Now China has invested heavily in their homegrown industry and all of their cigs are currently 10 years ahead of the rest of the world. Chunghwa thins are the new frontier, with their subtle plum aroma.
It's a lot cheaper in Turkey. I don't remember the exact numbers but each of mine (in the US) was in the high four figure range.
I originally felt more confident going to a plastic surgeon, though even though the doctor oversaw the process, it was being done by highly trained technicians. That's probably more ideal anyway because it's very manual and meticulous work, so (IMO) you want someone who's done it a thousand times--not someone who did a nose job yesterday, a boob job the day before, and only does a hair transplant every couple of weeks.
I'd assume the techs in Turkey are about as experienced as you can get.
I still don't understand the threat. Is it that a user who is not "worthy" of more permissive security may nonetheless be capable of enabling more permissive security?
I can put that more charitably by thinking about it in terms of informed consent, ie does the user understand the risks involved. But if you're concerned that someone following a video tutorial or seeking out a friend has not consented, then I think your standard for what constitutes consent is ludicrously high!
And if it turns out that lots of people are consenting to something, that isn't a failure of design. You asked your users a question, and they gave you an answer.
The threat is that users who are not sufficiently tech savvy will shoot themselves in the foot, including using methods they don't understand. This is a pattern we've seen play out numerous times. The more secure platforms are overwhelmingly the ones that protect the users from themselves, and (most) users value security over absolute computing freedom.
Accurate enough. Those platforms are more secure. But given that many players have a liability-related interest in making sure everyone uses Secure Platforms:
- Many important things that are needed or at least highly useful for daily life will only support "Secure Platforms"
- Everyone will have to use "Secure Platforms" whether they would value computing freedom or not
- "Not As Secure Platforms" will be unsupported and treated as roughly equivalent to malware.
We can see this already literally playing out - it's the whole point of the browser attestation idea.
So thanks to this thinking, we'll get one secure package - Firmware, OS, Browser, all cryptographically sealed. None of them changeable, no "tampering," like adblockers, tracking blockers. No programs that could, say, show you what other programs are phoning home. No third-party programs at all, unless they've paid the platform fee and agreed to Platform Vendor's terms.
You can always use Linux, if you can figure out the drivers, and if you're ok just browsing GNU websites and the Indie Web. Everyone else will block that dirty, non-attested traffic. "It's probably bots," they'll say.
> The more secure platforms are overwhelmingly the ones that protect the users from themselves
More secure by what metric? I would expect that by definition, they are equally secure until the security settings are disabled. If the user disabled a security setting, of course that system is less secure, that's a choice the user made in exchange for some other benefit.
> (most) users value security over absolute computing freedom.
How do you know this? I think that if they're disabling security settings, it's probably because they value freedom/capabilities over security. And you may think this is the wrong choice, but it's theirs to make.
Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains. Despite many people losing their jobs as a result, it's tough to argue society isn't better off.
I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry. People are having their livelihoods threatened while their utility bills go up because of datacenters, and the only substantive impact in their personal lives is that now they have to deal with chatbots and low effort automated customer service agents even more.
I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
I think it's impossible to argue we are better off. This comment is so detached from reality it's almost offensive. Education is unaffordable, health care is unaffordable, homes are unaffordable, the rich have gotten massively richer, the middle class has been gutted, suicides are up, birth rates are down... I could go on and on. It's gotten better for the 1% but the rest of us are being boiled like frogs. To the point where we've (you've) literally forgotten we used to be able to raise a family on a single income. But I guess we have video games and door dash, so sure, we're better off.
This is mostly due to improved economic outcomes for women. The more educated women become, the more money they make. As a result, they become choosier about selecting a husband and delay having children. All of this compounds to a lower birth rate. This pattern has been observed in all highly developed nations.
Maybe in some places??? I am an 80s kid, and was raised with what we'd call something like lower middle class. Neither parent has a college education, worked minimum wage, and owned a home and fed 4 kids. We didn't have as much stuff... But we sure were outside and playing a lot more back then.
Mostly what I can think of is access to medical treatments developed in the last few decades. Comforts like A/C are more widespread now (but they were less necessary when we were under 400 ppm CO2).
My great grandfather supported a family of 7 making brooms. He didn’t own the broom factory. He was an employee, and was paid by the broom. My great grandmother stayed at home to raise 5 children. There was even enough to lend to the local grocery store, apparently. This was at the turn of the 20th century in Canada.
He would have probably worked 12+ hours a day, his children could have died of a toenail infection, their teeth would be falling out early, they could have been deformed by various diseases, many children died young or at birth, etc, etc.
I would never choose to raise a family in that period.
