The article mentions epidemiological studies showing that people living or working near farmland where paraquat is used have a higher incidence of Parkinson's.
Don't be so quick to dismiss it, there could be a link.
climate change isn't an one/off effect but gradual
every bit of improvement is a higher chance to avoid some of the most catastrophic outcomes (where the unlikely but possible worst outcome being a mass extinction chain reaction which humanity will find very very hard to survive in a functioning manner/without losing their future)
so still worth fighting for any improvement even if we can't avoid a catastrophe anymore, as there is a huge margin between what we still can archive, and what we might end up with if we stop fighting and are quite unlucky
But it's also clear, it won't be enough. Emissions are not only still increasing, they likely won't stop increasing in my lifetime (in the next 50 years.)
We must adapt. The earth is going to get a lot warmer, and wetter in some parts, and drier in others, and sea levels will likely keep slowly rising for many centuries to come, if not millennia.
Even though we, collectively, are driving said train. As a believer in the great filter theory[1] it's a shame given how far we've apparently come, only to be brought low by our desires, our inability to believe we could screw ourselves this royally, and our collective lack of give-a-shit to fix it.
I believe in climate change but in terms of a great filter candidate it doesn't seem significant - even in a worst case scenario with a lot of warming there will be large parts of the planet that are perfectly habitable.
On the other hand: nuclear war, genetic engineering, or just plain bad luck (carrington event, asteroid impact) seem much more likely to actually wipe out modern society
Aside from just plain bad luck, the things you list don't happen in isolation. Humans have fought bloody wars over land for as long as we've stood upright. Do you think we'll all neatly organize into the remaining habitable land?
I agree climate change could cause wars but I don't agree with the narrative that it will somehow cause 'worse' wars because... worse than what? We've managed to have terrible wars than wipe out whole peoples, and great power competition that almost destroyed civilisation in the 1960s without any climate change required. It's hard to see how things can really get much worse on that front
I think it's most likely a symptom, not an end result of our stupidity. It's the short-sightedness that lets us keep doing this, that is the same idiocy that will lead us to nuclear or chemical warfare which reduces us back to a pre-industrialized society. Only this time we won't have readily available hydrocarbons we can use to dig ourselves out of it again. We'll be stuck burning wood to make coal.
Interestingly in the UK the industrial revolution actually started with water power, not steam engines. It just so happens that the UK, especially England is actually fairly bad for hydropower potential (too flat).
We'll never know the counterfactual, but I think if coal didn't exist what you would have seen is an increased focus on hydropower instead. That would have meant industrialisation would have been slower and distributed completely differently geographically, but would still have happened in my opinion
Oh cool! Sometimes taking away the easy toys enables us to innovate in completely different directions. Maybe there's hope yet (saying this as a guy who lives at the base of some pretty tall mountains too).
The great filter isn't about extinction necessarily, but about not being able to transcend to a space-faring species. I don't think our ignorance of climate change will extinct us, but I do think the way we handle climate change is a symptom of the short-sightedness and willful ignorance that ensures we won't make it past Type I on the Kardashev scale.
I see your point, but to qualify for the great filter it has to prevent not only us, but most civilizations from continuing as technological civilizations.
I don't see it. Maybe at worst it's a temporary setback, not a permanent one.
For example, it's trivial to post an advertisement without disclosure. Yet it's illegal, so large players mostly comply and harm is less likely on the whole.
> I don't think it will be easy to just remove it.
No, but model training technology is out in the open, so it will continue to be possible to train models and build model toolchains that just don't incorporate watermarking at all, which is what any motivated actor seeking to mislead will do; the only thing watermarking will do is train people to accept its absence as a sign of reliability, increasing the effectiveness of fakes by motivated bad actors.
It's an image. There's simply no way to add a watermark to an image that's both imperceptible to the user and non-trivial to remove. You'd have to pick one of those options.
I'm not sure that's correct. I'm not an expert, but there's a lot of literature on digital watermarks that are robust to manipulation.
It may be easier if you have an oracle on your end to say "yes, this image has/does not have the watermark," which could be the case for some proposed implementations of an AI watermark. (Often the use-case for digital watermarks assumes that the watermarker keeps the evaluation tool secret - this lets them find, e.g, people who leak early screenings of movies.)
Exactly, a diffusion model can denoise the watermark out of the image. If you wanted to be doubly sure you could add noise first and then denoise which should completely overwrite any encoded data. Those are trivial operations so it would be easy to create a tool or service explicitly for that purpose.
