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While true for the Iraq war I don't think that holds as true anymore. Even a lot of MAGA recognise that getting into wars in the Middle East does nothing but cost the taxpayer billions/trillions of dollars for nothing to show.

That's because there's a glimpse of reason that still pokes through with influencers sometimes saying "you know, I think (thing) might not be good so I hope Trump doesn't do it." Then when trump does (thing), they always backpedal and say it's great. Pre-election inflation was a problem. Now prices are great. Epstein was a problem. Now they say nobody cares. War with Iran was bad. In 2 days influencers will all have a prepared message supporting it and in 3 days half the country will absolutely support it.

The stock market will be spooked if the US govt can willy nilly high trajectory darling of the AI world like this though.

Who's next? OpenAI? Google? What if they refuse to allow the DoD to use AI with zero safeguards and Trump's goons decide they are also a "supply chain risk"?


In the end we discovered this had nothing to do with safeguards — OpenAI simply bribed them to switch. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47197505

No. The stock market has understood for generations that it's the guys with the guns that protect their gold. The stock market will have a sigh of relief.

Its the agents who control the drones now.

This will likely go to court, again as Dario has stated this is blatant retaliation as no US company has ever been designated a supply chain risk and they continue to operate on classified systems for 6 more months.

Yea strong odds this goes to court, the DoD’s clearly inconsistent logic is ridiculed by a judge, the designation is dropped, and everyone quietly goes about their way with the DoD continuing to use Claude according to the existing terms of the contract.

Sure, after a decade of litigation, meanwhile Anthropic goes bankrupt.

Please, the media didn't report on this because natural disasters affecting the climate is not controllable by humans and thus doesn't warrant a global effort to address unless it's so large as to be species ending.

Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.


Also some time after that other guy copied and pasted his canned Hunga remark into his big spreadsheet of climate denial comments the international community of climate scientists concluded that Hunga cooled the atmosphere, on balance.

"As a consequence of the negative TOA RF, the Hunga eruption is estimated to have decreased global surface air temperature by about 0.05 K during 2022-2023; due to larger interannual variability, this temperature change cannot be observed."

https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1049154/files/Hunga_APARC...


Thanks for linking that document, I’ll have a read.

Yes, and it doesn’t fit the narrative.

We should be moving towards being able to terraform Earth not because of anthropogenic climate forcing, but because one volcano or one space rock could render our atmosphere overnight rather uncomfortable.

You won’t find the Swedish Doom Goblin saying anything about that.

> burn petrol.

Well yeah, so making electricity unreliable and expensive, and the end-user’s problem (residential roof-top solar) is somehow supposed help?

Let’s ship all our raw minerals and move all our manufacturing overseas to counties that care less about environmental impacts and have dirtier electricity, then ship the final products back, all using the dirties bunker fuel there is.

How is that supposed to help?

I mean, I used to work for The Wilderness Society in South Australia, now I live in Tasmania and am a card carrying One Nation member.

Because I’m not a complete fucking idiot.

Wait till you learn about the nepotism going on with the proposed Bell Bay Windfarm and Cimitiere Plains Solar projects.

I’m all for sensible energy project development, but there’s only so much corruption I’m willing to sit back and watch.

With the amount of gas, coal, and uraniam Australia has, it should be a manufacturing powerhouse, and host a huge itinerant worker population with pathways to residency / citizenship, drawn from the handful of countries that built this country. And citizens could receive a monthly stipend as their share of the enormous wealth the country should be generating.

Japan resells our LNG at a profit. Our government is an embarrassment.


Natural resources are not required to make a country an economic powerhouse. See Japan, for example. Hong Kong, Taiwan, S Korea.

What's needed are free markets. Any country that wants to become a powerhouse has it within their grasp. Free markets.


And political will.

The Antipodes have such a problem with successful people we even invented a term for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

On the subject of free markets, Australia excels. We even let foreign entities extract and sell our LNG and pay no royalties and no tax.

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/zero-royalties-charge...

Doesn’t get any freer than that!


Spain stripped S. America of its gold and silver, and neither Spain nor S. America benefited from it.

Doesn’t South America collectively produce more gold in one year than the Spanish usurped from them in their entire conquest period?

Gold production by country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_countries_by_mineral_...

In only the first half-century or so of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, over 100 tons of gold were extracted from the continent. - https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2045/the-gold-of-the-co...

Context is for kings though. In the context of what occurred when it occurred, you’re right.

For a while there, Australia was known as ‘the lucky country’ because despite the folly of politicians, and general fallibility of humans, we had wealth for toil.

Now we just give it away.


We use server side Swift extensively since about 2016 for decent production load and it's easily one of the worst decisions I've ever made.

- C/C++ interop is great but if we wanted to use C/C++ libraries why use Swift at all? It's annoying to interop with them even if there is no FFI and still requires a lot of glue code for memory management etc…

- The stdlib (Foundation) is not identical on all platforms even today. This has been a major thorn as releases constantly have discrepancies and subtle bugs that are hard to diagnose and track down. Even Swift 6.1 broke non UTF-8 string encodings by just returning "nil" on Linux and took until Swift 6.2 to be fixed (nearly a year).

- The compile times are awful, with a large Swift codebase it takes us ~10-20 minutes to compile our backend Docker container and thus deployments to dev take that long and it's only going to keep getting longer as Apple seemingly has no interest in making the Swift toolchain much faster and Swift has a fatal flaw in it's design around bi-directional type inference that ensure it can never be compiled fast.

- Talent is impossible to find. Yes lots of people know Swift for iOS apps but nobody knows Swift for server code and a backend dev is a very different skillset than an app dev.