And that support was a family of 4-6 in a 1200 sq ft house, eating out <6x a year, vacations were picnics at the local beach, one car that you did your own maintenance on, one tv, only one set of good clothes (your Sunday outfit), et cetera. Most places in the US can still support a family at that same level of expenditure on an average income.
In many cases it's illegal or commercially unviable to build said 1200 sqft house.
It's kinda funny that this is considered small, though. 110-120 sqm is perfectly normal for a family of 4 where I live, and in many cases they do it with 1 or 0 cars. But I live somewhere that isn't horribly designed (the Netherlands)
Outside of the city cores in the US, homes are built as castles. We have large refrigerators and freezers so that we can amortize our trips to the grocery store by maintaining our own inventory. In my family, we plan the menu a week ahead of time and shop for it in advance. Missing an ingredient means a minimum 1 hour round trip to the big box grocery store by car when it all adds up, which is enough to scuttle an evening's plans. There is 1 smaller store, but it's barely closer -- the main savings is less time walking across a giant parking lot -- and it's absolutely pointless; the only things they can afford to carry are sugary trash and stimulants and intoxication-related supplies. The big box stores use their scale to monopolize the lower profit margin "actual food" category.
When I briefly lived in Paris, we had a laughably small refrigerator. But it was about a 5 minute walk to a neighborhood grocery store, so we effectively used their fridge instead. Which also provided human contact in a way driving to and shopping at a big box store really cannot.
Some of this is just the difference between living in a city vs the suburbs. But not all: even in the US cities, my impression is that you'll have a large fridge and shop at the big stores, even if you take public transit to get there, because the small stores can't compete on staple items.
We're in a path-dependent hell where losing a parking space is felt as a mortal insult, while losing the need for a parking space feels pie-in-the-sky, an unobtainable fantasy. There's an entire synergistic system of dependence on scale and cars and "self-sufficiency" (that masks the infrastructure dependency that it requires).
You can't get the same 1200 sq ft detached house in the suburbs on an average single income because suburbs have urbanized. But you can usually get a 1200 sq ft apartment in an urban area or a detached house in a rural area.
More household work was done in this era, before grocery stores sold prepared food, before washing machines. And more people lived in less square footage, with grandparents living in the home, less privacy and autonomy. I don't know if we've made the right trade, but it's not the case that a single worker's income was paying for the kind of lifestyle a family of four now has.
How is this relevant? The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either. Look at median income and median home prices. You're telling on yourself. Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist. There's a 90% chance if you are on this site, you are not average. You are a part of the haves and you need to consider that you are living a very different life from the average American, which all this productivity should be helping but fucking clearly isn't.
> The houses built in the 60s aren't affordable either.
Far, far more people and the same amount of land.
> Average families aren't buying prepared food and they have a washing machine from the 90s they bought on craigslist.
Well, that's just not true. The average person is absolutely terrible with their money. Not only are they buying prepared food, they're paying someone to drive it to their house.
> Well, that's just not true. The average person is absolutely terrible with their money. Not only are they buying prepared food, they're paying someone to drive it to their house.
The average person is doing this? Do you have sources/stats or are you just going on vibes, or are you looking at people in your (likely non-average) peer group?
Edit: A source I found cites 130 million US delivery app users in 2026, which is a little over 1/3 of Americans. Given that some non-users will call in orders (pizza, Chinese, etc) then it’s plausible that over 50% of people do order delivery from time to time. That said, it’s hard to find good statistics on how much the median person spends on delivery given the likely inflated numbers promoted by delivery app companies. One source said almost 50% preferred ordering delivery through third party apps like DoorDash; if so then how are only 1/3 of Americans actually users of those apps?
Given the numbers on consumer financial stress it’s likely that there is less food delivery happening right now.
No shot. As a general rule of thumb, most Americans, regardless of income, are also in a small mountain of debt. The rich and the poor alike max out their salaries with debt payments and then pile up living expenses on credit. Since that is "fake money" to so many people already, they overspend and convince themselves that using Klarna for a burrito bowl is a reasonable use of resources.
Buying prepared food is not a bad thing, it's cheaper than eating out and many people are busy. I live with a lot of roommates and this is what most people are doing. I'm just saying this is not the same division of labor we had before. My mom worked part time and was a part time house wife, she cooked meals for the family from scratch. Parents today are more likely to both work full time and outsource more food preparation. Part of the reason one income could support a family in the 60s is that they were buying raw ingredients and the stay at home parent was doing more house work.
You could still do that if you are ok living at 1950 standard of living. Average income back then was $26k in today’s dollars. Even low paying jobs today are better than that.
I’m sure you will say something about housing costing more, which it does. But also many things cost less, such as food and clothing.
point me at the apartments or houses you can afford today on a single, minimum-wage income with 40 hours a week. I dont care if its 1950s standard vs todays standard.
