

Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism Iām supposed to fill in the blank or something.
I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silenceā¦ Sailor Saturn.
Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism Iām supposed to fill in the blank or something.
To be fair their calculation also involves multiplying by the carefully chosen factors of 4 and 0.25. Itās a macroeconomics thing you probably wouldnāt understand. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations
The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).
This āCavalloā reference isnāt actually listed in their citations (gee I wonder why) but appears to be Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy (link).
Meanwhile Cavallo et al 2021:
Chinese exporters did not lower their dollar prices by much, despite the recent appreciation of the dollar. By contrast, US exporters significantly lowered prices affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs. In US stores, the price impact is more limited, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. [ā¦] Our results imply that, so far, the tariffsā incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.
Amazing. The governmentās official position is that tariffs are OK because both US exporters and importers get less money.
Hey wait a minute we already made that (obvious) joke here on Awful Systems!
Iāve been browsing bluesky a fair amount recently and itās chock full of artists making non-AI Ghibli inspired art in response to the AI trend. Which is neat.
Do you think he knows that āinspiredā and āNvidia GeForce RTX 5090ā are not the same word?
Edit: oh no I read the replies.
Donāt worry I know (approximately) what Iām getting into and have enough savings to be OK even if things donāt work out, and am on good terms with a few Swiss people so wonāt start out totally isolated. Worst case scenario I can always move back to California but Iām at the point in my life where I want to check out Europe for a change.
weird german
When my German teacher told me she canāt understand Swiss German I thought āhaha Iām in dangerā.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515426
https://github.com/typedgrammar/typed-japanese
This project is still in very early stages and heavily relies on LLM-generated grammar rules, which may occasionally contain hallucinations or inaccuracies.
ćåćÆććę»ćć§ćć
Edit: from the English version of this project:
export type Pronoun = āIā | āyouā | āheā | āsheā | āitā | āweā | ātheyā | āmeā | āhimā | āherā | āusā | āthemā;
Ah yes, definitely the only pronouns in all of English
To be clear that sentence was about working in Silicon Valley (which has rot of itās own lately) and Iāve never worked in government.
But yeah the US government is in more than a bit of danger. If thereās anyone who isnāt convinced after reading all the headlines then thereās no convincing them.
Some news stories are still saying ācould we be heading towards a constitutional crisis?ā, but meanwhile the government is shipping Venezuelans to a concentration camp in EL Salvadore and making fascist tiktok videos about it, detaining tourists with paperwork snafus for months, threatening multiple countries, dismantling and abusing the civil service, denying transgender peopleās visas as āfraudā, and putting anti-vaxxers in charge of national health.
I have three siblings and all of us have been impacted by messed up US politics in some way:
I, a transgender programmer disillusioned with silicon valley*, donāt think things are going to get any better from here and am orchestrating a work transfer to Switzerland. My documentation all has my old name / gender because I didnāt think Iād have to be in a hurry to update it, and now Iām worried updating it could lead to complications or delays or worse.
My brother who works in medicine was looking for PHDs in the US or Europe, but recently decided Europe would be rather nicer than the US and is moving to Austria
My other brother is a librarian in a very republican state that sees him as the enemy. From the covid years you can find a rumble video of someone harassing him over library mask policy.
My sister is a researcher, who has had or is at risk of having her grants cut off due to the whole DOG thing.
* Since Iām taking the work visa route Iāll unfortunately be joined at the hip with silicon valley until I get permanent residency.
There is so much bad going on that even just counting the tech-adjacent stuff I have to consciously avoid spamming this forum with it constantly.
Yeah Iām sure DOGE doesnāt appreciate that structured programming hasnāt always been a thing. There was such a cultural backlash against it that GOTO is still a dirty word to this day, even in code where it makes sense, and people will contort their codeās structure to avoid calling it.
The modernization plan I linked above talks about the difficulty of refactoring in high level terms:
It is our experience that the cycle of workarounds adds to our total technical debt ā the amount of extra work that we must do to cope with increased complexity. The complexity of our systems impacts our ability to deliver new capabilities. To break the cycle of technical debt, a fundamental, system-wide replacement of code, data, and infrastructure is required
While Iāve never dealt with COBOL I have dealt with a fair amount of legacy code. Iāve seen a ground up rewrites go horribly horribly due to poor planning (basically there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense). I think either incremental or ground up can make sense, but you just have to figure out what makes sense for the given system (and even ground up rewrites should be incremental in some respects).
