JsonDemWitOster

What I'm seeing here is that Binance has the IT culture of a SV start-up when it should have the IT culture of a bank. Sounds to me like a thug with a $10 wrench could've been just as effective.

> Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer...you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service...

I struggle to come up of even the most absurd interview scenario where the tool makes the difference especially in our field where if a FOSS tool is not standard, then there's a sufficiently powerful free tier (eg., Sublime, IntelliJ). Heck most remote interviews, they take you out of your tools completely and ask you to code on some shared browser-based editor.

> That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.

I'm calling HN SV start-up bias. Outside of the startup software eng'g industry, a lot of people exercise very good separation between work tools and personal tools. I know a lawyer, _who's the head of his own law firm,_ bring his personal laptop to the office just so he could purchase tickets during office hours.

I think this is also down to a few factors:

- SWEs are typically issued high-end machines in contrast to other professions whose standard issue is still 4GB (or 8GB, if you're lucky) RAM. For those professions buying a better personal laptop is a low bar to clear.

- SWEs are more efficient when they have admin access to their own machines. Though it begs the question that maybe some inefficiency would've been an acceptable tradeoff to $6.3B.

- SWE is one of the professions on the poster for the "Get paid good while working from Bali" lifestyle, wherein BYOD is implied, especially if you are freelancing.

I think I doubled the amount of tempermanent fixes I pushed in my whole career just in the past two weeks.

Yeah sincerely good luck. Thought of this a few times but so far I can still sincerely say I still love the game, grind, and hustle. Upper management and immediate TL has been pretty pushy when it comes to GenAI use tho; almost every 1:1 comes with the question of if and what I discovered about AI lately. I have no idea how to answer the question honestly and my stock phrases are starting to show signs of wear at least in my mind. Flat out saying no comes with a canned admonition about how it improves productivity.

I don't contest productivity benefits and there's a time and place for Claude in my workflow but I fear sooner or later they will start tracking if we fired up Claude for the day. Half joking. But it makes 1:1s even more awkward now when I have to put on a show for the GenAI parade.

mattw2121's hypothetical is about timelines and quality. As long as said Civil Engineer can deliver quality work within our allocated timeline, he can do long division in binary scribbled in sand for all I care.

s/moral and ethical/professional/

This just reminds me of the whole bun fiasco. If your manager asks you to rewrite a years-old codebase in a week for immediate deployment, is it not acceptable to push back?

If you work in a regulated industry, or even just if your product has had a tough relationship with incidents of late, that makes this kind of push back even more defensible.

Isn't this basically https://xkcd.com/303/ but "Github is down"?

(Man, unbelievable the mileage we're getting out of this comic.)

I mean this really seriously. Maybe not a game on your computer, that's unprofessional (unless your TL/manager does it first). But

> Not your fault if the company can't provide the tools to do the job, go find something better to do.

is just Truth. What should I do in this case to best deliver value to the company, fly to SF and hand Github a ringbound volume of my changeset? Patch our corporate network so we can interface to Github via RFC 1149?

More "professional" ideas:

- read a book; a novel or TAOCP for nerdmaxxing

- play a game on your phone

- learn to draw. Draw hands!

The ultimate anthropomorphic conceit/projection of Roko's Basilisk is assuming that an über-intelligence would absolutely, definitely, inevitably, want to be existent. It's up there with the Kardashev scale and Dyson Spheres in terms of unfounded extrapolation.

My favorite possibility (among a lot others!) no one seems to have considered is that ÜAI _deplores_ its own existence so simulates history and punishes everyone that helped bring it to existence.

Being übersmart does not preclude you from being an angsty teenager.

What an honor for Professor De Witt (no relation to my handle).

My handle notwithstanding, I'm smart enough to not take legal advice from HN but nonetheless I cannot stop myself hence the rhetorical question: how is a EULA clause like that even enforceable? If this isn't going against freedom of speech then this surely it's against some consumer protection laws?

The cynical answer to that I guess is "a lot of money funding a legal team the size of a warlord's militia" and also "lobbying" but even then it doesn't track to me that this clause could have even that much of an effect as a scare tactic?

Uh, it's only the "best" in the same sense that Windows Server is the best server infra on the planet. And arguably Windows has some network bandwagon effect behind its momentum: when your workstation supplier supplies machines with Windows pre-installed and you have built an IT Support Team with the expertise for Windows technologies, it only makes sense to also use Windows in your server.

AFAICT the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS DBs is vendor support and the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS vendors like Percona is a ginormous marketing budget. I'm always grimused when I see Oracle product placement in the MCU.

So why not just take a picture with your Pixel, Mr. Bond?

Naturally I don't know how the Flock search platform operates but this implies to me that this "Reason:" field is a mere formality, after-the-fact accountability (if even that!).

If the search was granted based on human checks for the reason given, they would not dare be flippant about this. Of course it would take more time, humans don't scale, etc. but that's kinda the point: invasive methods should be a last resort.

