I’m daily driver Linux now after three decades of Windows usage. I have Bazzite-dx (Fedora based) on my desktop and Cachy (Arch based) on my laptop, both using KDE Plasma for the GUI.
I can’t place my finger on it, but Bazzite feels more “coherent” despite using the exact same GUI.
I had the misfortune of using a Windows 11 machine the other day and I didn’t even recognise it. They’ve taken a huge misstep with the Copilot rollout.
This is a logical conclusion of most open source tools in a capitalist economy, it's been this way for decades.
Equivalent or better tools will pop up eventually, heck if AI is so fantastic then you could just make one of your own, be the change you want to see in the world, right?
Luckily debt will be solved by the power of AGI, right? Just one more data centre! One more GPU! It can nearly write a basic three tier application with only 10 critical security vulnerabilities all by itself!
Definitely think we’re in for a rough year financial prospects wise, and doesn’t even feel like we recovered from the 2008 crash properly.
Luckily debt will be solved by the power of AGI, right? Just one more data centre! One more GPU! It can nearly write a basic three tier application with only 10 critical security vulnerabilities all by itself!
If you read the article, it says the default is directly related to the sell off of software stocks, which are heavy private credit borrowers.
What caused the SaaS apocalypse? Gen AI.
I'm long on AI hardware companies for this reason.
Hundreds of financial institutions with greater or lesser responsibility for the crash in 2008 went under in those years[0]. The shareholders in almost all of these companies lost all of their money and the responsible employees lost their jobs. This includes some of the most guilty companies, like Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch (through First Franklin Financial), Bear Stearns. But all these companies are completely forgotten now.
Instead everyone hates on Goldman Sachs. Sure, Goldman Sachs deserves hate, but of the big banks they were the _least_ guilty of the crash in 2008. Not saying they were saints, but in 2008 they were the least bad.
When you have people at the top of those institutions who made those decisions, and made enough money during their tenures to weather any length of unemployment and were sometimes even given a severance worth more money than the average American makes in a lifetime, going out of business or losing a job simply isn't enough.
It's one of the only investments of labor and time where the risk is not proportional to the return.
In order to create risk, you have to either claw back their money through civil action - which you can't because the entire point of incorporation is to separate the business entity from one's personal finances - or look at criminal charges. Otherwise, you have created a class of hyper-wealthy people who have no real incentive to perform in a way that is for the best interests of shareholders or society at large.
It's the reason we tie so much for regular people to employment in the US, like healthcare. Many argue that if you give the rank-and-file worker the kind of long-term financial security that just one or two years of being a C-suite executive at a major company, they won't work as hard. They won't make the best decisions. They won't be the dynamic workers our economy supposedly wants. That logic goes right out the window when a board goes hunting for a new CEO.
>The shareholders in almost all of these companies lost all of their money
How is that penalizing those responsible?
Isn't it a pretty big leap to go from penalizing those selling packaged fraudulent loans to the public (whom, to my knowledge were never prosecuted) to the shareholders losing money as protection against it happening again?
The shareholders are responsible for the management of the company who are in turn responsible for their employees. By wiping out the shareholders in these companies hopefully other shareholders in other financial companies will demand more oversight. In the end people respond to incentives and the individual employees that sold the fraudulent loans were implicitly or explicitly incentivized to do so by management, who were in turn rewarded for this by shareholders. Going after the specific employees that sold the loans is of course morally satisfying, but if we want this to not happen again we need to make shareholders and executives keen to avoid a repeat. Looking at how popular Klarna, gambling companies and now private credit has been with investors, it doesn't seem to have worked, unfortunately.
But, yes, it is a travesty that more of the subprime loan salesmen weren't prosecuted. It has a lot of value for a society to actually convict people that have done actual wrong. We all want to live in a just world and seeing that people who have done wrong get what they deserve is part of that. Looking at the US from the outside I think a lot of the polarization we've seen in the US over the past 15 years could have been avoided if more prosecutions had happened in 2008-2012.
IMO this is also why big companies being allowed to do settlements without admissions of wrongdoing is so bad. They fail to fulfill the moral purpose of law enforcement. Ironically Goldman Sachs _did_ admit wrongdoing in their settlement with the SEC over their Abacus CDFs...
The problem is, shareholding is now so abstracted as to make actual corrective action incredibly unlikely.
