I worked at a now-defunct defense contractor with the typical inefficiencies of hyper-secrecy and government waste.
A friend once asked, "aren't you conflicted that you're helping kill people?"
At the time, that question put serious doubt in my head. But years after, I realized all the inefficiency slows the machine down. Combine this with negative public opinion, and you've got the perfect machine for creating work that results in busy-ness and reduces actual battlefield harm.
I frankly can't see how someone can look around at the world in 2026 and come to the conclusion that "military" == "automatically bad." There are bad actors in this world who would be more than happy to kill you and take your stuff because they feel like it, and these days some of them run countries.
Yes, but some of them run countries where we live in (and therefore working for military contractors in this country is literally helping kill people to take their stuff). This includes US where tech is so heavily concentrated.
I studied Turkish for a few years and remember thinking it could make an interesting programming language (due to the grammatical/agglutinative features). I was gonna call it Ç, but I was never seriously going to make it. Happy to see someone went for it!
In my 40s now, I can recall dozens of "we should..." statements from myself and others. Typically, these statements were driven by some personal mishap, and the statement is basically forgotten (because it was never a big deal to begin with). But occasionally, some well-read/educated (often with a philosophical bias) will allow a small complaint to consume them, forcing them to write extensively about it, while the world continues to change at increasing speed.
But there's a huge market for this kind of writing: it's all the other people that have similar thoughts but not the time to actually write it.
I once rented a "kei van" in Japan once. I think I remember seeing similarly utilitarian trucks, but forget what they were called. I found the kei vans very practical.
I have one. Four wheel drive, turbo, 660cc little motor. There's even a cute "bashguard" built in to the oil filter, which is hilariously the lowest thing to the ground. No frills. Knobs control everything.
I love it. Full-flat back allows for camping in your car (I'm just over 6 feet tall.) Three bicycles and three people can fit. Wood, tools, DIY... And it is tiny, so it is easy to drive and park.
It doesn't like driving faster than about 110km/hr, but that's good enough for me.
The utilitarian trucks you are talking about are k-trucks, or kei-trucks. "Kei" just means "lightweight."
On that note, kei car minivans like the Honda N-box are just about the most practical car you can buy for your teen offspring - 4 seats and a ton of boot space.
I got a drying closet. It's basically a heater in a tent with a few vents. It takes almost twice as long as a similarly sized tumble-drying machine, but absolutely nothing but warm, moist air is exhausted into the room. I even use it to supplement a space heater.
I personally find this opinion typical of HN readers, and I argue that successful influencers/pretty-people can easily beat more serious professions in terms of economic value, because the vast majority of people are more human than the average HN reader.
I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.
I rode Waymo in SF recently and was impressed at how calm it was. We just got in and a guy on a bike was riding in the opposite direction, and the Waymo just stopped and waited for him to yell something, and we went on our way.
Unrelated, I asked Grok to "Generate ANSI art of the cover of the first issue of Iron Man War Machine" (I did this back in the BBS days for a friend's welcome screen) and it repeatedly outputs:
|_______|\n
|_______|\n
It's been going for a minute and still going as I submit this comment
I'm grateful for low-level work, but what I really need is massive mocap datasets of cats moving so I can make a cat game with realistic motion (none of this walking on an invisible treadmill that rotates), and access to everyone's tax returns so I can make tax-filing software that actually works easily (for complex returns).
A friend once asked, "aren't you conflicted that you're helping kill people?"
At the time, that question put serious doubt in my head. But years after, I realized all the inefficiency slows the machine down. Combine this with negative public opinion, and you've got the perfect machine for creating work that results in busy-ness and reduces actual battlefield harm.
The stories from this place are fun.
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