That's the issue. Paramount+ only has roughly 59 million subscribers in the US.
Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and Hulu/Disney+ remain the big 4 nationally [0].
Additionally, you don't see the same degree of memes, zeitgeist, and discourse for South Park that you would see a decade ago, let alone 2 decades ago (remember ginger kids - it got so bad that multiple kids committed suicide due to bullying arising from kids misinterpreting the episode. Or ManBearPig turning into an epithet for climate change denialism for over a decade until the writing staff retconned it).
This isn't to say it's a bad show. It's just older, and Paramount+ distribution is difficult to access for the 18-34 demographic, amongst whom Family Guy and American Dad remained the two dominant streamed adult cartoons in 2025 [1] despite there also being a South Park season last year.
Frankly, South Park mismanaged the COVID transition - they basically took an almost 5 year hiatus which dropped viewership in a now very competitive adult animated market.
> The "Bernie bro" to MAGA pipeline is very real, as was the "I wanna make sexist or racist jokes" to Alt-Right pipeline.
It would have been so easy for the Democrats to embrace economics and labour over culture war and scolding. To push for getting money out of politics (Citizen's United). They could have kept the Bernie crowd, Gen Z men, and maybe even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure).
Losing in 2024 was insane though and it still feels like the Democrats might screw it up again. FFS people scolding South Park...
> even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure).
The right has owned the talk radio space for ever now. I'm rolling podcasts into that as well. I'm not familiar with many left talking heads, but I can name off many from the right. I'd suspect that Rogan noticed where the audience was and adjust programming based on that.
Positions that were mainstream in the Democratic Party 10-15 years ago are now being labeled as far right. There are a lot of normal people who haven’t changed their politics very much, but were left behind by the Democratic Party. The right happily scooped them up, as they had nowhere else to go. I think Rogan, and much of his audience fall into this camp.
Illegal immigration. Preventing it, and correcting lax enforcement of the past is now labeled a maga issue, with democratic cities actively trying to work against ICE and people who support the left protesting against it.
Here is a short clip of Obama, Hillary, and Bill Clinton supporting deporting illegal aliens, especially those who have broken laws. If they said this stuff today they’d be called maga.
You're taking a small slice of left progressives and applying it to all democrats to try and push this "the left are all commies" narrative. ICE is running around like the gestapo in targeted blue cities, so of course it's an issue. If they were doing this in red cities (where the crime actually is), there'd be the same push back. It's obvious that republicans are intentionally trying to create issues and division using every tool at their disposal. There won't be enough leopards for all of these faces.
I didn’t call anyone a “commie”. The push to allow illegal immigrants to stay, or to just give them citizenship unchecked, started well before any of the more recent ICE issues. Sanctuary cities existed before Trump’s current term.
If cities cooperated with ICE instead of fighting them, ICE could just go pick people up at the jail instead of ended up in this “gestapo” scenario. Federal and local governments fighting against each other is the problem here. 15-20 years ago they would have likely been on the same side of this issue and could have worked together to handle thing with more professionalism and tact.
The data doesn’t seem to support crime being localized to red or blue cities. Your characterization and Trump’s both seem incorrect.
Subsidizing unionized EV and Battery manufacturing jobs in deep red states [0], expanding tax credits and subsidizes for the bottom 50% of Americans [1], expanding Medicaid access [2], and other tangible pocketbook benefits showed that a portion of American voters do not care about their pocketbook, and would rather vote based on culture war topics.
And you aren't even American based on your very obvious commonwealth spelling. Butt out of our political commentary.
Don't be ridiculous. I'd love it if I didn't have to care about US politics, except it has infected the rest of the world. Telling someone to butt out when your dear leader is invading other countries, intentionally influencing foreign elections (Vance stumping for the AfD), and claiming others are 51st states, etc. I also have friends and family in the US that only ever want to talk politics these days.
For the record, I think Biden deserves kudos for pursuing a far more progressive and labour oriented strategy than people expected. The Bernie Bro's soured on Democrats in the 2016 elections. I'm not sure they were a real problem in 2024.
Most of these jobs are the same jobs that arose thanks to the CHIPS and IRA. Much of the AI boom and trade is building on top of the capex that arose from the semiconductor/hardware portfolio during that era.
Many of the current DCs being built out are also being powered or tied with renewable energy projects that were funded by the IRA, as many DC builders with deep pockets do know the political dimension. If this is what keeps the CHIPS, IRA, and the IIJA alive I'm happy.
