It's a choice. I go to the supermarket twice a week, not shopping for much. I switched the store I use three, four months ago, but I can already talk about some of the employees at the store I visit. Louis is back where he grew up right now because his 97-year-old grandfather died. Among other things, he feels lucky grandpa's passing came after the new year because of his time-off allotment. Nikki had great holidays, mostly because her adult daughter was here for a week. Nadine ("Shh.") has decided she's going to retire at the end of the month but hasn't yet told anyone at the store.
Raffy, the UPS delivery guy I see maybe five times a year? He's doing well, finally feeling things slowing down some after the holidays. His fiancé will finish her graduate degree this spring, then they're going to decide if they want to stay here or move back to the state where they were born. They like it here, but think job opportunities will be better back home.
I'm sure many here are familiar with "This is Water," the commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace. Many often cite his line, "Everybody worships," his observation that we all hold aspects of life in reverence, whether religious things or otherwise. It's a valid, pithy point, but I always thought the key part to his speech comes later and has been widely overlooked:
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
He delivered that speech in 2005. Before the modern smartphone. All those people I mentioned earlier were strangers. That's no longer the case because all of us chose to interrupt what we were doing and open up a little to someone unfamiliar. It's a choice. Or, as Bob Dylan once sang,
My aunt lived to 94 and was in a retiremement community outside Boston. She never married (had some long term relationships) but was always interested in people. I used to visit regularly from the UK, and she was always introducing me to people around the community, nurses, helpers, gardeners, whatever. She would invariably give me a potted life history of these people, who she might only have known a few months.
No need for crosswords or other activities to keep her brain active - talking to people and remembering their stories is what kept her going!
Before moving to the community, she had a house in Cambridge (Boston) and let out the upper floor to students, post grads etc - and kept up with many of them long after they had left. Connection was definitly a skill of hers.
this comment was beautiful. In my younger years, I used to be so embarrassed when I'd go grocery shopping or elsewhere with my mother and she would ask about service people's lives and stories. I used to hate it and feel uncomfortable and wonder what the point even was.
Thank you for completely changing my perspective, on something I haven't thought about in a long time
Ahhhhhh I love this and love that you referenced This Is Water something I've held dear to me as my default perception of life. There's so much to the world which we can access on our very doorstep, we just need to open up to it.
It's an easy thing to forget if you don't do it consistently enough to be 2nd nature.
I'm taking a moment to recognize once more the work that user @atdrummond (Alex Thomas Drummond) did for a couple years to help others here. I did not know him, don’t think I ever interacted with him, and I did not benefit from his generosity, but I admired his kindness. Just beautiful.
I don't know what atdrummond's political views were, and after your comment, I still don't know.
The label "literal Nazi" has become not particularly useful recently.
At best, it seems to be used to mean that the person in question agrees with one or more of:
"I think Hitler was awesome"
"We need to stop letting poor people into our country"
"Gee London was a lot better when it was whiter"
"I think we should forcibly sterilize everybody with an IQ under 85"
"I keep a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion under my bed"
"I will always use he/him when referring to trans women"
--
At worst the label is applied for much more prosaic reasons.
One can be racist, or a Eugenicist, or a white supremacist, or an anti-Semite, or transphobic without being a Nazi, and those terms are all far more descriptive than "Nazi," so are more informative.
>I don't know what atdrummond's political views were, and after your comment, I still don't know.
You literally don't understand what the term Nazi implies or what Nazi's stood for? And you could not _literally_ take less time than it took to write this comment to research what he was apart of?
I guess you refuse to.
Because you're purposefully trying to muddy the waters :).
>One can be racist, or a Eugenicist, or a white supremacist, or an anti-Semite, or transphobic without being a Nazi,
He's all of the above. Literally, by his own words. Thanks for spelling it out!
> You literally don't understand what the term Nazi implies or what Nazi's stood for?
I'm not sure how you could read my comment and come away with that impression. I gave a partial list of the sorts of things Nazi's stood for.
> And you could not _literally_ take less time than it took to write this comment to research what he was apart of?
Honestly, I did not search for it before I wrote the comment. After you posted this, I used a few search engines to search up both "Alex Thomas Drummond" and "atdrummond."
The former turned up a single white-pages listing, the latter various people named "Drummond" most notably a basketball player. There is also a twitter/x account which I can't see posts of without an account but has an Estonian flag in his profile, which matches HN comments I later found so is probably him.
So now I'm going through his HN comments one by one, which does in fact take longer than writing the comment I wrote.