If you have investments, go and look what your holdings are. There's a real chance you have some sort managed portfolio that will trade equities to maintain growth. It might be algorithmically-driven. Your holdings may very well temporarily include some companies that you don't approve of, but trading happens so fast and so often that you're not going to be able to keep up on what you actually own.
That's because debt IS money. Literally. If you create debt, you have created wealth. These people weren't punished so they could get back to creating new debt as quickly as possible.
The problem with credit defaults, especially private credit defaults, isn't that some private creditors lose some money, it's that twice that amount of money is destroyed, and disappears from the economy entirely.
In fact we rewarded them. We bailed them out by printing a lot of money. We then printed more money during the pandemic to pay people to stay home and watch Netflix. Probably a lot more examples. All that money flowing around that has no basis in actual productivity or value created. It's got to correct at some point. One of the corrections is how much more everything costs now, but I don't think that has fully absorbed the excess.
Exact opposite. We are in the midst of the COVID hangover.
So that govt money went to the wealthy to buy up houses (Californians bought real estate in the Midwest as investments and it drove up housing prices along with small immigration to these states)
Farmers etc benefited from bailouts when they were doing very well. It was a large blunder.
All that money directly led to housing inflation that still hasn't settled. The PPP loans were all forgiven (which massively favored business owners and upper class).
Meanwhile student loan forgiveness was overruled by the supreme court.
It's really hard to ignore the implication that it ended up being more like a wealth transfer than anything else.
It was inflationary but would spread out the pain over the recovery period after the crisis, the other option was to allow 100% of the pain to be felt immediately: economy shutting down, people losing their jobs, diminished household spending, less money circulating in the economy, businesses still running having fewer orders/customers, more people being laid off, all the way until the crisis passed.
Between the latter and the former I believe the former was a much smarter choice in the medium to long term.
We did. We created about $4 trillion. That just about neutralized the $4 trillion that evaporated in the crash, and the result was that we did not go through a deflationary collapse. You know that they did not create too much, because inflation was basically nothing for the next decade. It was flat until Covid.
Thanks, that was a perspective I hadn't thought about. But still doesn't seem like that taught any lessons, other than the taxpayers will bail out our carelessness.
I think it was a good call, yes. A deflationary collapse is incredibly damaging to the economy. The Great Depression was such a collapse, but there are others. The Panic of 1857, 1873, 1907... there's a long history of these.
The Fed avoided that. And they also avoided causing inflation. It was an amazing job of threading the needle. (One could argue that they caused a decade of stagnation, but in my view that was minor compared to the other options.)
I have really tried hard to figure out the counterfactual as being a good thing and it is just really hard to make the argument that we would have been better off with a deflationary collapse.
This is especially true from a global perspective. It would be a much more equal global economy but unimaginably poorer. The political consequences are unknowable but a deflationary collapse would not have had good political outcomes.
We largely shifted a nightmare into being a great time to be alive but take the good times completely for granted because we can't really know the nightmare we didn't see.
Thank you for the thoughts. Do you think if we had ripped the band-aid off then it would have been completely disastrous? I don't mind saying that this economy is frustrating, and it feels like we keep kicking the can down the road. I'm confident I'm not the only person that feels this way, and I'm quite open to being wrong here. My guts says there's just too much money sloshing around, and it gets vacuumed up, leaving the majority feeling like nothing changed.
I'm asking this in as non-confrontational way as possible, what am I missing?
I think you may be missing that $4 trillion evaporated in 2008, and the scale of the catastrophe that would have caused if the Fed did nothing. What the Fed did then was, essentially, restore the amount of money to what it was in 2007. They were trying to turn 2008 into as much of a "nothing changed" as they could, and they did it quite well.
I think the economy can adjust to any amount of money; it's the abrupt change in the amount that causes problems (because it causes an abrupt change in the value of money).
I think you may be missing that I'm not saying the same thing about the pandemic response. I think that too much money got poured in during the pandemic years, and that has caused inflation, and we've been seeing that inflation since. I wonder if you are taking how you feel about the last five or six years, and mapping that onto the last 18 years.
Now, from 2008 to 2020 was not all roses. Things were kind of stagnant. The rich were probably doing better than you were, because assets like stocks and land went up in value as interest rates went down, but your wages didn't go up. So, it was reasonable for you to feel "there's too much money sloshing around" in things like stocks during those years.
