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Corporate gambling is economic coercion, a way to shift tax burdens away from the wealthy to the poor. It's been here since the 1970s, and now it's corrupting sports and young men. Abolish it.
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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 532 posts.
Corporate gambling is economic coercion, a way to shift tax burdens away from the wealthy to the poor. It's been here since the 1970s, and now it's corrupting sports and young men. Abolish it.
Apple & Google at the EU DMA compliance workshops, June 2025.
The X account of a Turkish opposition leader with 9.7M followers is restricted in Turkey. Although his new account is not restricted, many users say they don't see his posts on their homepages.
The big idea of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State can be expressed in three points: Modern organizations exert control by maximising “legibility”: by…
The Tyranny of Stuctureless by Jo Freeman
While Silicon Valley obsesses over AI, a weight-loss drug is quietly becoming the biggest economic disruptor since the internet. Here's why your job, investments, and future depend on understanding it
2025 Year in Review of LLM paradigm changes
For several years leading up to this point I had been talking to Amazonians on and off about the possibility of Amazon sponsoring my FreeBSD/EC2 work; rather predictably, most of those conversation ended up with my contacts at Amazon rhyming with "Amazon should definitely sponsor the work you're doing... but I don't…
Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait. I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650! Just in the past week, we found out Raspberry Pi's…
Continual learning is a huge bottleneck
“Bye bye bye.” It took some time, and a serious amount of research, but I have finally crossed the finish line. I have officially migrated my digital life to pure, EU-hosted solutions.
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built
Yesterday I saw this Bluesky post from Adrian Black. He runs Adrian’s Digital Basement, a retro computer repair channel I really enjoy. In the post, he points out a trend I didn’t know about: YouTube views seem to have fallen off a cliff recently.
Together, the Bitter Lesson and Scaling Laws reveal that the god of Compute we worship is yoked to an even greater one — the god of Data.
In Engineering, quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say “Ship the Roadmap.” What new information are they comm…
AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom
...and the vibes are definitely off It feels different in tech right now. We’re coming off a long era where optimism carried the industry. Something has curdled. AI hype, return-to-office mandates, and continued layoffs have shifted the mood. Managers are quicker to fire, existential dread has replaced
"language models will get cheaper by 10x" will not save ai subscriptions from the short squeeze
A friend made me aware of a reading list from A16Z containing recommendations for books, weighted towards science fiction since that’s mostly what people there read.
Wealth inequality is driving the economy.
Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because: Technical decisions are often made for…
From chatbots to agents
A big nerd debate with bigger implications for the future of work, technology, and the economy
11 months in The Side Hustle From Hell
There’s no way I’m going to continue a subscription to a streaming service that suggests AI-generated music with AI-generated album covers. A bloated, Electron-based desktop application with a terrible UI is only going to add up.
Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos that aren't even moving.
This is Verdi's personal website. He writes about interesting ideas or projects.
A lot of people think LLMs are expensive to operate. That was true a couple of years ago, but these people haven't updated their views after an approximately 1000x reduction in prices over two years.
Silent changes in payment methods on big creator funding platforms raise some unpleasant questions.