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“Being productive” without taking inputs/costs into consideration is an oxymoron.

A company that cares more about cost than results is probably a terrible company to work for. They will give you 10yo dell laptop with 8gb memory and complain that you’re slow when it takes 15m to build the application.

So no it’s not an oxymoron.


Productivity is literally a statement of the relationship between the result and the cost, presumably you found that out after reading the reply and that is why you switched from "productivity" to "results" in your reply.

Until you learn what productivity is we can’t continue the conversation.

As a fellow cheese lover I would have loved for more geographical diversity, especially when it comes to sheep cheese. Ok, it didn't include Romanian telemea (I'm Romanian myself), but it could have at least gone for the Greek feta. Some Anatolian or Middle Eastern varieties would have also helped.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemea


> Jevons does not save you either,

There's also a very strong Trurl and Klapaucius [1] component to this AI craziness, as in I remember a passage in Lem's The Cyberiad where either Trurl or Klapaucius were "discussing" with an intelligent/AGI robot and asking it for stuff-to-know/information, at which point said AGI robot started literally inundating them with information, paper on top of paper on top of paper of information. At that point it doesn't even matter if that information is correct or smart or whatever, because by that point the very amount of said information has changed everything into a futile endeavour.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad


> Billabong board shorts lasted a decade of salt water and sun,

I've had a Billabong orange t-shirt last almost 15 years of sun and salt water from time to time, one of the best clothes-related purchases I've ever made. Sad to see that that's now a thing of the past.


Yeah, it's sad to see classic Australian brands caught up in this debasement process

That article you linked to didn't mention that Context.ai, from where this mess originated, is a YCombinator company. Most probably its founders are on this very web-forum.

Has the article been edited since these comments? I see "It was a Y Combinator company" in the text.

> into thinking they are turbo-charged devs

Fortunately no-one sane enough among us, computer programmers, believes in that bs, we all see this masquerade for what it mostly is, basically a money grab.


The national broadcaster here in Romania has been politically leaning on whoever was paying the bills, hence on who’s holding political control over the country.

I can say the same about the foreign bureaus of State-owned media thingies like Deutsche Welle and Radio France Internationale, both of these entities actively rooting for the Romanian political candidate that was seen as closer to German and French interests (I’m talking the last couple of rounds of Romanian presidential elections).


For once the accelerationists were proven right.

Which accelerationists?

Accelerationism is a strategy, not an ideology. Two accelerationists might have directly opposed beliefs and goals.


> Two accelerationists might have directly opposed beliefs and goals.

The same way as there has been a left-wing socialism and a right-wing socialism, which in the case of inter-war France (for example) ended up with the Ni droite, Ni gauche slogan. But I can understand that the audience here is not that willing to embrace dialectic thinking, even though discussing about politics of the last 200 years or so without involving said dialectic thinking would be a futile thing.


That comparison doesn't make any sense. Socialism is an ideology. Accelerationism is a strategy that can be used by a person of any ideology. A communist can be an accelerationist, so can a fascist, a liberal, a monarchist, an ethnonationalist, etc. It can be a strategy to try to advance any policy, pro/anti-slavery, pro/anti-abortion, etc.

I don't think you're using that word correctly.

Am I not? How would you have used it?

Accelerationists are people who want to embrace the ultra-capitalist surveillance state to force a societal collapse in order to eventually built a better society on its ruins. We are very far from that goal, so I don't see how they have been proven right about anything.

> , and Lerner ordered, for the both of us, a glass of “something dry and cold.” For lunch, he requested the chicken: a roasted baby chicken from a farm upstate, to be exact, an order that, in its comically artisanal specificity,

Stuff like this is so upper-middle class (or aspirational upper-middle class, which is the same thing) coded that it hurts, somehow I thought we left all that behind in the pre-Covid era, looks like I was wrong. Imo it all started with the Lunch with the FT (again, see the upper-middle class larp-ing) gonzos, and it went downhill from there.


Lunch with the FT is probably my favorite section of the paper, if only because it adds a little more context and physicality to the interview. I am doubtful that people are reading it purely for aspirational restaurant name-dropping, but that’s just me.

What's wrong with it?

It's weird enough to feel performative but not weird enough to be interesting.

The tone, for one thing. Normal people don't care about "il Buco" nor about what some nobody has eaten while recounting things, articles like this one should solely focus on the "recounting things" part, not on the eating and name-dropping part.

Now, I get it that for the Anglos normal food might as well have been a thing given to us by the Gods up there in the sky, but, as I was saying, this should have been a thing of the past now, cooked fish is just cooked fish, cooked pasta is just cooked pasta, we don't care about that shit, get to the point of the article.


This is part of a certain type of journalism. You're free to dislike it but it's doing something very specific that most readers of this type of journalism and literature in general do enjoy. You may be coming to this with the (not unusual for the HN crowd) overly stemmy attitude that scans for nuggets of relevant data (and only relevant data!) that can be processed in the most efficient way possible. This is not it, and if it was forced to be we would lose something precious.

You're not wrong, but these people are not going away. This is New York magazine, Vulture section, they just talk about what people eat at the interview, that's what the same people like to read.

Ben Lerner is from that world. Very New York, very arty, very socialite. If I remember correctly one of his books sets place in Marfa, the Art center.

Ben Lerner is not what "normal people" read, nor is New York magazine.

I find the books pretty good, but I think I qualify as one of "them".


Probably they feel this is performative

Europe still has coal, lots of it, not using it is a political choice and a self-inflicted wound.

It does not. That is not economically mined. Last big hard coal producer in EU - Poland, has extraction cost x2 or x3 of the mountain top removal mining in US. This sector is shrinking rapidly. Poland coal production came back to ~1915 levels (taking into account current PL territory). This sector would be closed already if not for massive subsidies.

Last year, China's coal use decreased, while China installed 300x more renewables than nuclear. Coal and nuclear aren't cost competitive with renewables, either in a free market or a technocratic top-down economy. Coal and gas still maintain a valid niche of firming intermittency. But that niche is temporary and shrinking.

Of all the coal consumed per year, China uses half of it. They are not a green economy.

They are greening fast, and enabling greening of others through cost competitive supplies.

> either in a free market o

Then why all the anti-coal mining diktats coming down from Brussels?


Large Combustion Plant Directive: coal incompatible with both traditional air quality measurements and CO2 emissions.

Renewables deployment is happening fast. Grid upgrades are not. Batteries .. it depends.

Even nuclear darling France has set solar records: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/15/france-germany-set-da...


The free market installs a tiny amount of coal, and a lot of renewable energy. Whether you believe this means "coal is/isn't cost competitive with renewables in a free market" is a debate about word definitions that I'm not terribly interested in.

Brussels is trying to reduce "tiny" to zero, because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

China, like Brussels, is trying to reduce coal for similar reasons. They don't like the air pollution health hazard (fully believable), and they say they don't like global warming (somewhat believable).


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