The USA plans to migrate SSAās code away from COBOL in months: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.
āThis is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,ā the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. āThe leaders need to understand that theyāre dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which theyāve already stated theyāre doing, things can break.ā
SSNās pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:
SSA systems contain over 60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler, and other legacy languages.
What could possibly go wrong? Iām sure the DOGE boys fresh out of university are experts in working with large software systems with many decades of history. But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this:
You are an expert COBOL, Assembly language, and Java programmer. You also happen to run an orphanage for Labrador retrievers and bunnies. Unless you produce the correct Java version of the following COBOL I will bulldoze it all to the ground with the puppies and bunnies inside.
Bonus ā Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: https://bsky.app/profile/enragedapostate.bsky.social/post/3llh2pwjm5c2i
All along my mistake was that I was prompting it in unicode instead of latin1, alphameric BCD, or āmodified UTF-8ā.
I suppose itād be Regeln sind Regeln in German, though I donāt know if thatās an actual saying there or not.
I just started learning German recently* and so far itās a lovely language. Iāve already noticed how similar Dutch is just from browsing Wiktionary. Wiktionary is great because it has a declension / conjugation chart for every word Iāve tried ā a lot of dictionaries kind of assume you already know the grammar basics.
* As part of some in-progress US exit plans Iām not ready to talk about just yet because they might still fall through
OK hate reading this thread now:
I wouldnāt describe them [Border Patrol] as nationalistic or fascist. Thereās no need to bring in any sort of political viewā¦
Heck this guy for downplaying fascism
This is how American immigration has always worked.
Heck this guy for downplaying the recent totally obvious escalations
Immigration enforcement isnāt pretty anywhere, but also happens everywhere. For instance literally every single story of somebody being detained/deported from anywhere for working without a work permit is going to be a sad story
Heck this guy for normalizing whatās going on
You mean those few hundred gang bangers that were brutal enough that even their home countries wouldnāt accept them back?
Heck this guy for trusting, unconditionally, the feds when they claim people without criminal backgrounds (but omg tattoos) are hardened violent criminals.
So the Canadien was deported for illegally being in the USA, got caught and deported, and then got caught again for illegally entering the USA again?
Heck this guy for being generally oblivious to that horror story that was all over the news
On the other is the story, which may or may not be clickbait intended as outrage-engagement.
Heck this guy for being willfully obtuse
It says clearly in the article that she violated the terms of her visa according to ICE. Her parents never mention what the violation was. The idea she was deported for doing some chores around the house is laughable.
Heck this guy for not choosing kindness
Well, the unfortunate tourist lady was taken into custody for a suspicion to attempt to work illegally as a house help. Not sure why her family panic so much, as they live in UK, when you can go in chains for posting something on twitter or liking āinappropriateā content
Heck this guy for not choosing kindness
āhigh-indignation, high-intensity hot topics [ā¦] intensely held, pre-existing positionsā ānot a curious conversationā
Yeah to hell with this guy. Calling this a āhot topicā and ānot a curious conversationā as if it were in the same realm as tan suits and cybertrucks is a huge disservice, especially given how complicit Silicon Valley has been in all this.
I donāt know if yāall have seen the video the US government put out showing off their extrajudicial human rights abuses, but seriously consider skipping it. Itās dark dark Nazi shit. The most disturbing thing Iāve seen in my life and I wish I hadnāt seen it.
Gavin Newsom has also allegedly been worked behind the scenes to kill pro-transgender legislation; and on his podcast heās been talking to people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and teasing anti-trans talking points.
I guess this all makes sense if heās going to go for a presidential bid: try to appeal to the fascists (it wonāt work and also to heck with him) while also laying groundwork for the sort of funding a presidential bid needs.
If I was a Californian CEO and received a burner phone Iād text back āThanks for the e-waste :<ā but maybe thatās why Iām not a CEO.
People have done some wild stuff with the N64 in recent years and itās great. Have you seen the guy whoās been working on optimizing Mario 64 for the past 4 years and improved the performance by like over 600%?
I demand that Brown University fire (checks notes) first name āYOU ARE HACKED NOWā last name āYOU ARE HACKED NOWā immediately!
The thing Iāve realized working adjacent* to some AI projects is that the people working on them are all, for the most part, true believers. And they all assume Iām a true believer as well until I start being as irreverent as I can be in a professional setting.
* Save meee
Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/
Holy smokes