> We are entering an era where computing capital, intellectual capital, and military capital will dominate
These are bullshit terms. Capital is capital. Military production, IP production and yes, AIs running in datacentres and on the grid, are all subject to economic forces. (Folks argued railroads were a different form of capital in the 19th century, too. And fibre optics. And tulips. And dot-com companies. And computer-assembled American mortgage instruments.)
We might be investing for a golden future. We might be the Soviet Union baited into unsustainable spending commitments. The answer to these questions isn't in pretending this time is different, or that economics can be suspended when it comes to certain questions of production and return.
Which capital is most advantageous in any specific situation is dependent on context.
We could probably debate how holding onto piles of green paper doesn’t provide much advantage in certain contexts, but I suspect you’d agree with that.
My proposal is that there’s a high likelihood the bet is that green paper matters less than high powered AI systems, and as far as I can tell, that’s a reasonable bet.
> Which capital is most advantageous in any specific situation is dependent on context
Sure. That doesn’t make it not capital.
> My proposal is that there’s a high likelihood the bet is that green paper matters less
The green paper is a transactional intermediary and unit of account. Nobody is hoarding cash. When folks talk about returns on data centers, they’re asking whether building more of those is a better economic bet than investing in housing, the military or healthcare.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing - a reserve currency is a form of capital that provides optionality, but it is not the singular defining unit of “capital”.
People questioning data centers vs real estate are denominating and critiquing returns on investment measured in money.
I am suggesting that they are not adequately considering risk-weighted returns denominated in other forms of capital. Do you disagree on this point?
> the factory system allows certain people to out-compete the previous weavers with a shitty product that’s really cheap
This quote is thrown, off-handedly, to describe the product of a weaver.
Some of the highest quality and most valued apparel today is made of completely synthetic materials, through automation.
We can debate about the merits or necessity of that on its own, but I think the argument that automated outputs are inherently and universally worse on objective quality measures is a losing argument with readily available examples that counter it.
~25% of packages handled in france come from shein, which is shit tier fast fashion company
You're right about quality, machines _can_ produce better things, the quote is right about quantities, in practice they mostly produce inferior products in large quantities.
While Shein is enabled by machine weaving it took centuries to find this business model. The first person I heard about buying single use clothing was Michael Jackson allegedly in the 90s and it was seen as the height of eccentricity. Obviously many wealthy people since the 1960 have been rich enough to easily afford throw away clothing (after all they spend as much on meals or flights all the time). It just never occurred to anyone outside of ball gowns or wedding dresses.
In conclusions SHEIN is more of a social phenomenon piggybacking on a hack on the global postal system fee structure.
I want to agree with you and counter the other replies to your post so far.
Anyone that looks at the 'glorious past' of weavers has a very skewed view of how much of humanities time it took. Pre-industrial timelines and you're talking about massive amounts of effort for even a single piece of clothing. Deaths from exposure were a common thing due to lack of clothing.
Now the world is awash in clothing, so much we dump thousands of tons of it on other poor countries (yes, this is a problem in of itself). Even what we consider expensive fitted clothing is cheap.
After decades of refinement it may become a superior product, however the transition point normally occurs when the drop in quality is offset by a drop in price.
Generic clothes sizing can’t handle differing torso vs limb ratios etc so people still walk around in clothes that don’t really fit. Good enough and way cheaper wins.
Designer is yet another aspect alongside materials that matter so you end up with market fragmentation. Default sizing is a reasonable fit for much of the population and many people do pay the premium for custom sizing of high quality clothing.
> I think the argument that automated outputs are inherently and universally worse on objective quality measures
Just remove universally and the argument stands. The point here is to focus on the curve (it will depress the overall quality of products) not the outliers (I really like my Patagonia jacket).
I’m unconvinced: machine made fabrics go into my nicest shirts, at a price I can afford several.
How would quality be improved by making the fabric by hand? — how would I benefit from a less standard, less fine, more expensive weave of those textiles?
Machines enable cheaper goods; but the preference for buying them is down to individuals — eg, I think it’s great I can also get cheap, relatively disposable tshirts. According to you that “depresses the overall quality”; but I’m struggling to understand how the facts that a) I have better and cheaper dress shirts and b) I have cheap tshirts I don’t care about damaging when cleaning, sweating during exercise, etc together make my life worse.
Even if by some obscure metric the existence of the tshirts and my ownership of them “depresses” quality.
I don’t think it does stand. During the Industrial Revolution, automated production replaced craftsmen and often produced a better product.
Specifically, interchangeable parts were a product of industrial automation. Craftsmen were not able to build parts to the same level of precision as machines, so true interchangeability only came when the craftsmen were replaced.