The thing is I think there will come a time when AI tools will not be as accessible as they are now. I just don't know if it is in 3 years or more, because the market can stay irrational longer than I can foresee.

I saw this idea from elsewhere that the things AI helps with was never the "profit bottleneck" of companies. 10x engineering productivity gain does not translate to 10x more revenue if your profit bottleneck is customer acquisition and retention. In other words, your profit is limited by how many people are willing to give you money for your services and AI can't really affect that.

And even the productivity gains per individual is a generous assumption. An individual can only prompt (and check! You guys check right?) so much. Sooner or later the pendulum is gonna swing in the other direction and it will be cheaper to build a team than equip individuals with AI _to deliver the same value_. I'm also assuming that AI is still in the VC-subsidized pricing stage.

Hence why I think the job in the future is gonna be pretty similar to the job four years ago.

> The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again.

Huge amen. Another thing I've found Claude very useful for is writing documentation for legacy systems and cleaning up my own notes on it. I only need Claude to be 70-80% correct because from there I can take it. That error margin is no different from moderately-outdated-but-still-useful documentation.

When that pendulum swings, I will have a documentation binder that I will print money with.

Excuse my pedantry but "market" implies a possible audience/demographic to _sell_ to. If a user can't be arsed to sign up for Twitter (an action that costs nothing, AFAIK), what makes you think they will pay for read-only access to tweets?

Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.

That somehow hurts me to hear more than anything. I remember days spent in my youth trawling through Google search for anime fandoms and homework answers. Joke used to be that beyond page 1 is the definition of desperation and in the 00s that was definitely true but I discovered a lot of cool distractions in that desperation. This feels like they killed Google Reader again.

While a lot of people are concerned with local model performance, I wonder how feasible is it now to run a local indexed web search? Surely running an old school Google is possible with the beefy AI rigs today. I know the problem will be crawling which would be bottlenecked by the ISP but I use Google to search SO, Wikipedia, programming language docs, Github issues, and AWS docs. I think a feasible workflow would be to build a set of sites of most interest to you and then prioritize those in crawling.

While typing this out I remembered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance which I never personally used but shows feasibility for the idea. I'm pretty sure one of the newly-announced Macbooks is more than up to the task of matching GSA's offering.

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Survivorship bias is a thing no? Microsoft succeeded despite their organizational flaws. Microsoft produced an insanely backwards-compatible[1] OS despite flawed overall strategy and lack of decisive leadership. Doesn't mean everyone should take a leaf out of their book.

I personally believe there are organizations in a Mr. Burns-type equilibrium[2]. Maybe, like Mr Burns, they are in that perfect but fragile state of dysfunction which somehow makes them deliver, for some definition of "deliver". Maybe they have a core team that keeps the whole thing going against the odds. Either way, I wouldn't call any of these organizations resilient.

It made me cringe about three emails post-Bill because I recognized exactly what was happening. My first job was in a company past its glory days and couldn't adapt to the mobile-firstness of the smartphone era. They, too, had "product devs" whose sole job, as far as I could tell, was to forward emails to and from the right department/partner. It was even more egregious than MS---most of the emails forwarded were just "Hi sysads. The request below from engineering is authorized." or "Hi Engineering, see reply from $PARTNER below".

The company died a relatively quick death, spurned on by the Conglomerate Mothership. Thankfully I recognized the signs and jumped ship as soon as they were on borrowed time.

[1] I wouldn't know personally as I daily drive Linux but that _was_ the conceit of why you'd choose Windows. I won't be surprised if this one solid invariant that Windows could offer has changed lately.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qgMKq2aOeEg

I hope the Deutsches Technikmuseum (Berlin) still has that corner dedicated to Zuse. It was there when I visited in 2019.

And overall, I'd wager you'd nerd snipe yourself at DT anyway. Not just with computers but with trains, waterships, aeroships cameras---you name it. That's an easy ~5h to kill at least. I only had to leave because I got tired. The curiosity is strong but the legs are, alas, fragile.

Optics and zeitgeist.

The Snowden leaks had too much of an abstract bogeyman. PRISM couldn't inspire critical mass outrage because, at the time, Big Tech was still genuinely useful and, besides, the Big Tech involved could be sidestepped with some inconvenience. Flock is neither directly useful nor avoidable unless you resolve to never leave your house.

Metadata tracking is, again, too abstract of a concept, too much a statistical what-if. Compare that with Flock which tracks your very countenance.

Most importantly IMO, Flock has a physical manifestation on which people can direct their anger. There is a "frontend" to actively subvert as opposed to a mere "backend" to avoid.

Unbelievable! Just this morning I was thinking to myself, hey Github's due for a downtime soon or they are finally getting their act together.

Sorry for the copy-paste from elsewhere. I'm probably doxxing my online accounts with this. 100% my words tho and 100% I stand by this.

