OkayPhysicist

Being responsible for protecting politicians from violent lunatics is an intrinsically violent job, thus they need to be armed.

Being responsible for telling otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants that they need to leave is not a violent job, thus they don't need to be armed.

You don't need to murder someone to remove a heckler, especially one that you have zero jurisdiction over.

Well, a law enforcement agency that has no need to be armed at all has shot and killed at least 2 Americans, which in my book is completely and utterly unacceptable. If you asked me what the acceptable life toll was for keeping non-violent (I make that indication, because despite all the "dangerous immigrants" talk from ICE, violent acts are not under their jurisdiction. If someone commits a real crime, it becomes real law enforcement's problem. ICE, definitionally, is only needed for otherwise law-abiding non-citizens) illegal immigrants out of the United States, I'd confidently say zero.

As I mentioned in my other comment, California is far from just tech companies. You could wipe out the entire information sector and California would still be the most prosperous state in the US. California is practically the only US state to have a fully diversified economy.

Generally, there are 2 forces at play dictating how fast people will go on a given road. The probability of getting caught speeding is one, the other is the perceived safety of going fast. The issue most American roads have is that they are built extremely wide, with even more open space on either side of the road, so people are comfortable gunning it. Speed limits only matter insomuch as they adjust the perceived probability of being pulled over.

Our highways also train you that speed limit are complete bullshit. On an 8 lane, divided highway, with nothing but empty field or protective barriers on either side, 60 mph is comically low. That's how you end up with absurdities like it often being unavoidably illegal to drive on 680 in the Bay Area: either you're speeding, or you're obstructing traffic, both of which carry a fine.

IMO, the correct answer is to raise the speed limit of surface streets that already double as psuedo-highways (looking at you, San Jose), strictly enforce speed limits on surface streets, and then completely eliminate speed limits on the freeways.

.That's not fair to assume. Different people have wildly different poracity in their enamel. You can be a health nut who brushes obsessively, forgoes all soda, and still gets cavities, or numbskull who does the bare minimum and is never punished. That's not to say oral hygiene isn't important, since for everyone in between you can improve your outcomes by taking better care of your teeth, but don't make the mistake of assuming that someone with shit teeth doesn't even try to take care of them

SVGs are mostly used for icons and polygonal images, because that's what they're good at. The entire point of using vector graphics over raster is to take advantage of the fact that for low-poly objects, SVGs are much smaller. Icony-ness is definitely implied by the specification of format here.

Don't low-pressure sodium lamps get like >2x efficiency gains over HPS?

IMO, modules vs monorepo doesn't quite address the problem. Historically, we human developers have been mostly concerned with the size of the project (i.e., the size of each commit) and the difficulties around merging work, especially with the ego side of it (why should I have to spend time changing my code to be compatible with Phil's changes?)

An agent swarm has a very different set of problems. There can be a lot more agents making changes in parallel than you'd see in all but the biggest megacorps, and the pace of those changes can be ridiculously high. The rapid pace simultaneously balloons the total repo size (because of history), and the frequency of collisions. A modifies file 1, B modifies file 1, A commits changes, B runs into conflict. Or worse, C modifies file 1 after A commits their changes and beats B to commit, resulting in B growing staler and staler as they race to get their branch merged.

This sensation of warmth while being in a nominally cold room can also be created with microwaves. A couple of such systems were designed when microwaves were the new hotness. Turns out it might cause cataracts, though.

That's trivially solved with a reflective housing, which nearly all sodium lamps I've ever seen had.

When it comes to California, it's complicated. We have a looooong history of playing fast and loose with federal supremacy, and you can bet the defendants would be fighting tooth and nail to keep any court case in California. Which would be pretty defensible, since it would presumably be a California-based company hiring California-based workers.

In particular for the noncompete ban, I believe that trying to enforce a noncompete-adjacent action like this would open you up to being sued by the employees who would have been hired, and the hiring company, in California court.

Yes, I have lived outside of California. It mostly made me more appreciative of this state, with the notably exceptions of last call and gun laws.

Noncompete "agreements" are evil and run counter to every redeeming quality that a free market economy has. If your state allows them, they are in favor of indentured servitude, plain and simple. In contrast, California stands as a beacon for those who refuse such chains. We don't just ban noncompetes in California, we actively liberate those who move here from their out-of-state noncompetes.

