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The post-COVID spike was also absolutely insane and much bigger than dotcom boom.

And I already thought we hired more devs than needed pre-covid. It was pretty well surmised that big tech was hiring to starve other companies of talent, and thus employees were underutilised.

It's unbelievable he's still given any semblance of credence for anything he does. Trump is just palpably stupid. He is bad at absorbing information, he is bad at analytical thinking, he is impatient, vain and rash. Aside from his tenuous legal justification, he never once publicly expressed even a fundamental understanding of the basic mechanics of tariff collection nor what balance of trade actually means. You'd constantly see his proxies on TV just put words in his mouth to bend his foolish policy into some coherent. And we're seeing it again with the attack on Iran. No strategy, no achievable objectives, no comprehension of basic facts on the ground. He's really really really just stupid.

It is a different kind of intelligence: System 1 instead of System 2. I guess you could call it startup style.

Being impulsive doesn't mean you have a good system 1 intelligence. Quite the opposite. His system 1 sucks and is driven entirely by superficial biases and ego. His system 2 appears to be moribund as he rarely comes up solutions beyond the same facile reasoning his system 1 comes up with. He has neither intellect nor good instincts.

Yeah, I think the number 1 use case for tablets is "portable TV" followed by "makeshift touchscreen kiosk". It really doesn't need a lot of features. I have an iPad setup as a little home dashboard and it's literally stuck on iOS 9 but it does it's job.

The coup against Altman looks prescient. They knew who he was.

Clearly it didn’t matter

Capital always wins because there’s an infinite line of psychopaths at the ready to screw everybody over for slightly less money than the previous person did


His own employees helped reinstate him, not the capital class which was actually the board that fired him.

The board that fired him wasn’t really “the capital class” in the traditional sense. It was a nonprofit board with an unusual governance structure specifically designed to limit investor controlling. Ilya and Helen were acting on safety/governance concerns, arguably against the interests of capital (Microsoft, VCs).

Like literally he’s doing right now the thing that would not have been done had Ilya and the other board members retained their positions


Not psychopaths. I recall it being rank and file who were concerned about their options or whatever. Greed is fundamental human behavior.

We literally just went through this with Venezuela. They replaced the dictator with the assistant dictator. The Iranian face of regime change making the rounds in Western media is the son of the last Shah.

> their goal is targeted and precise attacks

Day one and they've already bombed a school and killed dozens of children. The goals, strategy and tactics have not been clearly communicated. You can pray they are using high quality intelligence, but history tells us they are not at all concerned with collateral damage. They likely want to degrade Iran's military capabilities, but they also want them cowed and bleeding.


Israel is interested in the fall of the Iranian regime, a thing that can only happen if the Iranian people will rebel against it. The last thing Israel wants is to have the Iranians rally behind the state’s flag.

Based on this cold calculation, bombing a school full of children would be counter productive, even if you believe the Israelis are just collecting children's blood to make matzahs (passover is just around the corner!).

On a more serious note, do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.


> Israel is interested in the fall of the Iranian regime, a thing that can only happen if the Iranian people will rebel against it.

I personally don't believe in such appeals to rationality of parties waging wars. The issue is: if you wage a war, you can't control precisely what is going on. No one can. Like MH17 was shot down by pro-Russian separatists: who was interested in it? No one was, but still MH17 was shot down.

Israel bombed schools, it probably did it without clear intent to bomb them, but at the same time it means it is not very concerned about a couple of hundred of underage causalities. Like it was (and it is) not at all concerned about Palestinian causalities in Gaza. Moreover to my mind, it is the strategic stance of Israel: to be as brutal as possible to make neighbors to fear Israel. Israel does it for decades, it does it every time it wages a war. It means that now it just cannot wage a war without demonstrations of brutality. Even if it wanted to it just cannot, because on all levels of command people were taught to demonstrate brutality, and they were not taught how to wage war surgically. You can't overcome such a training on so many levels with a carefully crafted prompt.

> do you know the actual source for this claim? I don’t mean the news outlet, I mean what entity gave this to the news outlet.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/israel-strikes-two-...

"Mizan News Agency, the judiciary’s official news agency, reported the death toll..."

"Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi shared a photo of the attack, which..."


Ok, so the Iranian regime itself published this news? And you don’t even question it?

Seems like we’re on such polar ends, there’s no hope in discussion.


> Ok, so the Iranian regime itself published this news? And you don’t even question it?

I question everything, and in this case I'm choosing to believe it. Such fakes are hard to forge, and as recent history shows such news are not fakes. Look at Russia which claimed that it did nothing wrong for how many times? Russia all the time tried to declare that everything is a fake forged by Ukraine. And if we look at what Ukraine did to Russia, we can't find a single example of a fake news forged by Russia.

A priori probability of this being a fake is low, and if you look into it, it is a pretty good "fake". No one still questioned it, while you can see some news from Iran that are clearly anti-regime news.

So, no, without clear evidence for this being a fake, I believe it is not a fake.


It's all over. NY Times writeup points to multiple sources and videos of destruction that they have authenticated. I don't think any body count has been independently verified.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/world/middleeast/iran-sch...


Why would you doubt this? Have you not seen what Israel has done in Palestine and Lebanon?

You are relying on unreliable news sources, the strikes are incredibly precise. See the aerial photo of Khamenei's residence that was bombed [1]. You can see how the surrounding area remains surprisingly clean in face of the utter destruction in the middle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/war/comments/1rh2f41/the_residence_...


So in your mind a picture post from a 6 day old Reddit account is a reliable news source?

One nice thing about Reddit, is that if someone posts fake news, people refute it (which is not the case in this post). So there is active fact checking in place.

That photo is taken directly from AP news reporting, taken by Airbus.


Why not link to the AP then? https://apnews.com/live/live-updates-israel-iran-february-28...

Reddit is a shithole, even more so after it went public a year ago..

Anyway, I don't think the AP pictures are too convincing. Sure it might look like smoke in there, but it looks more like the entire right side of the image was carpetbombed - not just the building complex in the middle


Woke only exists in the mind of the far right.

I don’t know, I’m grouping runaway feminism and high LGBT visibility and celebration as woke.

So what's your position on trans people? Persecute them, or let them be? Persecute half of them perhaps?

Don’t persecute them at all. Live and let live. In my opinion though I believe it is a form of mental illness. It’s not based on genetic or hormonal anomalies so it’s purely a condition of the mind. Still it’s none of my business.

Jenny Cohn on bluesky posts a ton of stuff on technofeudalist: https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social

A favorite target is Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale who was recently discussing regime change in Iran with Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah.


I'm good, thanks.

Why are you here?

As the years go on I ask myself that same question more and more.

The HN of my day wouldn't have boosted a site pushing XR's brand of horseshit and mostly eschewed fringe political fever dream type posting in general. I say mostly because I'm aware of the notable counterexamples, but they were relatively contained.


The HN of my day boosted the fringe political fever dreams of Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel as peak Silicon Valley intellectualism, and, well, here we are.

That's not even true.

Your account was created in 2015. That's the year that Yarvin's talk was rescinded at StrangeLoop and the comments here in the very thread about it were widely supportive of his ban. The rare arguments in his favor were more centered on their thinking that his talk was a technical one about Urbit.

The same big posters of today were big posters then openly slamming the guy for being an unrepentant racist.

Any posts about urbit were basically flamebait and all of its devs, not just Yarvin, as well as most of the personalities from LessWrong were very effectively chased off this board.

This place has a long history and long memories and revisionist garbage won't be tolerated.


Well, as someone who's been here since 2008, allow me to say:

The HN of my day boosted the fringe political fever dreams of Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel as peak Silicon Valley intellectualism, and, well, here we are.


Search HN doesn't bear that out.

Mostly low (single-digit) engagement posts and lots of derision. Thiel's CS courses and Foundation got more mentions but their brand of politics? Definitely not signal boosted here.


Pete Hegseth is frantically asking Deepseek to come up with targets in Iran and some plausible objectives he can sell to the public.

If the last ten years have taught us anything it's that politics just isn't a topic isolated to the halls of government. It's real life. Political alignment has never so starkly indicative of your position on fundamental human morality. At the same time we've never had a government be so directly involved in private businesses.

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