But I think it got worse after Covid. The government air-dropped too much money in, and there has definitely been too much money sloshing around since then.
In all of this, I'm not really saying that you're wrong in feeling that there's too much money sloshing around, or that the economy is frustrating.
Consequences would be nice, but actually forbidding it for the future would be enough. Obama promised to do it, but didn't, and everybody kind of forgot and moved on.
We sure did when Frank-Dodd was written by the legislative and then signed into law by the executive.
GP's comment is about the aftermath of 2008, entirely missing the fact that the legislative did in fact create laws which were signed by the executive and then later, in 2018, dismantled under a different administration.
I mean people have been saying a crash is coming for years... Consumers recklessly purchased homes and cars at double their value, while relocating for remote work that was never long term in the eyes of their employer. Sounds like a receipt for disaster or a repeat of 2008- however, so much has changed since 2008... whatever happens, Black Swan! Hope "you" have your ducks in a row... As for AGI, lol. A box of matmuls isnt going to solve any real problems, so far, as you point out- is can barely write software. LLMs are basically gifted children. Smart sounding, lacking wisdom, chaotic, and likely just going to end up not that impressive. Either way- before we ever see AGI, we better get our heads out of the holes of the wealthy and enact UBI...
They do not in fact do it just fine. That's why it's utterly laughable to suggest that they can lead to AGI. They can't even do the one thing they are supposed to be good at, even after years of effort.
I didn't say anything about AGI, nor will I except to say it's an incoherent quasi-religious topic that has next to no engineering relevance, at the very least until somebody can empirically test for it. Stop coping.
Had the same crisis - I split from my long term partner after 14 years at 33 years old. Was happy to be alone for the first time in my life then within two weeks the dread of loneliness started creeping in.
My advice is find a social outlet - Group exercise like CrossFit and Run Clubs help a lot and cater to all people.
Also - restarting your life alone is expensive, but you will never again have a cheaper cost of living. Take the opportunity to save so you can let the good times roll when you find someone.
Also also - I had zero luck on dating apps, I think their prime days are over, and they’re superficial. Don’t bother with that negative feedback loop.
You are born out of another human but even they can never understand you fully, they can never experience you fully, they can never know you fully. The problems of parents and kids are all coming from that and are old as time. If even parents can't do that there is no chance with other people.
This is the trick of the universe, or a trade-off if you will: being completely alone also means being completely free in terms of internal experience. If you realise that - that is the greatest gift, if you are unaware it can feel like a curse.
I don't think so. Solipsism is not being sure about what exists outside of mind.
I'm saying that others can't understand you fully, not just the mind but whole combination of memory, emotions, experiences, etc. Therefore being alone is not different from being surrounded by other people, I'm not saying they don't exist or anything like that.
Much like LLM output, this seems convincing at first glance but it’s stating assumption as fact; That assumption being “when LLMs get better”. They don’t say what that ceiling is, but then go on to say “it can’t represent someone in court”. Why not? It can reason about more law and precedent than any human can right? As a society surely we want a fair and by the book justice system?
Look at GPT 5.4 and Opus, we’re clearly hitting diminishing returns already and these guys are pumping unsustainable amounts of money into them.
I’m bullish on AI, it’s been a net positive for me and my team. All I see here though is propaganda disguised as science to convince businesses to shrink their engineering budgets and redirect it to AI companies.
Anecdotal, but I asked Claude the other day about how to dilute my medication (HCG) and it flat out refused and started lecturing me about abusing drugs.
I copy and pasted into ChatGPT, it told me straight away, and then for a laugh said it was actually a magical weight loss drug that I'd bought off the dark web... And it started giving me advice about unregulated weight loss drugs and how to dose them.
If you had created a project with custom instructions and/ or custom style I think you could have gotten Claude to respond the way you wanted just fine.
Anthropic is a weird company where the CEO almost admits at times they are probably building the Torment Nexus, yet still feel they need to do it anyway…because someone else might do it first?
I'm not quite convinced of the maximalist claims, but these two aren't incompatible. Every time we talk about a company being "mismanaged" by e.g. a private equity buyout, what we mean is that the owners had access to a large volume of high quality white collar work but couldn't figure out how to use it right.
