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This kind of article reminds me of about 20 or 15 years ago. Maybe at the early days of Wikipedia.

There was so much exploring to do, and sites weren't filled with AI slop either.

You'd easily go ... "Ah, lookie here, this is interesting.. Unix usage in East Germany".. after 4-5 hours you'd still be reading, maybe about Elektronika (PDP-11 compatible clonest in old Soviet), etc.

Fun times!


The start of the story touches on even older days: they got a tape with some binary data, and couldn't just ask AI "What's this?", they had to hunt for answers in books, in their library!

And then the amount of focused work they needed, which they probably had because they weren't doomscrolling:

> Since we had no machine with a `C' complier, we chose the same method: translation by hand into another language. In a finite time (about 3 months), we had a `C' compiler which produced PDP/11 assembler.


I honestly thought this was some kind of OpenWRT firmware for routers until I clicked the link. "Ahhh, AI. Of course."

I love his views on Los Angeles, I paraphase:

> [...] What I like about Los Angeles is that it allows everyone to live his or her own lifestyle. Drive around the hills and you find a Moorish castle next to a Swiss chalet sitting beside a house shaped like a UFO. There is a lot of creative energy in Los Angeles not channelled into the film business. Florence and Venice have great surface beauty, but as cities they feel like museums, whereas for me Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance, even if it’s raw, uncouth and sometimes quite bizarre. Wherever you look is an immense depth, a tumult that resonates with me. New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn’t create culture, only consumes it; most of what you find in New York comes from elsewhere. Things actually get done in Los Angeles. Look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up; it has more horizons than any other place. [...]


This interview is full of gems. Just below that:

>Of course, California is also where some of humanity’s most astonishing stupidities started, like the hippie movement, New Age babble, stretch limos, pyramid energy, plastic surgery, yoga classes for children, vitamins and marijuana smoking. Whenever someone wants to pass on “good vibes” to me, I look for the nearest empty elevator shaft.


Where are these quotes pulled from? His autobiography? Something else?

Had your cat to a psychic yet? No? You're missing out man.

> New York is more concerned with finance than anything else. It doesn’t create culture, only consumes it

Even smart and talented people are capable of saying very stupid things.

> for me Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance

Well, it could have been worse. He could have disclosed his undying admiration for Las Vegas ..


Likewise, someone said Jacksonville FL is the most boring city, yet you have a vibrant artist communtiy there.

They have galleries and they are there for tax fraud.

What about the street art people?

Do you believe the murals aren't paid for?

As much as I love America, as an American I'd be a bit embarrassed to see my administration put this kind of negative stuff on Whitehouse.gov

I'd be a bit embarrassed

Oh wow, this is like straight out of the old geocitites. I was expecting the UFO documents. This may be out of compliance [1][2] and should be moved to Neocities [3].

[1] - https://www.gsa.gov/reference/gsa-web-style-guide

[2] - https://digital.gov/guides/plain-language/design#content-sta...

[3] - https://neocities.org/


I'd say in Norway there's more inherent trust in America. People may appear a bit more critical, but by now it's part of the culture. Even though you have some regresion of that trust due to Trump and polarization, I'd say most people see the US as a core part of Western society, cultural and critical to defense.

Where did they say that all data centers will move into space? I thought the claim was that it's going to be more and more feasible and profitable to have DC's in space.

Elon Musk is saying this together with Dyson Sphere and Mars colonisation.

In his FCC filling he also mentions DCs:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-113A1.pdf

And yes its absolutly wild.

His Scifi ideas are probably a min of 100 years too early.

And while he doesn't even need his own compute (renting out colossus 1 and 2), he thinks we will send server racks full of expensive hardware into space in no time.

Why?

Because his Space-X Trillion evaluation doesn't make sense if he doens't has payload for Starship.

So how much payload do we send to space? Actually not that much, starlink itself is the biggest change by far. So he builds Starship which he needs for starlink v3 but what then? Yeah Datacenter in space...


Agreed - Tesla has been an insanely good investment. I'm not sure about the next 10 years, but people have continuously underestimated them (and Elon Musk). The Norwegian so called Oil Fund owns more than 1% of Tesla.

Tesla is not and never has been a good investment.

Its a gamble.

The current evaluation of Tesla is still higher than real car companies + robot companies + robot taxi companies.


Never is a strong statement. Tesla’s price to sales ratio wasn’t absurd prior to 2020.

If you want to make sure to be very very specific, yeah for sure Tesla had a timeframe were the ratio was not bonkers.

Fair enough I guess, it has been a gamble. But risky investments are still investments that paid off well. Or they can drop like a rock.

has it been an insanely good investment because of changes to profit and loss, or because of other factors? (of course, building a car company of the scale they have is impressive. But by looking at tesla's financials vs stock price, youd conclude basically any other car company ever was a great buy by any reasonable metric)

Next one: Berkeley DB is all you need for durable workflows /s

We're IT people, we often work 14 hours a day. How does that not mix into your personal life?

Working 14 hours a day isn't normal. From an IT person who works 8 hours a day.

Think it might be normal for the HN crowd, founders etc.

This is so sad. "Maybe - just maybe"

> [...] the best career move is to become proficient at buying more tokens orchestrating agents, but I would still recommend not putting all your eggs in one basket just yet because maybe – just maybe – there will still be some value in knowing how systems work, both to differentiate yourself from other developers career-wise, and as part of effective LLM steering.


This should be read sarcastically. Its an idiom in the US. You state something you view as obviously true while qualifying it with "maybe - just maybe". Its commonly said in a comedic tone.

When it's spoken .. sure.. but as I read it, I wasn't so sure anymore.

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