As a percentage of all outputs, perhaps - But increasing to 20% high quality of 10000 vs 50% high quality of 500 would have meant an increase in absolute terms
I hope that you have read the article but they have given a sound reasoning behind it.
DHH mentions 39% or something which was the population of native white and not native british as an example...
Please read the article link and they have given a proper sound reasoning...
>Do you legitimately believe DHH would say those are his beliefs?
Yes, I mean, DHH wrote it in his own blog post. There is still an argument to be made that DHH is far right but even he knows that it is bad and somehow tries to normalize it...
DHH might not say that these are his beliefs but his words in his blogs logically point to this conclusion. Why do you think that DHH said those words in his blogpost if he doesn't believe in such similar far right ideologies? Nobody forced him to write a blog post but himself...
Why do you think such things are not what DHH believes in? Do you have any evidence as the author of the article provides for their reasoning/interpretation?
> Why do you think such things are not what DHH believes in?
Because the one thing DHH doesn't do is shut up.
He hasn't really been the kind of person who minces words, he says what he thinks, and he is pretty unafraid of pissing people off. If he wanted to make explicit racist statements, it feels like he would make them.
My read is that this is broader commentary on civic/cultural integration. There are, fundamentally, immigration challenges that present themselves in modern society, especially when cultural values are different. I don't know that it's wise to believe that everyone will eventually see the world the same way, and we are then left with a question of how to reconcile that as we develop our societies and cultures.
Tommy Robinson is a violent anti-Islamic voice -- But, we've unfortunately found ourselves with those voices being the ones willing to speak to the problem that a growing portion of the population feels is unaddressed.
I don't think these are easy problems. I also cringe at calling Robinson's march "heartwarming" without qualification.
Yet I still am not willing to, without much stronger and more explicit evidence, read into DHH's words and label him a `far-right racist` -- Because I think that label loses effect when it's applied to every person that we disagree with on certain policy issues.
MITM attack is a disingenuous label applied to a completely voluntary service that the site you're visiting opts into.
Why? Because, for many, it's a technical necessity to protect sites from the dark forest of the web (i.e., assholes.)
You can cast aspersions on the implications of that in conjunction with US intelligence access, but you're painting a completely fabricated picture of reality that borders on delusional.
Just because the site operator opted into having all of their users' traffic slurped up by what functionally amounts to a private sector branch of the NSA doesn't mean that netizens opted into such an arrangement. Being behind Cloudflare doesn't stop bots, it doesn't magically block all exploits, and as history has proven, doesn't even stop all DDoS attacks. What it does do is block off large portions of the web for people needing assistive technologies, block off large portions of the web for people who live in countries with bad rulers they didn't elect, give tyrants the ability to more or less achieve complete personalized information censorship at a moment's notice on a whim, contribute to a culture that normalizes totalitarian surveillance, protect C2 channels and other malicious infrastructure indiscriminately, discriminate against non-gecko, non-webkit, non-blink browser engines (anti-competitive, pro-monopolist, reduces competition, harming all consumers), and extort small businesses who think they're getting cheap or free DDoS protection right at the moment those small businesses are suffering attacks.
And just to be clear, your formal position is that we should all have faith in the idea the NSA, the organization tasked with collecting intelligence from more or less anything interacting with any part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the one that can and has silently compelled US corporations including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple to share user data with them, without a warrant, with a program that's very existence was classified, is NOT doing the exact same thing to perhaps the single highest-volume chokepoint for 20%+ of global internet traffic, all completely decrypted, a US company subject to the same laws that the PRISM companies were?
It would genuinely border on criminal negligence for the NSA to not be collecting from Cloudflare, given their capabilities and mission.
Additionally, I'd like to point out that your framing presents a false binary: the options are not "Love Cloudflare Unconditionally" or "Abandon all CDN / WAF / security tooling". There are a multitude of other options for every single function, feature, and service Cloudflare offers, including many that can be self-hosted, many that are not US corporations, many that do not infringe upon end-user privacy, many that do not discriminate against tor and vpn users (people living in repressive countries), many that do not discriminate against non-mainstream browsers (aka less untrustworthy browsers).
Finally, just because you don't care about many of these issues doesn't mean they aren't real issues causing real problems for real people, and it's very unkind to call someone delusional for raising these kinds of concerns. If dang is reading this, I hope they can remind you of HN's community guidelines around such conduct.
I don't make many of the claims you seem to tease apart from my response. I've presented no false binary, and explicitly advocated for operating with more nuance there.
I'll elaborate.
---
I'm pointing out that, in response to a seemingly innocuous post about a site, you've drawn attention to an unrelated issue, and subsequently framed the entirety of US-based companies as morally complicit with NSA surveillance.