Anthropic in particular seem to be in a weird place where on the one hand they fund some real research, which is often not all roses and sunshine for them, but on the other hand, like all AI companies, they feel the need to make absurdly over-the-top claims about what's coming up Real Soon Now(TM).
No, people are being arrested for making malicious communications. They would have suffered the same punishment if they had used email, letter, graffiti on a billboard.
You cannot go around threatening to harm people without repercussions.
He was offered to undergo "re-education." You might not like this meme. You might find it offensive. But should he be arrested by several officers for it? Of course not. This is just one example of many people being being arrested and imprisoned for offending people. It is against the law to offend people in the UK.
Re-read what you just linked. In the response from the JIMU:
"A 51-year-old man from Aldershot was arrested on suspicion of sending by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing message or matter."
This is the legal basis for the arrest. Without the retweet, police would not have had authority to turn up to his place of residence - twice - and demand entry. No doubt they preferred Brady voluntarily submit himself for interview at the station, but he refused, which I hope we can all agree is the morally correct position. No one should have police turn up outside their house - TWICE - because of a parody retweet.
The law might be a bad one (and probably is) but on balance better that police investigate suspected illegality than don’t. Overall I’d rather be somewhere where even a former royal can be arrested than somewhere the rule of law is optional.
Haha, any comments on that? The police didn't even apologize or admit a mistake, they believed they were doing the right thing and just made a waffle statement about "reflects need in our local communities."
Police make mistakes, in some countries they arrest someone trying to incite an arrest and that's bad. In some countries they shoot someone for driving 5mph over the limit, that's worse. The police in the UK do far worse than wrongful arrests so while bad, it's not really on my "top ten problems" list.
People are certainly being arrested *in the USA* for speech (e.g. opinions) that are theoretically protected by the first amendment.
Unfortunately, last I tried to look this up, I found that there simply do not exist useful and easy to find stats for "malicious communications" in the UK such that stalkers and people making death threats can be separated from mere political correctness.
And even with actual death threats, there's stuff like this, where I don't myself have a single sustained state of my own mind about how I would respond to such a tweet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
Kinda irrelevant, given that the go-to examples I see on Hacker News of this happening in the EU and UK are either actual death/violence threats etc. (which are also not protected speech in the USA) or also not upheld in higher European courts.
And? I didn't say anything about "incitement", I said "actual death/violence threats", because I meant people making actual threats of violence up to and including death, are the actual things tweeted in the most commonly seen examples given on Hacker News (besides the aforementioned "also not upheld" that the commenter I was replying to tried to use to justify when Americans get arrested for tweets).
The people in Europe have a different view of freedom of speech and that’s fine. Not everything that’s a slightly different perspective on freedom of speech and what that entails and includes is tyranny.
I’m European and I do not. France and the UK especially come from the same liberal intellectual root as the USA. What we see today is a bastardisation of these principles in Europe. Only the US was smart enough to canonise it into law.
Democracy also includes sometimes things not happening the way you want to … happens to me all the time, too.
Obviously free (and not merely democratic societies) need strong protections of minorities and broad freedoms, but I don’t see free speech implementations in Europe broadly infringing on that.
So there is censorship, you just think that it is good. That's fine! But you should own the position and justify it on its own terms instead of pretending that it doesn't count as censorship.
Sure but filtering what you say is also a form of censorship. Swinging the term around like it's some form of morality is silly; anyone who isn't for a form of censorship is just a moron and an asshole. Or even worse: a liberal.
”Margaret Dodd of one offence of improper use of a public communications network,
contrary to section 127(2)(c) of the Communications Act 2003. This provides that a
person commits an offence if “for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or
needless anxiety to another [she] … persistently makes use of a public electronic
network”.”
Not the author but I'm making a similar tool currently, and the reality is no because of the nature of it being character based.
You can theoretically have "artistic" polygons where it renders using a mixture of characters to emulate how that grid would be filled if a certain shaped was laid over it but the end result wouldn't be very functional for the purposes of diagramming.
If we have syntax highlighting build into the TrueType font, can’t we also get sticky lines with the same mechanism? It would then only work with the right font obviously.
I can’t place my finger on it, but Bazzite feels more “coherent” despite using the exact same GUI.
I had the misfortune of using a Windows 11 machine the other day and I didn’t even recognise it. They’ve taken a huge misstep with the Copilot rollout.
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