And contrary to what you'll read on here, California is not just tech. We've got a massive agriculture industry (more than 50% of the country's produce), several of the best universities in the world, the entire entertainment industry (to such a degree that we're killing everyone's accents), one of the top financial sectors, and the largest manufacturing industry in the country. Hell, our restaurants are better than anywhere else in the country: I can walk down the street walk past multiple restaurants that would be the best in the entire state in most of the rest of the country, to a point that I take it for granted until I walk into a random restaurant in the heartland somewhere and expect it to be good.

We treat our companies well and our residents better. Hell, we even treat our non-residents better than any other state, given that our taxes subsidize the existence of the parasitic 41.

When the worst thing about your state is a housing shortage due to everyone wanting to be there, that's glowing praise.

The problem is each step individually is important to allow companies to do, and follows as a nigh-irrefusable consequence of the previous. You can't ban companies from "poaching" employees, or you end up as an economic hellhole of indentured servants, like Florida, or New York. You can't ban the licensing of a companies technology, since we want innovators who don't necessarily have the opportunity to directly execute on their new technology to still innovate. And you can't ban paying the company for doing so, since that's the whole point.

Meanwhile, the way that plays out is that Google hires all the talent by fairly paying more than the startup can, then can turn around and say "your company is a dead man walking, you can either sell us your tech, or crash and burn with nothing", and the only fiscally responsible decision is to sell.

Any such ban would be in direct conflict with California law (where I assume Character.ai, as a company founded by Xooglers living in Palo Alto is based), under the same logic that forbids non-competes. California has created one of the most prosperous countries in the world under a framework where you actually have to entice your employees not to leave, rather than shackling them to their workstations, and I would be extremely opposed to any attempt to change that.

This is the solution to all the "oh no it's soooo hard to comply with all the protections" bullshit that MBA types bellyache about. The only reason complying is difficult is because you are trying to do just as much evil shit as you can get away with. If you just switch to the honest, upstanding approach, you won't need to work as hard to try and figure out where the line is.

My experience (as someone who has almost exclusively worked as a software developer in non-software companies) is that my primary value add is the ability to recognize things that a computer can do easily, versus problems that are not solvable by throwing software at it.

For example, when I was working in a finance team, I'd come across all sorts of situations where someone had a task of "once a week, download this data from this application, apply the following transformations, then upload the results to this other application". Anybody reading this site would think "ah, that's like a dozen lines of code! We should automate that". But that thinking is incredibly rare outside of our field.

On the flip side of that, you'll have the people who think they can simply buy software that will solve all their problems. "No, ma'am, buying a fancy new Spend Management System will not magically make everyone know or care about the difference between 'GL 10754 - Employee Appreciation: Meals' and 'GL 10822: Employee Meals (Discretionary)'".

My take on it is that the ability to recognize automatable problems boils down to 1) having an intuitive understanding of algorithmic reasoning ( this solution comes in 4 parts, the first part can be divided into 3 separate problems, which...) 2) having an up-to-date understanding of the extant capabilities of computers. 3) having the kind of bull-headed hubris that makes someone say "Sure, we currently do it this way, but I can do it better".

And at the end of the day, those features end up meaning you need some sort of engineer.

I can't find the study in question, but I'd be interested in the polling process. The average person has zero understanding of what 500,000 immigrants per year means. For context, the average American is off by at least a factor of 2 about the population of the United States. If the questioning wasn't something along the lines of "of the people you personally know, what fraction should be immigrants" or something, I have no idea how you'd get anything resembling useful responses.

Here in the states, the main WWI issues are stockpiles of chemical weapons that were buried and then forgotten about. They pop up from time to time, and we've only recently started cleaning them up. Ironically, the ones that were stored somewhat deliberately with safety in mind end up being some of the worst to dispose of, because the poorly-stored ones can be largely thrown into a blast-resistant washing machine, popped open with a small charge, and then scrubbed with all sorts of fun chemicals to neutralize the toxins.

Fun fact: One of the best analogs available for phosgene that's been sitting in cold water for a hundred years is Wintergreen DOTS candy, if you can keep the engineers and military brass from eating all of them.

