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pintxo commented on AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning   seuros.com/blog/aws-delet... · Posted by u/seuros
OutOfHere · a month ago
I don't understand how the VC financiers got so rich while being so stupid as to hire such stupid people at the executive level, e.g. your CTO.
pintxo · a month ago
If only 10 out of 100 of your investments make it, does it matter if one of the 90 failed because of lacking backups? Their risk strategy is diversification of investments. Not making each investment itself bulletproof.
pintxo commented on Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP   arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/LorenDB
dmonitor · a month ago
Most people don't have the equivalent of home internet plumbing in general. They have a hole drilled into the wall (by the ISP) where the all-in-one modem-router-switch-wap sits on a shelf. There's probably a third party service to get ethernet run through your walls, and maybe even replace your all-in-one box with something good, but most people are just doing the equivalent of getting water straight out of the water company's tap with no plumbing.
pintxo · a month ago
Nice analogy!
pintxo commented on Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions   assemblingamerica.substac... · Posted by u/namlem
keiferski · a month ago
I think it could work well if you added two things:

1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.

2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.

pintxo · a month ago
I don’t see any need for that. There are enough weirdos in politics today that the weirdo rate might even go down when selecting people at random.
pintxo commented on Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions   assemblingamerica.substac... · Posted by u/namlem
keiferski · a month ago
I think it could work well if you added two things:

1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.

2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.

pintxo · a month ago
This training thingy sounds sensible. But who controls the contents of the training? That body will have quite some power.
pintxo commented on Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions   assemblingamerica.substac... · Posted by u/namlem
connicpu · a month ago
Regardless of how the average person may feel about it on a surface level, I think it's absolutely critical that congress has so many lawyers elected. These people write laws, we need people who actually understand the way law works doing that job.
pintxo · a month ago
Given that legalese is still commonly prone to interpretation. I‘d rather have more Mathematics and Computer science people to ensure proper logic in the texts ;-)
pintxo commented on James Webb, Hubble space telescopes face reduction in operations   astronomy.com/science/jam... · Posted by u/geox
coldpie · a month ago
Yes. Despite what others are saying, the people making these decisions are not stupid. This is part of a decades-long, coordinated plan to sow distrust in experts, so people will vote against their own interests to ensure the wealthy & powerful remain so.

It's plainly true that spending several billion preventing climate change now, will prevent having to spend several trillion dollars later. There is no debate about that. But the people with the billions now do not want to give it up, so they have spent decades destroying trust in experts, so people will be tricked into voting for their children to spend trillions later, so that the current billionaires don't have to spend anything now.

It's the same thing pushing anti-vaccine views, even though people getting needlessly sick is obviously bad for the economy. Don't trust your doctor, "do your own research" because you know better than the experts, etc etc. It's all part of getting people to vote against their own interests. A stupid population is easier for the powerful to maintain control over than an educated one.

pintxo · a month ago
„You keep am stupid, I keep them poor“, said the king to the bishop.
pintxo commented on James Webb, Hubble space telescopes face reduction in operations   astronomy.com/science/jam... · Posted by u/geox
EcommerceFlow · a month ago
Conservative ideology views government research as inefficient compared to private sector research, something I generally agree with. The evidence for this in regards to space is very clear IMO. SpaceX, with 8,000 employees and a fraction of government space budgets, now controls 95%+ of all orbit launches worldwide. They outcompete entire continents.

There is no risk structure within government research, and NASA's results of the past few decades shows this. No one paid the price for the SLS being so overpriced, delayed, etc.

pintxo · a month ago
If SpaceX had to distribute their spending like NASA across states/senators/political influence, I doubt they would be anywhere near were they are today. I wouldn’t call this a failure of public science/research/development per se. It‘s a failure of democracy, but maybe it’s also a feature?

Dead Comment

pintxo commented on The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles   simonwillison.net/2025/Ju... · Posted by u/swyx
sandspar · 3 months ago
I just don't understand how people can see "100 million signups in a week" and immediately dismiss it. We're not talking about fidget spinners. I don't get why this sentiment is so common here on HackerNews. It's become a running joke in other online spaces, "HackerNews commenters keep saying that AI is a nothingburger." It's just a groupthink thing I guess, a kneejerk response.
pintxo · 3 months ago
I assume, when people dismiss it, they are not looking at it through the business lens and the 100m user signups KPI, but they are dismissing it on technical grounds, as an LLM is just a very big statistical database which seems incapable of solving problems beyond (impressive looking) text/image/video generation.
pintxo commented on Computer science has one of the highest unemployment rates   newsweek.com/computer-sci... · Posted by u/zdgeier
_aavaa_ · 3 months ago
University departments do not always have the kind of autonomy your post implies. It is common for the university’s central administration to dictate how many students they must let it, how much money they get per student, and hence how many they can fail without going into the red.
pintxo · 3 months ago
What could possibly go wrong making education a for-profit business? /s

u/pintxo

KarmaCake day2344April 27, 2017
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