Reminds me when I tried to warranty a macbook air battery a couple years ago. I was already under 80% within the warranty period per System Profiler. They hook up their diagnostics and turns out, System Profiler is wrong, I was at 81% capacity after 1 year. No repair for me.
> More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised.
Yeah, obama was president at the time.
A lot of fanfare and then nothing happened.
People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news.
It’s always “weird” when the same action get different a connotation depending on who’s president…
A couple things you're ignoring or underplaying for some stupid political-score-keeping reason:
1) Many were upset, especially here and in the general tech media, with the Snowden information. Is "a lot of fanfare and then nothing happened" worse to you than "no fanfare and nothing happened"? The fanfare regardless of who was in office on that info is telling, there, no?
2) Many of those policies went back well before Obama
Not sure why you're trying to deflect "we should be fighting this" into "Obama bad, actually!" when the evidence is very clear that it crosses parties, has crossed parties for decades, and will almost certainly continue to if the status quo is maintained.
It's an explicit policy of the Trump admin to not just increase the volume of deportations (regardless of if they've hit their goals yet), but also increase the speed and disruptiveness of them (picking people up when they're at their regularly scheduled "trying to do it the right way" appointments, for instance), and reduce judicial process and oversight.
It's very intentionally NOT the same action, because they're looking for more red meat for the base to distract from any number of other failed promises on affordability, jobs, etc. They've really been unable to do much there other than, at best, "stay on or close to the trend line from 2023-onward as the covid-induced supply chain bullwhips and demand whiplash effects started to recede."
Have you considered that one can protest against those changes independently of doing math on how many happened in 2013? Or that they might also take into account certain notable other actions on immigration taken by the Obama administration as a balancing factor?
If anything, doesn't that suggest that the Trump admin's moves to bypass legal safeguards are unnecessary and are just increasing the militarization of the federal government for nothing?
Ever think that maybe it’s not the deportations that are the problem, but the murders and other human rights abuses?
And the fact that there was a lot of fanfare over Snowden rather undermines your point. People did make a big deal about it. It didn’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, the establishment on both sides is in favor of that stuff. It didn’t get any more action after Obama left office.
I didn't plan to. It demonstrates pretty well as-is how people stop thinking and acting critically when their biases are being confirmed, and the trend on HN demonstrates how widespread this is. Well, either that, or the lack of critical thinking in the first place.
That’s your right, obviously. But it’s too bad, because I have no idea if you think it’s a good demonstration because these things didn’t happen, or they did but they also happened under Obama, or they’re new but don’t matter, or what.
I’m pretty sure that if people had tried to obstruct the law in a similar manner there would have been similar death. And unlike today, there was pretty much no bodycam at the time.
Regarding the fanfare… yeah sure big deal… and yet, here we are, with ubiquitous surveillance whose ground work was laid out during the obama administration.
Multiple independent and credible sources including documents from within the DHS show a deliberate strategy of terrorizing and harming civilians who have done nothing illegal, and numerous serious and sometimes lethal cases of violence against protestors (protest is in fact supposed to be legal) and just random people, as well as spurious immigration arrests to meet unreasonable quotas, cruel and inhumane conditions in the holding facilities they've rushed to build to support all this, and a general lack of due process and proportionality throughout all of this. You are uncritically repeating state propaganda
>People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news.
That's because most news are (or were) partisan with a liberal bias.
Just like a republican bias makes you miss the fact that whether Obama was deporting more in larger quantities, Trump has moved the Overton window about what ICE is allowed to do, how blatantly they can do it, and what they get away with even if it's still illegal.
As somebody that has a vague interest in running local LLMs… they day i decide to burn cash on hardware I might as well go all-in a get either a 128gb mac studio or an nvidia dgx spark (or some other equivalent gb10-based system).
The 64gb mac mini is also interesting, if anything because it is very likely to hold most of its value when reselling.
I’m keeping an eye on the next apple hardware refreshes, particularly for mac minis and mac studios.