I should note that on the first page (which indeed took less time to read than writing my comment), the only thing I saw that gave off any "Nazi vibes" was this sentence, in the context of dealing with homeless addicts:
> The issue is there’s a cohort who thinks that the solutions that enable safe streets require too much sacrifice of one’s individual liberty - even if said individual abuses their freedom to harm themself and others.
But that view is not even definitively a politically right view, I'm probably reading it that way primarily because I'm looking for Nazi evidence.
On page 2 we get this thread[1] which turns into a discussion similar to what my comment was, but specifically defends two people that atdrummond claims to be respectively Jewish and philosemitic and accused of being Nazis.
At this time, I do not know who these writers are, so I have to search them. Assuming Cremieux refers to Jordan Lasker[2], who (after this comment was made) was revealed to have a Reddit pseudonym where he self-identified as a Nazi, but at the time would have been primarily known for his arguments that white people are genetically superior to black people with regards to (at least) intelligence while also rubbing shoulders with avowed eugenicists. I'm not going to spend a lot more time searching him, but I should note that, as a convert to Judaism, I could not find any evidence that he would be defined as Jewish by Nazis, who were primarily concerned with race (as they defined it) rather than religion, which certainly muddies the waters here.
Next up is Hanania[3], someone I also had not heard of before, who was definitely an avowed white supremacist and eugenicist, but claims to have changed; journalists close to him deny this, and quotes on the Wikipedia page seem to support that he is at least still fairly racist. In my (admittedly brief) searching I didn't find strong evidence for him being particularly anti- or philo-semitic, though the Wikipedia article did include a quote by him implying that America would be better run by Jewish people than black people (and maybe also hillbillies; he said "voters in Baltimore or Appalachia"). Presumably he considers at least Ashkenazim to be "sufficiently white" in his racial calculus.
While it seems likely that these two people have not specifically called for the extermination of all ethnic Jews, given that there are far more milquetoast people who have been accused of being Nazis, atdrummond defending these two people specifically makes it seem likely that he has some far-right views, but I still haven't gotten to what those are specifically.
As I was scrolling down, I almost missed this quote[4] in a collapsed reply, but saw his username:
> I am frequently called a Nazi (despite being on, and identifying as left wing, my entire life) on X simply for having the temerity to challenge certain orthodoxies.
X has made it very hard for me to view posts of users, so I don't know what he has said on X, but with what we've seen so far, I suspect he is some form of racist hereditarian. Let's keep going:
Next item[5] is the first overtly racist post from him, so looks like I may be on to something. In the context of discussing how the former confederate states seem to be a different country with different health and educational outcomes from the rest of the US:
> The outcomes are primarily due to race, not the contours of the Confederacy. Nearly all of these “red state demographic maps” are isomorphic to the percentage of African Americans within a given state/county/city.
I was skimming so I may have missed something, but the next racially tinged comment is:
> Look at the rates of homicides by firearm for White Americans and they’re within the same order of magnitude as European nations.
> This is a conversation that is verboten in the US because people assume that it means you believe that crime must be intrinsic to race, even though this statistic is actually fully compatible with the liberal orthodoxy regarding the disparate impact of government policy on American Black people.
With a later reply clarifying that he believes this difference to be not solely due to increased poverty in said demographics.
At this point, it seems clear that he believes that black people are more criminal, and he's being coy about whether he thinks it is racially intrinsic, which is arguably a tacit admission of what he thinks. I'm also done reading through his HN comments.
I strongly suspect there are much spicier comments on Twitter, but of the 3 posts that X let me see, the only relevant one was a reply saying "You don't believe correctly" to a post saying "If you believe (correctly) that immigration is a huge positive for society..."
So it seems clear to me at this point that he likely believes black people are inherently more criminal than white people, and he is opposed to immigration. This is what I could find with several times as much time and effort that went into my first post.
> Because you're purposefully trying to muddy the waters :).
I seriously am not, I didn't know what you meant by "literal Nazi" originally; your reply made it clear that you meant "Racist, Eugenicist, White Supermacist, Anti-Semite Transphobe." Please understand that calling someone a "literal Nazi" on the internet does not reliably communicate that today.
Thank you for the mention. I could not follow through this last year [2025] unfortunately, the need has been so great throughout this year from the less fortunate and I had exhausted my discretionary resources by the time the holidays approached. I hope to be able to sponsor again soon. My apologies.