We chose it because it allowed us to share some domain code between our flagship iOS product and the server with a custom built sync engine but as our platform has grown it's just gotten harder and harder to justify keeping Swift on the server which is why we're actively migrating off it.


> - The stdlib (Foundation) is not identical on all platforms even today. This has been a major thorn as releases constantly have discrepancies and subtle bugs that are hard to diagnose and track down. Even Swift 6.1 broke non UTF-8 string encodings by just returning "nil" on Linux and took until Swift 6.2 to be fixed (nearly a year).

sad, I was doing server side around v4/5 and this was the biggest issue at the time for me (lots of stuff was not implemented and you only found out at runtime). that this is still a problem is very disappointing...


Outside macOS/iOS devs wanting to share code with server side, I don't see a use case, given the more mature alternatives.


They're not all banned, you just need a prescription to get one which realistically should've been implemented day 0.

Eventually it'll prove very impactful with the youth, it'll reduce the number of users and make it more cost prohibitive to be so prolific as it is right now.


Yeah I don't think my doctor is going to give me a cannabis vape prescription, though admittedly I haven't asked.

I don't see how making vapes prescription only changes the situation with children, which is that all tobacco products are illegal to sell or provide to a person under 18. Cracking down on the sale of tobacco to children does not require tobacco products to be made prescription only, these are orthogonal issues. All this does is drive profit towards shonky pill doctors who advertise on facebook that one cheap over the phone appointment is all you need to "feel great again" and other euphemisms, and will give you any pill you ask for regardless of the medical suitability.


Why though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling costs.

It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.

100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be required to take back empties and dispose of them responsibly.


> It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.

Sounds like they should be banning their sale and/or production then, just like many jurisdictions have been with plastics and other non-recyclable items. These devices are not an essential-to-life item where the waste produced is justifiable, especially when you consider the LiPo batteries, which are a borderline-environmental disaster from the moment the lithium is mined to the day that battery finds its way to a landfill. Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available, often right beside the disposable ones, and generally offer a significantly lower cost of ownership.


> Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available

I suspect you could make the same argument for manufactured cigarettes vs pipe tobacco. It seems people will pay for convenience.


I think waste management should be required to scan the garbage and remove useful items, i.e. recyclables. This would take the burden off consumers and allow more items like this to be intercepted. The technology is there, why not force the corporation to innovative?


Because they are a fire hazard:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62vk0p5dn5o

Trash compactors break the batteries in these things. A deposit could help to ensure that the vapes are disposed responsibly.

Other option: Add an "electronics" bin everywhere. Though that would be more expensive and less clear how effective it would be.


How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?


I see more vape litter on the beach than bottles and cans. The deposit is part of why that is


It's very profitable to recycle small electronics in some economies where thousands of companies do it (eg India or Shenzhen); in countries where human labour is more expensive, it's untenable


I just received a $10 deposit refund for returning my motorcycle battery to the battery shop.


That's a good point. In America we call this type of deposit a "core charge." The "core" is the component you return to the store to get your deposit back.

This is done for components like starter motors, alternators, power steering pumps, batteries, and a variety of other components. The complex components are re-manufactured to like-new specifications and the less complex components are recycled to recover materials. The battery is a probably the only component where the potential ecological impact drives the cost of the deposit.


I never thought about it but it is odd car-components are the only thing most people will experience with a "core" charge. Why don't more industries do something similar? Is it just because car ownership and car repair has been such a core (no pun intended) component of American culture? That a system of recycling has been set up?


I was curious about when and where these core charges started. It looks like it was the result of WW2 and the shortage of steel and other materials forcing both the military and civilian manufacturers to turn to recycling and rebuilding parts out of necessity. After the war, the remanufacturing industry was large enough to stand on its own and the concepts stuck around. Some hazardous items like lead acid batteries have legislation helping to enforce the core charges but the rest seem to be market driven.


Lead actually has a pretty good scrap value.


V2 to V3 was really good value, but V3 to V4 was mostly performance with a migration nightmare with little new features.

I don't know what a Tailwind V5 could add that is "breaking" and be worth the migration headache again.


Yes but Tailwind Plus has a flawed business model, AI was not really the reason nobody bought it, it's that it's a lifetime purchase and that shadcn + LLMs has eaten their cake left right and central.

If LLMs didn't exist but shadcn still did, do you think people would pay and use Tailwind+ or shadcn?


Tailwind UI is tool companies buy to save dev time mostly on internal/back office tools. It's usually bought per project. The math is pretty easy - if it saves you few hours of devtime you buy TailwindUI. Shadcn and bazillion other similar things are certainly competition but TailwindUI is very broad and of high quality so why not pick the nicest version.

The problem is that Tailwind is extremely portable (thats why it's so popular) and since LLMs have been fed all TailwindUI code... people using LLMs don't even have to know that TailwindUI exists they just get some Tailwind styled components. They would probably look pretty confused if you told them you used to buy these templates.


What’s the problem with the lifetime purchase?


It's the difference between one-off revenue and recurring revenue. If you're making new components, making new changes for the new version, adding new css and browser support it's hard to keep going with only income from new customers.


It takes the recurring out of recurring revenue, 100% churn


shadcn/ui I'd argue is probably the single biggest factor in the declining Tailwind revenue more so than just LLMs in general.

As said is it is to say shadcn is what Tailwind should've created and maintained for a fee rather than some html/css templates that are easily replicated.

I say this as someone who bought Tailwind+ to support the project many years ago and still use Tailwind every single day.


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