenance ethos, an embarrassingly underpowered CPU is a guaranteed poor experience. What are these vendors thinking? The entire lineup is aimed straight at the bottom of the price pile. But so what if they cost just $350? Bad is still bad at any price.

Apple, thankfully, is generations ahead of everyone else in hardware. Even the most base of base models is snappy and has an excellent, finely-detailed display. My pick was the M5 Air 15-inch, a delightful machine to use. The price is $1,300, less than HALF the equivalent Windows laptop experience-wise. The world has turned upside down.

Submission + - Vladimir Putin is now afraid (telegraph.co.uk)

fjo3 writes: The scaling down of the May 9 Victory Day parade in Red Square is extraordinary, so much so that it demands serious attention. What was once a massive display of military power now appears reduced to something closer to a token event.

This, remember, is meant to honour the sacrifice of some 26 million Russians during what they call the Great Patriotic War, known elsewhere as the Second World War. To cut it back so dramatically – reportedly due to an inability to defend Moscow from Ukrainian attack – is not just embarrassing; it is strategically revealing. For Vladimir Putin, it raises uncomfortable questions.

This is, in part, because when Putin reintroduced military hardware to the parade in 2008, he framed it as a clear signal of strength: a warning to adversaries that Russia could defend itself. He was explicit: this was not sabre-rattling, but proof of growing capability. That claim now rings hollow.

Comment Re:For context (Score 2) 170

Which means the Swiss run the risk of losing their national identity over the coming decades.

Surely that would be lost in the noise. Don't most cultures lose their identities about every 20-30 years anyway? I'm not quite the same person I was 25 years ago, and I bet you aren't either. Yet we are the medium through which culture waves.

Take a longer view and think of 1926. WTF do you today, have in common with them? Some things, but not others. Reading about their lives is much like meeting someone from the other side of the world.

The amount of time it takes the cultural Ship of Theseus to change all its components, is equal to the average human lifespan. Though you can detect the change of culture whenever you think in terms of decades, in day-to-day life it mainly manifests as "ooh neat, a new 'exotic' restaurant has opened!" Twenty or thirty years later, it isn't exotic anymore.

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