I am in a similar boat to you, but I can’t make the money math work. Local LLMs obviously have a privacy benefit but DeepSeek V4 Flash (which you’ll struggle to get running on any single Mac - you’d need at least 128gb RAM) is $0.14$/mtok input $0.28/mtok output on the API. You’d have to be just absolutely burning tokens to ever make this make sense.
Mac Studio M4 Max with 128gb at $3,699 (if you can find it) would equate to 10 million tokens a day of mixed input-output for over 5 years to break even. At which point that hardware is outdated compared to the SOTA models that will probably still be cheap on hosted platforms.
I just use my gaming pc. So I can play games or code with assistance for fun. It's awesome because it's mine and technically I can do whatever I want with it. Having a decent computer around and lower end laptops is pretty budget friendly.
In high school my stats teacher told us we had to get a proper calculator. She didn’t set any upper limit so i went down the calculators rabbit hole… and got an used ti-86 from 1999 off ebay for 35 euros (this was in 2007 or so).
I programmed software to solve exercises in ti-basic and spent every lesson doing essentially software testing: basically whenever a classmate was called to the blackboard to solve an exercise I’d input the exercise data and verified I got the right results.
I got 9.5 out of 10 to the immediate next test. The teacher took off half a point because i miscopied a number (0.3 rather than 0.03, i still remember that after almost 20 years). It would have otherwise been a perfect test.
Fun times.
I still have that calculator, i turn it on every now and then.
I remember naming that calculator “Annarita”, like a girl I used to like and that (of course, lol) barely knew I existed at all.
My TI-85 story involves the fact that it only had 2D plotting (though I think newer models such as the TI-89 had 3D).
I had a 3D calculus class so I wrote a program in it to plot a 3D isometric mesh of a surface using the 2D rendering library. It was slow but got the job done. I used it to help pass a test or two.
I also experimented with drawing random surfaces and objects like a tire. They looked pretty cool for a calculator screen.
The math lab at the college had a cable which you could use to take data off or put it on so you could in theory have exchanged programs with others but this was before the internet so I didn't.
I still have mine and enjoy the sliding the cover off - a trip down memory lane.
Later I rewrote the program in QBasic on a PC for fun and it was lightning fast!
Vim and Emacs can do a lot of what IDEs used to offer thanks to language servers and build servers. Before those (lang/build servers) they were largely useless for large scale development (believe me, i tried).
> A huge part of what attracted me to programming was how free and open it was. The fact that literally anyone with a computer could install Python/Javascript/etc for free and create virtually any software they wanted, limited only by their own abilities and determination, was wildly exciting to me.
but you can still do that, AI is not preventing you from doing any of that in any way.
React is really a bad example because you really don't need it. I am no web dev, but I think React is an abomination. The reason I can confidently say it without knowing every detail there is to it is simply that there aren't impressive websites that show it. There should be some that by now. The number of reused components is probably quite analogous to reused classes in OO. It can make sense, but sometimes it also sometimes doesn't.
Some suggested it could become web standard and I just hope it doesn't. React is beyond opinionated. It certainly has a raison d'être for some applications, but the problem is simply that it didn't put our less buggy or generally better sites.
Internally I oppose react as much as possible. The reason beginners use it is because of job security. The reason experts start projects with it is because it enforces encapsulation, inversion of control and declarative code. Can you do all those yourself in freeform js? yes, of course. It is their way of imposing these traits.
> that not only harvest and sell my personal information to the highest bidder but constantly change the rules and restrictions on my software
yeah i'm gonna call BS on that. what you describe was happening well before modern-day AI (LLM, agentic stuff etc) became mainstream: think of google accounts binding your identity to your searches, gmail, google adsense, facebook, instagram and twitter (and others).
And the products and services that do what you describe can do that just as well without ai.
So yeah the problem is absolutely real but AI is not the culprit here.
And what consequences will there be for whoever lies.
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