Why do you blame Trump for the shutdown? Isn't it caused by Congress basically failing to agree on a funding continuation? (I think it's been ages since they could actually go further and agree on a budget). Government shutdowns are common under both Republican and Democrat administrations.
You can say he refuses to compromise, but clearly so does the other side, hence the impasse.
The issue is that the Democrats 'compromised' on the last funding bill - basically had an agreement that some programs would stay funded.
Then the trump administration said "funding allocations from Congress are limits, and we do not have to spend that much on these programs if there is not a need"
There's a conflict because Trump thinks the obvious way forward is you destroy the filibuster, and the Republicans in the Senate fear that when there are more Democrats - say, after the mid-terms - they need the filibuster or else Democratic priorities can become law by simple majority.
Imagine trying to explain to Trump that you can't destroy the filibuster because too many of your colleagues might lose an election. It's like telling a five year old that he can't have desert because he hasn't eaten the vegetables. He doesn't want to eat the vegetables, you are a bad person because rather than agreeing with him you're acting as if he's wrong, which is inconceivable.
Some of Trump's advisors may have the idea that they can rig the 2026 elections and so it won't matter. A big problem is that some of these advisors also assured senators that they'd locked down 2020 and that didn't go so well.
To Trump this seems irrelevant. Why should he care about Susan Collins? She's not even hot, and hasn't given him any cool trinkets. So what if she loses to some Democrat? They're both losers, Trump is the ultimate and his people have told him that over 600% of people support Trump, if she loses that's her fault.
So that's a problem, a recurring problem and so far this term the solution has generally been to ignore Trump's useless suggestions but not do anything he explicitly forbids. Trouble is, Trump doesn't care about the shutdown but the at-risk Republican senators do care.
I actually give Trump more credit for understanding scrapping filibuster is the wrong move.
I also think he’s smart enough to realise people think he’s dumb. So he says scrap filibuster as a way to sow the seeds that there’s tension where there really isn’t.
Maybe it’s too much 4D chess but he is a master manipulator of media/public opinion.
The two longest shutdowns in the history of the United States of America have occurred under Donald J. Trump.
Trump is hosting Great Gatsby parties, traveling, golfing, and doing everything except trying to end the shutdown. He doesn't seem to care that much that it is happening. And the entire reason it is happening is because Trump's Big Beautiful Bill did not contain Affordable Care Act subsidies.
It is incorrect to say that what is happening is common under all administrations. This dysfunction is uniquely Trumpian.
> Government shutdowns are common under both Republican and Democrat administrations.
They're not really, especially at this scale. Since they became a thing when Carter was President, Biden and George W. Bush had 0. Reagan had 3, but only for 6 days total and George H. W. Bush had 1 for 3 days. Clinton had 2 for 28 days total and Obama had 1 for 16 days total.
Clinton and Obama's records are a bit more significant, but Trump so far across his 2 terms, 1 of which is less than a year in, has had 3 shutdowns for 77 total days so far. Or to put it another way, out of the 130 days of shutdown that have even happened since they became a thing 45 years ago, ~60% of them have happened in the 5 years Trump has been president. If you do the math, that's roughly 10x worse government uptime. Notably, those are also the only shutdowns that have happened with one party controlling the Presidency, the House, and the Senate.
I'm still not saying this is definitively the Trump administration's fault, but any way you look at it that is not a great record.
> I'm still not saying this is definitively the Trump administration's fault
How is it not?
The budget requires 60 votes, not a simple majority. Thus it's up to the majority party to present a bill that will win 60 votes.
Some important stuff in major democracies is designed to require way more than simple majority.
In Italy, e.g. the president is elected by the parliament, but the quorum required is two thirds of votes.
This is very important because it forces all governments to find a suitable candidate that is as unbiased and trustable as possible by the overwhelming majority of the representatives.
While elections of the president can drag for very long, even for months, I can't but say we italians have been blessed with great presidents. Each one stepped up to represent italians and never political interests.
> The budget requires 60 votes, not a simple majority. Thus it's up to the majority party to present a bill that will win 60 votes.
It's up to the majority party to do so, but not up to the President to facilitate it, even if he's a member of the majority party. Of course he should help find a solution and has some responsibility if that doesn't happen. But Congressional Republicans could work out a compromise with Democrats with or without the President's involvement, and as long as they have enough votes to override a veto they can come up with a compromise even if the President actively opposes it.
This is only true if Congress treats the President just as the head of a co-equal branch of government, which is not always the case and is definitely not the case for current Congressional Republicans. The fact that they defer to the President so much effectively shifts more responsibility to the executive branch, but I'm not sure congress isn't still to blame even if they abdicate their responsibility.
