The blockade is like a nuclear bomb detonated on all countries. 30% of World's oil supply is at risk. Not to mention critical elements needed for semiconductor production. Even the US is suffering passively because of this. Only saving grace for US is to restore navigation in the straits. Quicker it does it the quicker we can stop hell that'll be unleashed on the World. You really don't want to be responsible for 30% of Earth starving and dying of hunger because critical fertilizers never reached the masses for food production.
The fertilizer and helium shortages are unfortunate, but expensive gas has ~ doubled global demand for EVs. That’s an ecological miracle, given the idiocy of the US government. That’s probably where the good news ends though.
If spent on humanitarian aid shortfalls, the funds wasted by just the US on this war could have saved 87M lives:
To put that in relative terms: WWII killed ~85M globally; 2/3 of them were civilians. So that’s killed 150% as many as the war crimes committed by Stalin, Hitler and the Japanese occupation of China combined.
I don’t mean to minimize the famine that’s definitely coming later this year.
So where is the air superiority over Iran? This only proves Palmer Luckey right. Future of warfare has changed drastically and all countries are taking notes from this War.
YC needs to go back to how it was. Choosing those who know what they are doing, and have been in the game for long and not blindly choose those who have graduated from tier-1 institutions. University degrees mean nothing at the end of the day.
And please stop investing in slop/wrappers. They do not solve World's problems.
I feel there has been complacency set into investing in general where investors are chasing quick money (first crypto and now AI slop) over solving hard/grueling problems that take a long time to fix but have huge returns down the line.
And we have a lot of tough problems that still need solving. AI won't magically fix that, despite being a great tool.
Yeah, used to be that a lot of companies in the batches made more or less sense, or you could at least see how they'd made sense if they managed to successfully reach their vision, even if it many times was a bit wishy-washy.
YC since then seems to have moved into a "spray and pray" approach where the ideas don't matter at all, they're 150% in on the "We invest in founders" idea now, almost too much, although I know that's always been a thing they've thought about. But all the batches since some years ago are just so uninspired and seem to be quick cash grabs, or obviously acquisition targets, rather than "solve a problem you experience yourself" which seemed to be much more popular (and realistic) before.
>choose those who have graduated from tier-1 institutions. University degrees mean nothing at the end of the day.
It means everything for YC's model.
YC does not care about the software.
They care about the founders.
YC's model and ecosystem is explicitly designed to be a who's who club of interconnected founders that are very, very encouraged to """rely""" on each other when building their companies.
YC uses a lot of double speak regarding this ecosystem, but if you explained the concept to a layman on the street they'd tell you exactly what this concept is in just a very few, very blunt words.
Elite-class founders and lots of cheap, imported, or "passionate" labor.
The only time I used Azure was for setting up Microsoft as a provider for authentication. Put me through a never-ending loop of asking for a Government of India issued document that was already submitted. Human support was non-existent. Decided never to use Azure in any product after that horrible experience.
If you cannot even get auth right I shudder to think what the rest of the product will be like to deal with should issues arise.
I think they don't understand what milquetoast actually means, as the post defintiely isn't - django quite clearly asserted themselves and their rules.
What the parent comment was probably trying to say was something like "a completely reasonable, uncontroversial post that I'm glad to see them make", but chose milquetoast (a word that no normal human ever uses - and certainly not in casual conversation) due to an affectation of one kind or another.
On the contrary, they could have stated their points much more bluntly and strongly than they did in the post. I had the same impression upon reading it.
Milquetoast perfectly describes it, I am happy to see less common words used around here (specially when the convey the intended meaning this precisely), and I find claiming "affectation" of the person who used it unnecessarily rude.
A use of LLMs is when you are in your second reply and you don’t have the will to make your own argument.
The post is timid and conciliatory, spending words on some weird bargaining on all the wonderful things you can do with LLMs in preparation for a contribution. Who cares? I’m not in the Django project, but I’d think (living in These Times and all) that the thrust ought to be more about how no-effort faux contributions are wasting people’s time. At some point you can say: you’ve been warned, others have warned about this for years as well, and we don’t take kindly to you pinging us in any form.
But if someone disagrees with this milquetoast proposal or stance? If they want to defy even this and go ahead and “spend tokens” by trying to shovel unlabeled, generated code into the project? Then that’s the kind of person that I don’t want to work with. I hope that clarifies milquetoast hermeneutics.
What I wrote last was the expanded thought process for my original comment, the same sentiment. For those who don’t understand what milquetoast means.