I have no doubt that the NSA likely petitions Cloudflare, among others, for information. But, unlike you, I don't have any indication or context for relationships that would provide the NSA direct, unfettered access to all information processed by Cloudflare.
Further, I believe that the ever-holy north star of capitalism would suggest that Cloudflare, a company that operates globally with significant ties to large organizations outside the US, likely has a sufficient incentive to maintain at least a degree of friction in that access.
What I do know -
- The company issues multiple transparency reports. They declare they have never: turned over encryption keys, installed law enforcement software on their network, provided feeds of customer content to law enforcement, modified customer content at government request, or weakened their encryption.
- They are a public company, and have SEC filings which the CEO is on the hook for.
- The CEO of the company stands to make a lot more money being successful at what Cloudflare does than serving NSA requests the US govt makes -- And the latter would pose great risk to the former.
The best move if the golden goose is at risk is to make an absolute shitstorm of noise, which would put everyone on high alert. In fact, the tranparency report says as much -- "If Cloudflare were asked to do any of these, we would exhaust all legal remedies, in order to protect our customers from what we believe are illegal or unconstitutional requests. -- Accurate as of October 8, 2025"
Cloudflare, like any CDN/reverse proxy, has the technical capability to view customer traffic. There's no evidence of systematic NSA access, and plenty of evidence that would suggest resistance to it.
Suggesting that because the company is US-based that they are somehow "evil" indicates, more than anything, an anti-US sentiment that is looking for reasons to villainize the company.
None of that is to downplay the issues the Cloudflare does, in fact, create. But, proposing that there's a massive conspiracy to "slurp up your data" requires a really, really big stretch that begins to stray into tinfoil territories.
I've seen Niri floating around the conversation, but still find myself drawn to Hyprland. There's something about "pagination" vs a scrollable compositor that makes things feel much more targeted and organized.
If I'm not mistaken, you can have the same workflow with niri. You don't need to use "scrollable" feature of Niri, you can attach screens to workspaces.
I was a former Hyprland user but after I switch to Niri I didn't look back because I think it's kind of having best of two worlds.
In my workflow, I have browser on workspace 1, code editor on 2, CCTV Viewer on 3 (we have a baby and babysitter so I occasionally check them).
In the other monitor, I have slack, terminals etc.
So when I need to switch between browser <-> code (or terminal) I can do quickly. Scrollable comes in handy when you need to check something quickly; for example you are trying to solve something and you need to run some commands in terminal. In that case I just open a new terminal next to browser, do my job and get rid of it.
Also the Super+Tab view is awesome, you can easily see which window is where. Niri also some IPC features so you can find window id and make Niri focus to it. This comes handy if you use Vicinae (Raycast like launcher for Linux). I can switch windows with just using that.
I've been thinking about this comment all day trying to decide if this was an unironic "I use Arch btw" or an intentional homage, but it made me laugh a lot
I'm also on Omarchy. I use it somewhat like a scrollable compositor, in that I open a max of 2 windows, then move on to the next desktop, then just scroll through them all. But have the option for floating windows or a vertical split when needed (to run a command or something). Plus Hyprland is becoming more cohesive by the day.
I'd consider it just an opinionated distribution of Arch, with a lot of flex.
Sure, I think if you disagree with the majority, you'd go Arch and rice your own from the base install (lot of folks who do), but if not, it's a very streamlined way to get off to the races with a community supporting the shared baseline 'opinions'
I avoid anything to do with DHH for his views expressed on his blog. I'm sure Omarchy is nice and all, but there are other choices without the ethical baggage.
This article is a far right tone poem; that it mentions Tommy Robinson at all without any qualification, and links to the "FreedomMarch" hash tag is enough to qualify.
Shame on DHH for eliding who Tommy Robinson really is -- a football hooligan and violent thug:
DHH knows nothing of London, and the hugely-ironic idea that it's too full of "non-native" British people for him -- a white foreigner -- to feel comfortable moving there is the purest sign of who he is.
People on the ground at many of these protests are saying that enough people are celebrating the attack. In London they were attacking the police. What % need to support the attack before it's a problem?
> It is sensitive to compiler versions, GPU setup, and sometimes even being looked at the wrong way, and we have no intention whatsoever of supporting it.
Good thing it's been forgotten enough that almost nobody knows that, or cares it's the name of this company.
I think if anyone is offended by a word that is not used by anyone in that context, they're probably due for some self-reflection on what offends their sensibilities.
You are going on a very weird crusade in this thread. Literally have never heard this in my life used as any kind of slur and here you are arguing with everyone about it.
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