Well in this case the executive branch isn't even following congressionally appropriations, so one could argue that this particular shut down is more caused by the president than any other in history.
AFAIK this kind of situation is a result of a novel interpretation by an AG of a much older law some time around 1980. I don't think it's ever been tested in court, and we'd operated for decades under the old interpretation before then.
Trump could just say "we're going back to the old interpretation" and at-minimum buy several months of runway while court challenges happened (if they even did). This would be among the least questionable "stretches" (to be very generous) of presidential power he'd exercised.
These are puts, you buy them, they have a fixed expiration date at which point they will be worthless if the price is above the strike price.
Fixed down side, upside is $100 per contract per dollar the stock is below the strike at expiry. You can also sell them before then, and price depends on time to expiry, volatility, and distance to the strike price. See Black-Scholes model for more info.
> If you're off, it could still crash and you could spend more money sustaining the position than you'd make.
And in Black Scholes this is called Theta Decay. In any form of short, there are maintenance costs, and maintenance costs roughly scale with the risk-free interest rate (usually assumed to be roughly the Federal Reserve's overnight lending rate)
Theta Decay is above-and-beyond the risk-free rate because you're also losing time-value. So you must always factor in the amount of time before a predicted crash: the longer it takes the more money you lose.
> So you must always factor in the amount of time before a predicted crash: the longer it takes the more money you lose.
I think the idea is, as a put buyer (market taker), this has already been baked into the option premium. The only "maintenance cost" in the sense of a cost that adds to an open position is from interest on margin loans.
There would be a maintenance cost from rolling the position into a later expiry, but I think the impression is that this is a precise single bet.
EDIT: You're spot on about opening a position being a sort of cost too, due to missing out on risk-free returns. This is especially important for hedging. Less so for a directional bet.
If you want to minimize loss of time value, you buy 2 year LEAPs, and then as their 1-year approaches, you sell the LEAPs and roll them back into 2-year LEAPs. Theta rapidly changes as you grow closer to expiration.
No one should be buying and holding just one option. Anyone who understands Black Scholes will be selling/buying and exchanging options as time goes on.
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Buying puts is a bull-bet on Volatility and bear-trade on the underlying stock, while losing Theta (largely based on expectation date. Longer means less Theta decay).
Selling calls is a bear bet on volatility, bear bet on underlying while gaining Theta in value each day.
And then there are the many combination trades that are available.
In any case, I don't think any sophisticated trader does the strategy you are assuming here. The sophisticated strategies involve selling and renewing your options as time moves forward / and or the stock price changes (to keep Delta withing appropriate levels).
The same way the stock market invents a trillion dollars of fake wealth on a strong up day?
That's capital markets working as intended. It's not necessarily doomed to end in a fiery crash, although corrections along the way are a natural part of the process.
It seems very bubbly to me, but not dotcom level bubbly. Not yet anyway. Maybe we're in 1998 right now.
The stock market isn't inventing money. Those investing in the stock market might be, those buying on leverage for example.
Capital markets weren't intended for round trip schemes. If a company on paper hands 100B to another company who gives it back to the first company, that money never existed and that is capital markets being defrauded rather than working as expected.
I think it's worse. The US market feels like a casino to me right now and grift is at an all time high. We're not getting good economic data, it's super unpredictable, and private equity is a disaster waiting to happen IMO. For sure there are smart people able to make money on the gamble, but it's not my jam.
I don't tend to benefit from my predictions as things always take longer to unfold than I think they will, but I'm beyond bearish at present. I'd rather play blackjack.
> It seems very bubbly to me, but not dotcom level bubbly.
Not? Money is thrown after people without really looking at the details, just trying to get in on the hype train? That's exactly how the dotcom bubble felt like.
We shouldn't judge whether an indicator is stable or okay only by looking to see if its the highest historical value.
PE ratios of 50 make no sense, there is no justification for such a ratio. At best we can ignore the ratio and say PE ratios are only useful in certain situations and this isn't one of them.
Imagine if we applied similar logic to other potential concerns. Is a genocide of 500,000 people okay because others have done drastically more?
I’m not asking if it makes sense, I’m simply pointing out that by that measure this is much less extreme than 2000. As I stated, I think we’re in a bubble, so valuations won’t make much sense.
If you have a better measure, share it. I trust data more than your or my feelings on the matter.
I sell you a cat for $1B and you sell me a dog for $1B and now we’re both billionaires! Whether the capital markets “want” that or not it’s still silly.
Both parties would need the $1B prior to the transaction for it to even potentially be meaningful, and still they just traded a cat for a dog and only paid each other on paper.