You can try your luck with some text slot machines. Maybe they will be able to analyze and find some discrepancies. Not that I would read those analyses.
The problem is finding the needle in the haystack. When you can cheaply develop AI slop by the millions, good luck finding that one game where a human put blood, sweat and tears to realize their vision/dream. Even if you somehow have access to at-scale distribution, economics will ultimately always triumph everything else and more slop will be pushed because it makes economic sense.
It will take at least a full decade for people to realize the slop isn't helping, has made us all collectively mediocre and will seek out people with real specializations. By then I sure hope those who are specializing haven't lost the motivation to do great things and moved on to other fields.
This probably only works properly in the developed countries. In developing countries like India we suffered through decades of "booth captures" [1] where armed gangs would take over a polling booth and cast votes for their political candidate at gun point. Villagers would be disallowed from casting their votes. In many instances, the polling booth itself would be set on fire, ensuring that those votes are never counted.
With EVMs the polling officer can just deactivate the machine (which stops the counting at that moment) making booth capturing pointless.
Not saying this is not possible in developed countries. It could very well happen sometime in the future where armed gangs take over polling booths (especially if the candidate in question is bound to lose due to corruption/scandal and needs to cling onto political power to prevent himself/herself from going to prison).
> This probably only works properly in the developed countries. In developing countries like India we suffered through decades of "booth captures" [1] where armed gangs would take over a polling booth and cast votes for their political candidate at gun point. Villagers would be disallowed from casting their votes. In many instances, the polling booth itself would be set on fire, ensuring that those votes are never counted.
Yeah, but these are visible! They provide evidence that the voting was not fair.
Compare to electronic voting, where a capture might be done and no one ever finds out.
We want rigging of elections to be visible. That's the whole point.
I mean looks like booth capture can only capture a booth at most and to capture more you practically need armed rebellion. But if we automate it, then you only need to capture a location to capture all booths in the region.
I don't think any system can do much if things have degraded to the point where armed gangs are running around with impunity. I think systems (paper or otherwise) presuppose a certain level of functional civil society
> Not saying this is not possible in developed countries. It could very well happen sometime in the future where armed gangs take over polling booths…
I fully expect this happening more as the systems degrade in the west and, arguably, it already has happened several times now in many different ways, even if executed in more “sophisticated” ways that make it less apparent.
What do you call the many “color revolutions” the US and EU have now perpetrated in many different ways and places? The ”gang” was just a state level actor with immense resources and methods that exceed the local capacity to prevent them… just like a local gang using arms to take over a local polling booth.
There are declassified versions of old and obsolete CIA guides on how to conduct the precursors of such “color revolutions” through long term “capacity building” that is then activated if/when necessary. That’s the voluntarily declassified manual of the CIA; someone might suggest there are more effective instructions that are classified.
There have also been medium sophistication level events like what has happened over the last several years in Europe, where Merkel ordered an election result cancelled through technicalities because she/the literal The Party, did not like the result (I guess you can take the woman out of the dictatorship…), the EU simply used the judiciary to force a “runoff” because the election results were not to its liking, de facto canceling elections, or even all the subtle measures like visually misrepresenting election results where the bar or pie chart does not match the numerical data to suppress public mandate and perceptions about results, i.e., higher result numbers being represented by smaller bars than lower numbers.
I would argue they are all examples of the very same things you describe, the equivalent of “…gangs take over polling booths…” only it’s done through process, authority, policy, or even law and those in power tell themselves they’re doing it for “our democracy” and justified through similar dystopian, narcissistic, megalomanic, authoritarian mindsets; “I need to be in power for your own good because you don’t know any better”.
It could go both ways, either things will increasingly start degrading even more as the power slips out of the “gang’s”hands, and the system starts crumbling around them; or if “digital voting” is fully implemented there will essentially be “backdoors” to make sure the powers can “preserve our democracy” just like they need OS backdoors and media control to “protect the children”, which coincidentally seems to always coincide with them remaining in power and control and the people not even being asked about major upheavals of their society and their votes being effectively meaningless because the agenda is continuous regardless of election results.
It’s like those people who used to play slot machines at the casino, (now doing so digitally on their phones) pounding at the buttons that do absolutely nothing since the algorithm is what determines where the spin ends, not them rapidly hitting an essentially dead button just because the “clicking”, the “voting”, makes them think they have control. . . . “our democracy” where you and I are not part of that “our”.
Thank you! Please also make a separate Show HN for AI-generated/vibe-coded projects (specifically open-source projects) and queue any project that has a .claude/.codex (or whatever flavor of the month) into a slow queue automatically.
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