Every industry and career type goes through ebbs and flows. The 2010s was a white collar boom, and the 2020s is now a white collar bust. Meanwhile the 2010s was a skilled trades bust and the 2020s is now a skilled trades boom.
The recipe is also similar to Hamedh [0], a delicacy in Iraqi and Baghdadi Jewish households. The only major difference is the addition of tomatoes thanks to the Columbian Exchange, and rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet.
On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".
But anyhow, a lot of home cooking and traditional meals actually have a pretty long history.
Actually, in Persian, tomato is literally translated as “western plum”. This is common in our language as we usually say “western” or “foreign” as a prefix to many things that were introduced to Iran (strawberries, sit-style toilets, etc)
Chinese does the same thing, using prefixes like 西 (western), 番 (foreign), and 洋 (foreign) for introduced items.
For tomatoes, interestingly, it has two common names that follow this pattern: 西紅柿, literally translated as "Western Red Persimmon", and 番茄, literally translated as "Foreign Eggplant".
Other produce examples include 番薯 (Foreign Yam) for sweet potato, 西瓜 (Western Melon) for watermelon, 洋蔥 (Foreign Onion) for bulb onion etc.
The recorded English-language etymology for "ketchup" suggests that the word comes from one of the Chinese dialect's word for tomato. Do you have any idea which Chinese word sounds like ketchup?
My personal theory based on nothing more than the vibe of the thing is that it comes from the Malay/Indonesian word ‘kecap’ (which is pronounced almost identically to “ketchup”), the word for sweet soy sauce. This is soy sauce that is thickened and sweetened with palm sugar, and I could see European cooks attempting to replicate it based on the vague descriptions given by sailors, and ending up with ketchup.
Are the Vietnamese and Chinese languages related? Or perhaps one of the two cultures was introduced to that fruit by the other, and thus preserved the name?
Not related at all in recent history and I have no insight on the etymology links but Vietnamese used to be written in a mix of original Vietnamese Chinese-style characters before they changed to a Latin alphabet with Colonialism and Communism so there was definitely contact.
In Chinese the use of 西 (western) often really means from the West compared to China so India/Central Asia/Middle East, which can be a little confusing at first if you are used to the word meaning "Western World".
For instance, watermelons come from Sudan/Egypt and thus arrived in China from the West long before Europeans visited.
Another example is The Journey to the West (Monkey King) novel which is also about travelling to India.
Everything is an apple, it seems. You also have earth apples (pomme de terre in French, aardappel in Dutch) for potatoes, grenade apples (pomegranate in English, granatäpple in Swedish, ...), pineapple, ...
Interesting, in various European languages those tend to be "Turkish": turkey hens (the bird called turkey now), Turkish corn (maize), Turkish beans (long beans).
And in Turkish maize is called "Mısır", which comes from the country name Egypt (which is also Mısır in Turkish).
When Arabs conquered Egypt, they called it "Mishr" (مصر) which literally translates to "country" or "borderland". Maize was originally imported from the Americas, but because the trade route was through Egypt, Turkish people initially called it Egypt Wheat or Egypt Millet. In time, it is started to be called only Mısır/Egypt.
According to Kagi Translate, a term for maize that's specific to Egypt is "الذرة الشامية" (al-dhura ash-shāmiyyah) which could be directly translated to "Levantine sorghum". Can anyone with actual knowledge of Egytian Arabic confirm?
Also I had the idea that "Maize" might have come from "Mısır", but etymonline claims it comes from the native (Arawakan) name for the plant: mahiz.
There is a bird native to the Americas which in English is called the turkey, from its original name "Turkey fowl", because it was thought to come from "the east" of which Türkiye is the country with which most Europeans were familiar (due to being the closest). In Turkish, the bird's name references India ("hindi"); the same is true of other languages such as French ("dinde", from "poule d'inde", chicken of India).
My pleasure! I also find languages very interesting and have had the opportunity to grow up in a bilingual home and learn French and German.
One more fun fact is that potato is a direct translation of the French “Pomme de terre” (“sib zamani” or “ground apple”).
Back to the actual topic, this is a recipe that’s definitely worth trying. Persian shallots are actually more garlicky than oniony. A great addition to lamb dishes and yogurt.
I find it fascinating that the Persian word for "foreign"/"Western", farangi, actually means "Frankish", which gives some idea of the "compressed geography" people experience regarding faraway places. It was also used to name a race on Star Trek.
> rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet
Surprisingly it was still imported in surprising quantities nearly 1000 years before it started to be cultivated. Not significant enough quantities for it to be a common staple, but still an interesting tidbit
One day, someone - someone like you, maybe, someone with the Hacker Nature - was looking at the rice they'd bought and thought "You know what, it just *cannot* be all that difficult to just grow this stuff here, it costs a fortune to import. How hard can it possibly be?"
So they set to digging irrigation trenches, and had a go at it, and maybe a couple of shitty harvests later they'd got the trick nailed.
Possibly! It seems more likely that migrants brought rice cultivation. Or maybe a mixture of both. Maybe some "I wonder how we could grow that here. Lemme visit that new community of immigrants"
In Sicily and Spain, rice cultivation began because Islamic expansion brought advanced irrigation and cultivation techniques. It's called the "Arab Agricultural Revolution"
Most of my and my peers PortCos run their own eval and benchmark sets, simply because they know what they need best.
The reality is, capabilities have largely converged across foundation models over the last 18 months, and much of the value add is coming from the harness layer itself now.
This has been the operating assumption for me and my peers, and has largely played out that way.
That said, this has always been an issue with benchmarking since the very beginning. DB Benchmarks, compute benchmarks, and others that were external facing were always inherently a content and product marketing tool. The actual internal benchmarking used to model, understand, and enhance your product was always a closely held secret.
Most of these conversations are happening, but largely in person and not on HN.
It's not "models have stagnated" but "models released at the same time are on the same level". Improvements are still real but the relative gaps between OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Grok, Gemini and open models are closer than ever. That doesn't mean progress is slowing down, it's just more widely distributed.
> The reality is, capabilities have largely converged across foundation models over the last 18 months, and much of the value add is coming from the harness layer itself now.
Can you please elaborate on what are your thoughts on open weights models (GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, deepseek etc.)
and if the value add is coming from the harness layer itself, then thoughts on open source harnesses (there are so many harnesses but to name a few: opencode, pi [omp as well], maki, codex is OSS as well, fx.sh) and you can always combine them with skills (Obra/superpowers, matt pocock skills plus using these skills and others to create some other custom skills tailored to your use case as well)
And what about the combination of both now with this cheap open weights models + open source harnesses and other things to compete over the closed garden ecosystems?
How does that comparison follow in reality
Could you in theory use these methods to save on the massively expensive $$$ token spending on Anthropic/OAI?
(Personal anecdote but I have GLM 5.3 + maki [sometimes omp/opencode but mostly maki] and its good enough for most use cases out there that I have and I dont know of too many use cases outside of say recreation of games for examples maybe that I would prefer complete SOTA models. I would also love to know where you believe that SOTA models absolutely do still make the difference discounting the benefits provided by the harness.)
I know both you guys haven't been on HN for that long, but the downvote is not meant to be a dislike button. That is the antithesis of HN's norms around discourse:
It's not as dramatic as the title makes it out to be. It's a steady transition to EV buses and Grab drivers within D1 (the current CBD and Japanese red light district) and the new CBD called Thu Thiem. The majority of Saigon is exempt.
It's still a good start, but forcing most Saigonese to shift to EV vehicles in such a small amount of time with no subsidy would turn into a Tiannamen style event - not becuase they're anti-EV, but because a new bike costs around $1-3K in a city where your average take-home is around $3-5K/yr, rents are around $1-3K/yr, everyone is sending back $1-2K/yr to family, and the majority are working actual 996 hours.
"In 2014, he and his sister Uchechi Onyekwere were charged in a $13 million medical fraud scheme. ... According to the FBI's report, the operation took place from approximately 2008 through at least the end of 2013."
"As alleged, the defendants used fictitious companies and fraudulent claims to steal very real health care dollars," said then-United States Attorney Loretta Lynch in 2014. "The Medicare and Medicaid systems serve our most vulnerable citizens, and those who seek to steal those tax dollars will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."
You cannot naturalize in the US if you are found to have conducted criminal conduct. There are millions of us immigrants and children of immigrants who followed the straight path.
The "Bernie bro" to MAGA pipeline is very real, as was the "I wanna make sexist or racist jokes" to Alt-Right pipeline.
Anyhow, it doesn't matter what Matt Stone and Trey Parker do now. South Park is boomer media and not easily accessible on modern streaming.
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