That ultimately wouldn't be a big deal if the paper valuation from the trade didn't matter. As it stands, though, both parties could log it as both revenue and expenses, and being public companies their valuation, and debt they can borrow against it, is based in part on revenue numbers. If the number was meaningless who cares, but the numbers aren't meaningless and at such a scale they can impact the entire economy.
It has async I/O support on Linux with io_uring, vector support, BEGIN CONCURRENT for improved write throughput using multi-version concurrency control (MVCC),
Encryption at rest, incremental computation using DBSP for incremental view maintenance and query subscriptions.
Time will tell, but this may well be the future of SQLite.
It should be noted that project has no affiliation with the SQLite project. They just use the name for promotional/aspirational purposes. Which feels incredibly icky.
Also, this is a VC backed project. Everyone has to eat, but I suspect that Turso will not go out of its way to offer a Public Domain offering or 50 year support in the way that SQLite has.
> They just use the name for promotional/aspirational purposes. Which feels incredibly icky.
The aim is to be compatible with sqlite, and a drop-in replacement for it, so I think it's fair use.
> Also, this is a VC backed project. Everyone has to eat, but I suspect that Turso will not go out of its way to offer a Public Domain offering or 50 year support in the way that SQLite has.
It's MIT license open-source. And unlike sqlite, encourages outside contribution. For this reason, I think it can "win".
Calling it “SQLite-compatible” would be one thing. That’s not what they do. They describe it as “the evolution of SQLite”.
It’s absolutely inappropriate and appropriative.
They’ve been poor community members from the start when they publicized their one-sided spat with SQLite over their contribution policy.
The reality is that they are a VC-funded company focused on the “edge database” hypetrain that’s already dying out as it becomes clear that CAP theorem isn’t something you can just pretend doesn’t exist.
It’ll very likely be dead in a few years, but even if it’s not, a VC-funded project isn’t a replacement for SQLite. It would take incredibly unique advantages to shift literally the entire world away from SQLite.
It’s a new thing, not the next evolution of SQLite.
The actual reality is that I personally started the project because its synchronous architecture is holding back performance. You can read all about it in https://penberg.org/papers/penberg-edgesys24.pdf. The design is literally the next evolution of SQLite's architecture.
The founders came from ScyllaDb, I wouldn't be so quick to count them out. The repo has a lot of contributors and traction. As long as the company survives, I think it has a bright future.
The project is MIT licensed with a growing community of contributors. It does not even matter how long the company lives, all that matters is that some of the core contributors live.
So they have a history of using the legitimacy, trust, and infrastructure of the open-source ecosystem to grow adoption and contributions, then gradually shifting constraints in favor of monetization and control?
Either way, the math is different this time. SQLite isn’t heavy server-side software written in Java with weaknesses that leave it obviously open for market disruption.
It’s also a public domain gift to the world that literally everything has deployed — often in extremely demanding and complex environments.
I work for a major consumer product manufacturer, and I can guarantee that we will not be switching away from SQLite anytime soon, and if we ever do, it will not be to a VC-backed project with a history like this one has, no matter how much hype startup bros try to create around the idea of disrespectful and appropriative disruption.
VC-funded ‘open’ databases almost always follow the same arc: borrow legitimacy, capture attention, then fence it off. It’s the inevitability of the incentives they’ve chosen.
You're not wrong about VC-funded database arc, but what history are you even talking about?
I am sure you understand that I have absolutely nothing to do with Scylla's licensing. I have not worked there for four years nor was I ever in a position there that I would even had that opportunity to influence such decisions.
I am also sure you understand that Scylla's development model was completely different: they had AGPL license and contributors had to sign a CLA, which is why they were able to relicense in the first place. Turso is MIT licensed and there's no barrier to contributing and, therefore, already a much bigger contributor base.
I fully understand the scepticism, but you're mistaken about the open source history of Turso's founders.
The moment turso becomes stable , SQLite will inevitably fade away with time if they don’t rethink how contributions should be taken. I honestly believe the Linux philosophy of software development will be what catapults turso forward.
Until the politicians want to come after you for posts you make on HN, or any other infraction they decide is now an issue.
History is littered with the literal bones of people who thought they had nothing to fear from the state. The state is not your friend, and is not looking out for you.
It’s going to be pretty easy to embed instructions to Claude in a malicious website telling it to submit sensitive things (and not report that is doing it.)
Then all you have to do is get Claude to visit it. I’m sure people will find hundreds of creative ways to achieve that.
Don't be so quick to dismiss it, there could be a link.
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