code51's comments

On: Water 'Bankruptcy' Era Has Begun for Billions, Scientists Say

[code51]

Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue. Yet, economic downturn creates a vicious circle: governments avoid infra spend because of low funds, then agriculture and other economic output gets hit because of water shortage. Lower resource lower will for infra spend. Until you hit the very low: stopping the grid because day zero. At that point, both the grid and city hygiene becomes a mess anyway. Costs build up so much that most governments cannot cope up with it properly.

and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest

[sbacic → code51]

> Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue.

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.

[citrin_ru → sbacic]

In many places water is pumped from deep underground aquifers but leaks go to surface ground waters and could quickly end-up in the Ocean so aquifers are still depleted.

[alphawhisky → sbacic]

Groundwater recharge from surface to an aquifer where it "rests" can take up to 1000 years.

[jezzamon → sbacic]

We're talking about accessible fresh water. If it evaporates and then rains over the ocean then it's lost, or as the article mentions, if it becomes contaminated then it's not longer usable as fresh water

On: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand [video]

[code51]

Wait, your job was len(x) == 15?

[raddan → code51]

The hardest part is figuring out how to use leftpad.

[catlifeonmars → raddan]

The hardest part is checking to see if the version of left pad you just pulled or one of it’s 300 dependencies has a supply chain vuln in it.

On: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

[code51]

Recommending new material involves risk. Once these companies go big and mature, they hate risk. They hate risk in hiring (taking a chance in people) and they certainly hate risk in algorithms.

On: Claude's new constitution

[code51]

> A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed.

A new religion? Sign me up.

On: How AI destroys institutions

[code51]

12 Angry Agents

On: How AI destroys institutions

[code51]

I know it's a draft but why on earth people cannot use page formats the same (more or less)?

Material (full page) material material, sources at the end. Simple. Readable.

Material (half page), sources (half page). Material/source. Material/source. Looks quite unreadable to the eye.

On: The percentage of Show HN posts is increasing, but their scores are decreasing

[code51]

Sooner or later this will hit the VCs. Translated into a mass underfunding.

[heliumtera → code51]

This would require a significant culture change, much bigger then what happened post zero interest era. For now rainmakers are still praising the ability to spew bullshit. See the recent ralph debacle. Theo this week praising someone for running 50 active "projects" with zero users. Tobi Shopify CEO shitting out dummy projects. Linus vibing side projects. The thrill of seeing a project slip into the realm of the incomprehensible is too great.

I suspect a big chunk of programming will turn into unity game dev/blender tutorial levels of quality. Developers being bamboozled by effectiveness of LLMs are a testament of how hard normies will fall for this crap, huge market ahead.

On: The Olivetti Company

[code51]

Adriano Olivetti (1960) Mario Tchou (1961)

On: Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

[code51]

they were not joking but... joking? when big tech is all rolled into a giant ball, wrapped with money and duct tape, it's hard to get these jokes.

On: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

[code51]

Weird thing is, Gemini didn't crack speech-to-speech yet. They have a product but both Anthropic and Google are visibly suffering in speech-to-speech vs OpenAI voice mode.