You still can if you want to live like you're in the 60s. My parents grew up eating bread with dripping for most meals, meat since they were farmers, some inexpensive vegetables, not much variety. Houses were half the size and had twice as many people in them, my grandparents did any building or expansions themselves. Public schools with free tuition. No overseas holidays, eating out once a month max. The urban poor had it much worse.
You just can't live an upper-middle class on a single income unless you have a good job, but you couldn't back then either.
You can't really live like you're in the 60s. Food and accommodation and other basic costs are going up all the time. Young people in entry-level jobs can barely support themselves while renting a room with flatmates.
Standards of living are going up regardless if we like it or not, and costs as well.
Yes. Choose a time and country in history where you would like to be raising a family now as a "median person"? I bet it is within the last 50 years, and specifically in one of the developed nations and probably during the 1970-2000 period. People rarely would choose to go back further.
We wouldn’t expect productivity to keep growing from one innovation. Growth requires new innovations every year. So in the absence of innovations productivity would stop increasing.
I mean productivity generally, not economic productivity as measured by market cap growth or GDP.
Nobody is operating businesses now without electronic cash registers, POS systems, accounting systems, etc. It's way more productive to use computers and the Internet than to try to accomplish the same stuff without them.
> Nobody is operating businesses now without electronic cash registers, POS systems, accounting systems, etc. It's way more productive to use computers and the Internet than to try to accomplish the same stuff without them.
Well, yes. But once you make the switch and get your productivity boost, that's it: a one-time shot. How do you improve things after that?
> I think that's the key difference with AI, though. It's not like I'm losing my job, but at least I have a robot at home that cleans the house and does my laundry.
Do you though? You might be hallucinating those robots. And no, a Roomba doesn't mop the floor, wipe the countertops or clean the toilets.
> I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance and life is >10x cheaper. But it's unclear if/when we'll move beyond marginal business impact, aside from in software development, I suppose.
Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.
> Do you though? You might be hallucinating those robots.
My phrasing could have been better. The "not" applies to the rest of the sentence, not just the first clause. I'm saying it might be OK to lose my job for "progress" if I were personally getting big benefits from AI.
> Will it though? Your biggest cost is lodging, either rent or own, and both have consistently increased over the past millenia.
Lodging is typically <30% of income and housing costs are driven more by policy than market forces. That said, I see no reason why housing costs couldn't also decrease with the right applications of AI, at least in the eyes of its biggest cheerleaders.
>I'm OK with accepting a job that pays 10x less if the efficiencies from AI mean we're all living in abundance
Well, you won't be living in abundance. All productivity gains will go to the oligarchs. You will have slightly less than you had before. Instead of cleaning the floor yourself you'll work the extra hour for the oligarchs doing whatever the robots cant.
Is this a joke? Income inequality is at it's highest (even worse than the gilded age), deaths of despair are at their highest as well, people can't afford childcare (a years worth of childcare costs more than college), people are losing access to health insurance en masse; but we're suppose to think society is truly better off?
What brand of edibles do you have there 'bud? I'd like to fly into that realm of alternate reality for a bit.
Also when have any efficiencies gained by employers benefited workers? Being honest here because the only time workers have truly gained anything was due to solidarity between workers in the forms of strikes + workplace sabotage.
Do you really think that dropping of your kids at a flu factory is a higher standard than having caring relatives (often even one of the parents themselves) available to give them a good childhood?
Part of the value of paying an accountant is that you can get representation in case you are audited. Though I guess you did say you were confident it is correct.
Yesterday I had ChatGPT walk me through fixing my single-node k3s cluster. It required rebuilding the sqlite database (while skipping a few corrupted records), then clearing the containerd cache, and then finally deleting a somehow-corrupted Secret record, and then recreating it.
Without it I would have given up way earlier, but the infinite patience to keep slurping in error messages and continue to troubleshoot really worked out.
"Anticipate" is strong. Even the mere possibility of something bad happening, even if unlikely, is probably enough to outweigh the positives. In this case, that's just "saying things of grey morality in recorded settings."
My primary worry would be things being taken out of context when circumstances change later. Maybe there's lawsuit discovery, or maybe you have a falling out with a coworker who tries to defame you. The last thing you want is a motivated adversary to be given access to a wide trove of things that could be reframed to be used against you.
And it's not just off-color jokes or insensitive comments. At one job, we had a project that involved "fudging" billable numbers for a completely legitimate purpose. I was the one insisting that we don't use that term in writing at all to avoid any potential future misunderstandings. Call it an "adjustment" or "algorithmic modification" or something, but not "fudging" or "fabricating." Same kind of reasoning.
reply