California's borders are bit strange for a state, but they're perfectly normal for a country. When the borders were decided, there weren't really any existing political boundaries to discuss except Mexico, so they went with geographical boundaries. The Sierras to the East, the Pacific to the West, the Cascades to the North, and Mexico to the South. The only place they really needed to smack a line on a map was in the middle of the Mojave desert, where they just continued the line from the Sierras to the Colorado River.

All hierarchies work like that. In order for the top to gain benefit from wielding the power of the entire hierarchy of lessers, it necessarily means that the coordinated power of each level is greater than that above them (at least on average).

Take a simplified model of a king, a bunch of nobles, beneath whom are a bunch of knights, beneath whom are a bunch of serfs. Collectively, the nobles control more power than than the king. But if an individual noble defects while the others remain loyal, then the King maintains enough power to crush the uprising. So as the King, you have to proactively maintain a status quo where the nobles can't easily collectively plot against you. Classic strategies include maintaining some kind of nebulous ranking, where nobles are constantly competing with each other to garner favor, and thus likely have more to gain outing a rival noble's conspiracy than joining it, keeping the nobles sufficiently comfortable such that the risk of losing that comfort acts as friction against plotting against you, and in times of extreme distrust, keeping the nobles close at hand such that you can take decisive action against the individual noble before the forces they control can show up.

At each level of the hierarchy, recursively apply similar strategies. Nobels need to keep control of their knights, knights need to keep control of their peasants.

Google Maps' time estimations seem to somehow take the elevation into account. I've definitely had it give me different time estimates going uphill versus downhill in SF.

I can only speak for the US, but at least here it's largely not a question of intellect, but opportunity. If you're a teenager, not particularly academically inclined, in a community without a lot of hiring opportunities, the US military is the single best option you have for making a living wage. They'll feed you, house you, and pay you on top of that, all you have to do is sell your soul. That's a hard deal to turn down.

The people I don't trust are the ROTC lot. They had everything they needed to get into college, and then still decided their skillset was best applied committing atrocities. They're vastly more likely to be some jingoistic nut than the average highschool-to-bootcamp pipeliner.

We're on said plateau. In terms of normal coding usage, models have not become wildly more useful in the last few months. The existing open models that are useful today will remain useful.

Running open models from commodity hosts doesn't appear to be particularly subsidized today. It's not a massive expense, because the biggest cost that's causing the frontier labs to hemorrhage money at the moment is training. Inference isn't terribly expensive for what you get, and seems to be quite comfortably profitable.

Why haven't they yanked those suckers out? My brother got his tonsils out out after infection number 2.

That's more complicated. Basically, the courts have found that inability to pay is not a crime, but unwillingness to is. Depending on the court, and the debtor, judges end up with a lot of leeway as to how to interpret non-payment. It's a fucked enough situation that I hedged in the original comment. In an ideal world, where everyone had access to high-quality legal representation, it would be relatively straight forward to represent the difference to the courts. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world, and the very same pressures that make it impossible to pay your speeding ticket more often that not also deprive you of worthwhile legal representation.

It is not a crime to be unable to pay your debts, therefore your rights cannot be infringed for ending up in such a state. Debts, especially those to private entities, are a civil matter.

Restricting air travel would be an attack on an American's freedom of movement, a right enshrined in our Constitution.

Restriction on doing business with whomever is willing to do business with them would be an attack on an American's freedom of association, which is likewise enshrined in the very first ammendment of our Bill of Rights.

Any US politician who offered up such an outrageous attack on the Constitution would deserve nothing short of death for their utter betrayal of the trust placed in them by the American people.

If you're bellyaching about emojis, you should be treating them as a litmus test: If your application can't handle emojis, it's because you're doing something you're not supposed to (specifically, making false assumption about the nature of text), and thus you will run into situations with text that break your shit, too.

The way I see it, emojis are practically single-handedly responsible for near-universal adoption of Unicode in the Anglosphere. Otherwise, it would be all too easy for lazy developers to just use ASCII and then shove their fingers in their ears about any other writing systems.

What do you think doesn't belong in Unicode? It turns out that expressing all the different ways humans have used text in history has some necessary complexity, but assigning each character and modifier a number seems like a perfectly reasonable approach.

Either way, flamethrowers turn out to be remarkably effective.