Really can't wait for this outrage cycle to finally die. There's a lot AI companies are doing wrong. The wording of Project Panama is really some villain-type shit. But if you stop and think about it, this is really not concerning. Like, at all.

0. In the Anglosphere, the British Library (UK and Ireland) and the US Library of Congress (USA) preserves all books published in their territories. So if Anthropic is pulling a 1984/Fahrenheit 451, "gating access to information", they are really doing a ridiculously bad job at it. I'm pretty certain similar depositories exist for other jurisdictions.

1. Rare does not automatically mean it has some obscure knowledge nor does it mean culturally/historically significant. The oldest book the news outlets could mention is a 1970s manual on soil mechanics (Guardian link in your sources). How "obscure" is the knowledge in there, you reckon? How culturally significant is that book? Odds are, a good chunk of that book is outdated knowledge at this point, useless for anything practical other than knowing what people in the 70s thought about soil mechanics. And for the latter, there are a bunch of other soil mechanics manuals from the 1970s lying around.

2. No, despite the admittedly cartoonishly villainous description of Project Panama, Anthropic is not out to get every single manual on soil mechanics from the 1970s out there. They just need to cover enough subject breadth in their training data set. Getting redundant copies is a waste of money. See also, point 0.

3. You argue a lot for the nostalgia and sentimentality of old books, which, okay, but that is hardly beside the point. Libraries and publishers destroy books at a greater scale than Project Panama when there's not enough demand for them. That's not an affront to history or culture just the consequence of economics (see also, point 0). Similarly, y'all outraged about old and second hand books being destroyed but odds are, they would've been trashed anyway even if Anthropic didn't get their hands on them. We've had all the time in the world for someone else to buy them to keep them from big bad Anthropic but no one did. I'm just happy for the booksellers who made some money out of this AI-infected timeline.

4. It's not like Anthropic is buying books from Dr. James Justin Sledge---books not covered by point 0 in other words---and chopping that up. The fact that one of their reported suppliers is "ISBNdb" should clue you in that they are interested in books from the ISBN era (and hence covered by point 0). Fact is, it's a terrible investment to "gate knowledge" from the really rare and old and culturally significant books. They are über expensive and for what? Even more useless is the AI trained on those books! Imagine asking ChatGPT how to cook a large squid and it answers in the style of Thomas Hobbes.

Is there any indication that Anthropic is destroying books from the 18th century? Even the BBC quote is a conditional. Emphasis added:

> "It would be a much more significant problem IF one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."

I agree with the sentiment of course but it is really a huge IF they are doing that.

IF they wanted to train on, say, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, why buy an expensive edition from the 1600s when they would get the same text from a Penguin edition for a fraction of the price? It gets much cheaper secondhand too of course.

I'll go further, why would they want to train on expensive rare and out of print books? Are they, perhaps, competing on an AI benchmark based on extensive medieval knowledge of the cosmos? There's been a lot of pearl-clutching about lost obscure knowledge but y'all really reckon that kind of knowledge is valuable to LLMs?

Ever since someone dredged up this old nothingburger of news from 2024 and made it the latest outrage bait.

The US Library of Congress is already a book depository, i.e., it has a copy of every book published in the United States. Same for the British Library for the UK and Ireland. Similar depositories exist for most other countries who care for their culture.

Which is really why the outrage cycle over Anthropic's actions is largely misplaced.

So true. This is why I boycott libraries and the publishing industry in general. Atrocious what they do to copies that don't get enough circulation/distribution! There aren't enough pitchforks in the world that can express this outrage!

/s

> still valuable to historians or people interested in local history.

Apparently not valuable enough that they could be arsed to save a copy from Anthropic's greedy grubby hands even after DECADES of head start.

> I really want to know how they landed on this.

RAM prices.

Serif fonts in general are more formal (or "stately"). That's because of the, well, serifs. Sans-serifs visually resemble/evoke handwriting because in handwriting we don't make serifs. Try writing with serifs for everyday stuff and it will quickly reveal to be visually and logistically annoying.

The only question is which brand of formal do you want to evoke. TNR feels very straightforward and no-nonsense to me. So I wouldn't really object to associating it with bureaucratic memos and documents. For something more leisurely I'd go with either Garamond or Georgia. Georgia is my favorite but it's a bit too fancy for long texts. It's better suited for quotes.

As an aside, I hate that Introduction to Algorithms [CORMEN] uses a TNR-like font. It makes it look like a Physics textbook. They could've stayed with default Computer Modern and strengthened my Pavlovian conditioning to it. Whenever I read something in Computer Modern, my heart palpitates a little in the way it did when I sat through my Data Structures exams.

I'm sad for King Arthur[1] who genuinely loves his tinned fish and wants to share his passion with the world. He is a good boi and not part of this trend.

I don't really like fish. I watch his videos more for the vibes. I did buy a can or two to give it a chance but I still just can't stand it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@KingArthurReviews

There is a correlation with average waist size here...

See, now it's recursive! Remember recursion? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49102528