https://ineptech.com is sort of my personal site and sort of a software site parody, which may or may not be what you're looking for, but I'll throw it on the pile.
Readit Newsineptech commented on Ask HN: Share your personal website · Posted by u/susam
ineptech commented on Something Ominous Is Happening in the AI Economy theatlantic.com/economy/2... · Posted by u/jonbaer
The lede IMO is near the end:
> The federal government responded to the 2008 crisis by limiting the ability of traditional banks to take on big, risky loans. Since then, however, private-equity firms, which aren’t subject to the same regulatory scrutiny as banks, have gotten more heavily into the lending business. As of early this year, these firms had lent about $450 billion in so-called private credit to the tech sector, including financing several of the deals discussed above. And, according to one estimate, they will lend it another $800 billion over the next two years. “If the AI bubble goes bust, they are the ones that will be left holding the bag,” Arun told me.
> A private-credit bust is almost certainly preferable to a banking bust. Unlike banks, private-equity firms don’t have ordinary depositors. In theory, if their loans fail, the groups that will be hurt the most are institutional investors, such as pension funds, university endowments, and hedge funds, limiting the damage to the broader economy. The problem is that nobody knows for certain that this is the case. Private credit is functionally a black box. Unlike banks, these entities don’t have to disclose who they are getting their money from, how much they’re lending, how much capital they’re holding, and how their loans are performing. This makes it impossible for regulators to know what risks exist in the system or how tied they are to the real economy.
> Evidence is growing that the links between private credit and the rest of the financial system are stronger than once believed. Careful studies from the Federal Reserve estimate that up to a quarter of bank loans to nonbank financial institutions are now made to private-credit firms (up from just 1 percent in 2013) and that major life-insurance companies have nearly $1 trillion tied up in private credit. These connections raise the prospect that a big AI crash could lead to a wave of private-credit failures, which could in turn bring down major banks and insurers, Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in financial regulation, told me. “Unfortunately, it usually isn’t until after a crisis that we realize just how interconnected the different parts of the financial system were all along,” she said.
A lot of people lost money when YHOO tanked in 2000, but the money they lost generally hadn't been lent to them by a bank, which is why 2000 was a tech crash and not a finance crash. I generally think of private equity as a rich guy gambling with a wealthy guy's money, but to the extent that the last ten years of growth have made private equity seem safe enough for banks and pensions to invest in, a correction caused by AI companies failing seems a lot scarier.
ineptech commented on Fighting the age-gated internet wired.com/story/age-verif... · Posted by u/geox
I consider myself lucky to have grown up before the internet, but after local BBS' were a thing. My parents had absolutely no idea what went on in those systems, and I found the freedom incredible. Being able to explore and spread my wings a bit was a huge part of my childhood and teen years, and it wouldn't have been possible if my parents were hovering over my shoulder, or if I were unable to make an account because I wasn't 18.
That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online.
I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.
I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.
ineptech commented on I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla manualdousuario.net/en/mo... · Posted by u/rpgbr
The #1 thing I want from Firefox is for it to keep existing in the long term, as a hedge against Google's monopoly. Burning capital on hardware-intensive AI features to get FF from 1% market share to 2% market share would endanger that, no matter how useful the features might be.
This is also true if humans in general, at all stations in life, including union members and union leaders. Is there any offer a union would refuse on the grounds that’s too much?
People like getting more money, but they don't die without it. You can get a job that pays just enough to pay your bills and work at it until you die. Companies can't do that under capitalism. They take on debt and require growth to pay back their investors, or they don't take on debt and get undercut by a competitor who does.
ineptech commented on Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race nbcnews.com/politics/elec... · Posted by u/jsheard
There was a government option in the original ACA. Dems couldn’t get the votes to overcome the filibuster in the senate to pass it. It had nothing to do Obama u turning. It was an amazing feat to get it passed in congress and get 60 votes in the senate.
The u-turn came long before that acronym existed, as I remember it. The Dems had been trying to build consensus for some kind of single payer plan for almost twenty years by that point, and practically the first thing Obama said after being elected was that as a show of good faith he would take single payer was off the table.
Maybe today the ACA is thought of as progressive, especially in the sense that the right wants it to end and the left doesn't; but in its time I think it was rightly understood as the Democrats caving to a massive transfer from the public to the private sector. I recall the private insurers' stock prices all going up 10-20% that week.
ineptech commented on A turn lane in Rhododendron greentape.pub/p/a-turn-la... · Posted by u/apsec112
Would a wider road not embolden drivers to increase their speed?
The issue isn't people going too fast, it's people turning left. 26 basically connects Portland on one end and Mt Hood recreation stuff on the other, and it used to be that there wasn't that much in between. Over the last few decades, a lot of development has gone up, meaning a lot more businesses and neighborhoods along both sides of 26, plus the highway has gotten a lot busier.
ineptech commented on Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come blog.muni.town/personal-d... · Posted by u/erlend_sh
Both of these proposals (as far as I've read them, YMMV) fail the evolutionary test. At the scale we're talking about, ideas must proceed as evolution does: not with a far-away goal in mind, but with incremental changes, each of which individually must be an improvement over the status quo.
We are at (near) a significant local maximum, and (again, as far as I've read, which is not all of it for sure) the people pitching this form of information control have given no set of steps from here to there without significant cost/effort.
Of course they don't have to have the whole path in mind. By definition they just need the first step or two. But they must be steps up.
You don't get wings by wanting to fly; first you need feathers to keep warm (I am not an evolutionary biologist, I don't know if that's a valid theory).
The realistic path off looks like this, I think:
* I use Bluesky to chat as a Twitter replacement, which gets me into the Fediverse and gets me a PDS
* I use my PDS to store my payment details, giving me a (at first client-side) way to submit stored payment details that feels similar to storing it in the browser, but stores it in my "server"
* From there, it's a natural step to giving the retailer a token that can be used to pull payment details from my PDS; early adopter retailers are incentivized to do this because it frees them from the burden of storing and updating PII/PCI
* After some subset of users and retailers do this, users see the benefit of controlling their data as a viable alternative to some of the worst user-hostile patterns, e.g. the New York Times' "we don't have a cancel subscription page, you have to call an 800 number" nonsense.
* To the extent that storing PCI/PII in a PDS is as easy as storing it in the browser but with perceived additional benefits, user demand drives wider adoption
* Once it's technically feasible for sites to maintain their business model without storing any PII/PCI, it is much more realistic to write laws that proscribe it effectively for those users who choose that
Funny, i'm building something similar too but mostly because I don't want to contribute to someone's SAAS etc. Can you describe how yours works?
Sorry to have missed this, been traveling (naturally). You can see it yourself if you like, ineptech.com/flash. It is absolutely the bare minimum, but it worked fine for me.
Last week I wanted to quiz myself on German vocab words, and after searching in vain for a simple "flashcard" site without subscriptions or bullshit I ended up just making one myself. Very barebones, a single index.htm file with a little css and js in the header. Threw it on to a silly novelty domain I own ( ineptech.com/flash ) and bang, a useful (to me) webapp from zero to done in maybe two hours. And I'm a terrible programmer! It does feel sort of powerful in the way this site describes.
Still, I can't see buying a domain for it and putting it on this guy's webring, because while it's possible someone somewhere might find it useful, i don't think it's possible that person would be able to find it. They'd see the same 30 links to adware crap I saw and build their own like I did. In fact I'm probably the hundredth person to build this exact site for themselves. That part doesn't feel so powerful.