Can you help share more of how we can know more about these claims? The only thing I could find related to this was https://x.com/jaredlholt/status/1757799398707188046 and the replies don't add any clarity to understanding what is real and what is not. I'm not saying that's all there is, just that I don't know how to find more and figure out one way or the other what is up where.
I don't know how to find superchat history, but honestly you can just peruse his own twitter here: https://x.com/ATDrummond
The guy has had a long running reputation on this site. Which is why he decided to add this to his profile:
>here from hacker news? don’t be a creep
And by creep, he of course means "don't call me out for advocating for genocide."
His last post is even out right decrying ANY type of immigration, and his second post is being critical of Israel. And mind you, not because of any "normal" sociopolitical commentary, but simply because Israel = Jews and "Jews are bad."
Thanks, I don't use Twitter/X so it would have taken me a while to figure out how to see the content of the posts (gee thanks X for requiring login to see most things properly!)
Knowing this, I managed to find 2 additional things which help strengthen this connection as not just being some random twitter account with a matching name:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38840473 where it doesn't actually link to the Twitter to see what the content is but he doesn't bother denying he'd have a Twitter account that could be taken that way.
- https://archive.ph/pJqzD where someone acknowledges they interacted with the account knowing it was really him as part of sharing their discovery of the news.
Much thanks, I would never have thought to look for such an unhinged Twitter account for a seemingly above average HN user being praised long after his death.
Yeah, I understand it's seemingly hard to reconcile. And without revealing other aspects of my identity I can say his posts on Twitter and here do not reveal the extent of his views.
I don't understand that tweet, I'm not sure if it is something dismissive for you to lose respect over or not? He says it's 'not a disease' but that people with it 'are sick'... I'm not sure if the point is simply that it's not a single well-understood thing with known causes, but more of a description of a state of affairs. (Sort of like 'cellulitis' is just 'a skin infection of some sort'.) But I think that would be correct.
But that's basically what we do. We learn about Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, MLK, etc for what good they did.
Then someone eventually figures out they did or said some wrongthink by today's standards and tell us those people should be hated because they messed up.
But the kicker is we never once learned about nor celebrated said wrongthink. We celebrated the best in people... and I think that should continue.
There's a famous quote that says we all die twice, once when we physically die and a second time when we are truly forgotten by humanity. It's attributed to lots of different people. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/10/15/die-twice/
Whenever I encounter this idea, I think of a certain Henry Symeonis who is, by this standard, still "alive", even though he died in 1264.
There was so much bad blood between him and the Oxford University that Oxford students had to take a pledge never to reconcile with Henry Symeonis upon ther Bc graduation. This tradition stuck for 550 years.
And we are still aware of him today. Neither an important king, nor a great artist, just a guy who triggered a petty revenge from some long-dead academicians who are, ironically, likely completely forgotten, name and all.
Genuine respect absolutely can - and should be able to be - lost over a "bad take." Whether this instance is one of those is another question entirely.
I would even argue that respect that can endure through numerous shitty takes, just because there's one facet of that person that isn't shitty, is far less genuine than otherwise holding that person up to a standard for your respect.
Separating "one take" from "many takes" -- one should be able to give grace that people are wrong occasionally, and especially that they are fallible and susceptible to being emotional or relying on anecdotes for a particular theme that their experience has affected them differently than your experience has affected you.
That was impressive to see what you did there and the harsh reality that its true hits like a brick.
Don't forget that those forks of VScode are gonna be bought by Nvidia or chatgpt (OpenAI which gets invested by Nvidia) and everything else
Its all one large web connecting every investment and cross-investments and everything. The bubble image which got infamous recently is definitely popping up even more. Its crazy basically.
>The project was completed in less than a year, ahead of schedule, and on budget.
>"After more than nine years of planning and work...."
>The overpass is the single largest bridge structure for wildlife in North America and one of the largest in the world at 200 feet wide and 209 feet long covering 41,800 square feet, nearly an acre.76 girders hold up the bridge deck.
So it was basically a decade-long project and in that context $15M doesn't seem that high. Along with the wildlife benefits, it sounds like the economic benefits will be immediate and ongoing since the area has had "an average of one wildlife-vehicle crash a day in the fall and spring wildlife movement seasons."
I have no issue with simonw's work/comments; I've never gone near it because it's far afield from my non-tech world. He is, though, someone who breaks one HN guideline:
>Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
His submissions here are usually to his own work. Admittedly, that HN guideline is like an obscure 19th-century law which is still on the books that few know of and is never enforced. Even so, he's clearly well-regarded based on the amount of conversation his blog posts elicit.
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