3 beers for 4 euros? Man, we live in different Europes

gotta love HN. Top comment on an AMA with an author who's actually written books is "Here is a book you should read".

I don't understand what's wrong with someone suggesting a book to an author? Do you think all authors have read all other books?

If you had pointed out the original commenter's patronizing comment, as if they with 100% certainty know better than the author who has just written a book about said topic (at least the commenter thinks so), then I'd have agreed with you.

Gotta love HN. A commenter does literally nothing other than recommend a book and the top reply is "don't recommend books to him - he's written books, don't you know that?"

TBF I think it's just a remark on the upvotes. It's a perfectly cromulent comment with no business being at the top of an AMA.

I upvoted it - because I loved those two suggestions and have already have them open in another tab. I believe a bunch of others would have done the same.

Gotta love HN. You can't just have a thread without a psycho-analysis on how people interact with each other on a social media website.

Right, and it's quite possibly not even very relevant to the book.

to be fair, the top comment from simonw is most likely legit unless anthropic hacked his account too

this resonates with me, but fortunately one difference between LLMs and rockstar developers, is that LLMs will at least _try_ to explain what they are doing, and why something has to be certain why. I've gotten quite a lot of mileage from being a five-year-old with Claude and just asking "why" until I'm satisfied

"a solid leader who can carry the weight of our massive responsibility"

The title just goes to show that

1. the turkish government had reasons for trying to get people to use "Türkiye" instead.

2. It's still not working.

I 100% thought this was about birds until clicking

> I 100% thought this was about birds until clicking

Same, I was really curious reading about the hair transplant industry organized by turkeys and got really disappointed :(

Shouldn't you spell it Tuerkiyesh government, then?

Turkish isn't pronounced "Turkey-ish". It's just "turk-ish" as in, "of or relating to the ethnic group the 'Turks'". "Turkiyesh" (Turkish is perfectly phonetic, they don't play games with vowels combining to make all sorts of sounds like English) would be a different thing, being of or related to the country Turkiye.

No, that's not it. The problem is that "How turkey" means a bird, but "How Turkey" means the country.

I think the missing piece here is nuance. Of course there are certain tasks that software engineers do that will be replaced. But will AI replace _everything_ a software engineer does? The most difficult bit about software engineering is to keep a mental model of _everything_ a product does with varying levels of granularity. The way I see LLMs fail at my company the most is that they are very good at the big picture, and very good at the very small picture, but have difficulty moving between those two levels. And especially when changes have occurred or accumulated over time. Most of all production systems have an extremely long tail of gotchas which are only managed by people who have been around for long enough to have some kind of deep storage access in their heads to those little tidbits of information. And I think current LLMs might be fundamentally incapable of replacing that.

" Bullough gives the example of a Mexican drug dealer who smuggles product across the border to the US. The drug in question would once have been marijuana, then cocaine, and is now likely to be fentanyl, which is cheap to manufacture and easy to conceal. The drugs are sold in the US for cash, which is used to buy, say, agricultural equipment. "

Wouldn't the person buying the tractor in the US for $$$ have to show where that money came from? Can you show up to John Deere with over a million dollars _in cash_?

The short answer is yes. You can buy cars, trucks and tractors for cash. The more expensive the car, the easier it often is. Luxury cars in particular are routinely bought and sold for cash.

Luxury cars are frequently bought outright without debt, yes.

Literal cash, as in actual paper pieces of money, is not a common medium to do so.

Not in the US without the dealer doing all the same work a bank accepting $100k of cash in a duffel bag would be doing. Plus filling out a suspicious activity report on top of it all. They might have a real hard time explaining to the feds that they truly did "know their customer" from a simple form and a photocopy of your ID.

Some dealers might be willing to do this for you, but most will not. They will direct you to your local bank to deposit the money and get a cashiers check instead. They do not want the liability of it all. Perhaps better chances at the Ferrari dealer you've bought 14 cars from over the past 30 years I suppose?

I asked my (luxury) dealer if I could pay cash the last time I bought a car and they basically said “hell no, we haven’t done that in over a decade”. The risk of being caught up in some drug money investigation or whatnot is too great.

Coincidentally showing up to your bank with a duffel bag worth of cash to deposit is a great way to both get your accounts closed, as well as be added to a blacklist so it will be very difficult to open an account anywhere else.

I used to work for GM as a field rep (in the 80s). There had been enough instances where finance managers skimmed/embezzled some of the cash (even before the feds required filing SARs) that dealers stopped taking cash as a policy decision.

> Luxury cars in particular are routinely bought and sold for cash.

Cash? As in hundred dollar bills?

Yes, duffel bags full.

But it doesn't take too many cash purchases that are not inline with your tax returns before somebody is going to start snooping around.

edit: although sometimes, a lot longer than one might expect.

> Yes, duffel bags full.

Citation needed? Where did you hear that this is a routine occurrence? That seems risky for everybody involved, and it requires a report to the government from the seller.

Selling a car usually does require a report to the government. Why would the seller care what happens down the line to the buyer?

Because the legal system in most Western countries is set up that the seller bears liability for laundering money if they accept duffel bags of cash for a car without the same documentation a bank would require.

This is absolutely not true in the US. Are you trying to tee up one of those "the US is not a developed country" type quips that are popular around here?

A dealership may take issue with it but a private party accepts no liability by taking cash.

Firstly, I said "Western" not "developed", you need to calibrate your quip detector lest you become what you dislike.

Secondly, while it's possible to construct a private party transaction in the US where this is fine, if the person spending the duffel bag acquired the money illegally, you the seller are liable if you should have known. "Willful blindness" when accepting illegal proceeds makes you liable too. See 18 U.S.C. § 1957

Maybe I misspoke by saying you would be liable for laundering specifically, but certainly accepting that money is a crime if you have any reason to think it was ill-gotten. And that's a huge risk that no one wants to take on.

Disappointly small bag to buy most cars with 100 dollar bills

I don't know about the US. The EU limit on cash transactions differs by country, with a legal maximum of 10k€. Belgium and the Netherlands for example are at 3k€.

These people aren't walking into the dealer. They have tractor dealers in Mexico.

They're paying cash for a 20yo bulldozer that leaks enough to be a liability, loading it on a trailer and sending it home.

This has been my understand as well. I have CKD and my doctors have always been chill about it as long as I stop taking it about a week before having blood work done.

EDIT: I don't do 25g though... sounds like a lot...

You're lucky your doctor is aware of it. I've had several who did not understand, and insisted creatine must be dangerous if it elevated creatinine levels, and/or didn't understand the effects.

If your egfr is above 80 it’s you won’t notice it. But CKD is a late in life problem so you are basically making your end of life worse by making your kidneys work harder now. You might as well take up smoking: claiming it doesn’t hurt now is a lot different to 20 years of constant use.