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This is not at all what Palantir OR SamDesk does. SamDesk processes and sells data (eg, has agreements with various news/social media websites etc and converts that to a nice API of events). Palantir sells software to use all sorts of data, including stuff like SamDesk (hence why I suspect plenty of Palantir customers are ALSO SamDesk customers). They're complimentary rather than competing products.

"solved through technology" is an optimistic take on modern litter robots, in my experience ... I saw those as someone who has owned like 3 of them. Sometimes I realise I'm paying 500 bucks for an incredibly unreliable machine that gets slowly more smeared in poop over time instead of spending 30 seconds of my day to scoop some poop and feel quite silly.

Someone tested this, and it doesn't look to be saturated.

https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html

Simon made I think a very good argument for why it's still useful, if not the most robust benchmark in the world.

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/kimi-k3/


> Someone tested this, and it doesn't look to be saturated.

They could still pelicanmaxxing but the RL for "pelican riding a bicycle" does incidentally improve "<animal> <verb> <vehicle>".

Or they could've predicted someone would check if they're pelicanmaxxing or the benchmark would switch eventually, so they preemptively RL'd a mixture of animals and vehicles.


At the risk of bringing up a controversial topic, in the midst of the Jason Arday furore last month when everyone was like "this wouldn't happen to a white professor", the person who kept coming to mind for me was Ariely. I became a data scientist in no small part due to his early work, and seeing academia totally incapable of punishing him is deeply disappointing.

Yup, you can still get one, as long as you're happy to pay 3k usd plus the 300 yearly cloud subscription...


Everyone should just read everything by Tim Harford and then the world would be a better place.


As in the UK, where we've since gotten rid of all the regulation and live in a halcyon utopia.


Honestly, ZSA deserves so much love. I have a Moonlander and Voyager and they're both so darn excellent.


But why?

I've had dozens of keyboards in my PC life, so far. The earliest examples were Chicony clicky-mechanical boards in the late nineteen-eighties. Those were pretty cool (and they're very much NLA).

I've had innumerable membrane keyboards. Some were more useful than others. I had a very long and pleasant run of membrane boards made by NMB, which were good while they lasted.

Over the past 5 years or so, I've been mostly using boards with Cherry MX Blue switches -- assembled by whomever. Those worked fine, too.

And lately, in the past month or two, I replaced the one at home with a keyboard that uses Hall effect sensors for each key in place of any kind of conventional electrical switch. It's been fine; in fact, it's been quite lovely so far. It's a joy to type with.

---

I haven't named any keyboard makers here except for 1980s-era Chicony and PS/2 era NMB. Some of my keyboards have been good, some have been great, and some others have been trash.

That's my background.

What's yours?

What makes ZSA deserve "so much love"? Can you elaborate?


Some things I really like are:

- Generally high quality boards. I expect to be using my ZSA boards for decades. - Uses open, standard, programmable firmware (qmk). - They have fostered a community around their boards (importantly making it easy to share and discover layouts and promoting 3D printable accessories). - I have found their live support team to be very accessible and knowledgable.

It's hard not to be biased having spent >$700 on keyboards from them, feeling the need to justify my purchases a bit. At their prices it's easy to find high quality boards elsewhere or build your own board on open tech, but I think you'll be hard pressed to find similar offerings both with such excellent support from the company and such a vibrant community.


They make well-engineered keyboards, have excellent customer service and made a very usable web front-end to QMK for configuration.


Why? They brought columnar lately to the mass(es).


So straight-and-narrow columns of keys are what they're into, and that's a big push that is an important part of what they're doing?

(I did look at their website earlier and the details of what I found seemed to get wrapped up in the tiny details of some low-profile keyswitch or other. It's also possible that I am unobservant, stupid, or otherwise inept and that I missed the main concept, but that's what I found and I didn't think it was very interesting.)


I mean, the Chinese government doesn't really believe in checks and balances, or corporations as autonomous to the state. That's not a conspiracy, that's just how the CCP sees it (ask Jack Ma). You could argue the US has the Cloud Act, and obviously their respect for rules based law and order as a concept has heavily deteriorated, for but it's a very different kettle of fish to a regime who just doesn't even believe in the concept.


Meanwhile Trump is building a surveillance state with all his tech executives friends who all massively benefit from government sponsored schemes, it's TOTALLY different!


At the risk of stating the obvious, Trump has had his tariff policy killed off in the courts (although it'll obviously come back in some form) and in a few months is going to have (probably not great) midterm elections. And there are pretty open efforts to commit genocide in Xinjiang to preserve a nationalist myth of ethnic purity. So, you know, yes.


> That's not a conspiracy, that's just how the CCP sees it (ask Jack Ma)

That is a conspiracy. Do you even know what happened to Jack Ma? From what you're saying you don't.

Also that was MANY years ago. The Shanghai stock market crashed. Companies had a lot of fear then yes. Things have changed and repaired. I'd say China in this sense is moving upwards and the US is going downwards in policy.

> You could argue the US has the Cloud Act

No, not really. Your Jack Ma example happened to Elon Musk to some extent. Jack Ma had a feud with the Chinese government as much as Elon had a feud with the US government in the last year or so. Back then Tesla and the other projects all tanked.


So have you looked at what's happened in the US over the past 10 years?

The US has much further to fall, but it's falling very, very quickly and if there's ever another Democratic president they're going to have to rebuild a lot of the government from scratch.


I dunno. I'm just glad Congress can barely pass any legislation. What an Executive Order does, another Executive Order can just as easily undo.


The unelected bureaucracy was more like the chinese party system. The U.S. has a strong-president model by design: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. The check isn’t supposed to come from unelected bureaucrats, it’s that the strong president is elected every four years. It’s supposed to be a tight feedback loop. Engineers of all people should understand why that’s good.

When the next democrat president gets into office, he or she should do the same thing as Trump: put trusted deputies in charge of various departments and whip them to actually do what people elected the administration to do. That’s how our system is supposed to work. And democratic voters would I’m sure be much happier with the party if they sometimes actually got what they voted for.


Yeaaah for seeing Andy on HN. His stuff is always excellent.


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