abalone

* We achieved Level 2 autonomy first, which requires you to fully supervise and retain control of the vehicle and expect mistakes at any moment. So kind of neat but also can get you in big trouble if you don't supervise properly. Some people like it, some people don't see it as a net gain given the oversight required.

^ This is where Tesla "FSD beta" is at, and probably where LLM codegen tools are at today.

* After many years we have achieved a degree of Level 4 autonomy on well-trained routes albeit with occasional human intervention. This is where Waymo is at in certain cities. Level 4 means autonomy within specific but broad circumstances like a given area and weather conditions. While it is still somewhat early days it looks like we can generally trust these to operate safely and ask for help when they are not confident. Humans are not out of the loop.[1]

^ This is probably what where we can expect codegen to grow after many more years of training and refinement in specific domains. I.e. a lot of what CloudFlare engineers did with their prompt engineering tweaking was of this nature. Think of them as the employees driving the training vehicles around San Francisco for the past decade. And similarly, "L4 codegen" needs to prioritize code safety which in part means ensuring humans can understand situations and step in to guide and debug when the tool gets stuck.

* We are still nowhere close to Level 5 "drive anywhere and under any conditions a human can." And IMHO it's not clear we ever will based purely on the technology and methods that got us to L4. There are other brain mechanisms at work that need to be modeled.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-robotaxis-re...

Or did you know the National Bureau of Economic Research just published a study concluding “Supply Constraints Do Not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities”?[1] Directly contradicting the YIMBY narrative that all we need to do is unleash market rate supply.

Simple economics tells us that when you have a boom town with strong demand from white collar professionals migrating in, driving up incomes, they will outbid lower income folks for market rate units ten out of ten times. Per the law of supply and demand, all of that demand needs to be satisfied before market prices even have a chance of declining to affordable levels - and that’s only if the real estate industry decides it is profitable to keep building. Older units get renovated into luxury units as well.

That creates a real scalability problem for cities because you get a labor shortage. That drives up the cost of everything: education, restaurants, and you guessed it, construction itself.

That’s why social housing is such an international standard. Without affordable working class housing, the local economy becomes dysfunctional. And it echoes the debate we had about socialized medicine some years ago, the solution favored by pretty much all other developed countries, but always said to be too expensive or impractical to be done here, the richest country on the planet.

But we’re beginning to see some cracks in the narrative. And it clarifies why these right wing movements find the Abundance agenda so appealing.

[1] https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2025-06.pdf

But you've made the larger point of the article: The oligarchy that funds the YIMBY movement uses it as a political tool to slander and fight anti-oligarchy activists. Just moments after pointing to seemingly neutral, technical legislation on the minutiae of zoning reform, you descended into crazed mudslinging against tenants rights advocates and socialists.

Addendum:

I looked up Red Bridge Strategies and find no evidence they have opposed affordable housing developments. What I do see them supporting:[1]

* Yes on H! Rent Control for Pasadena

* Yes on M! Empty Homes Tax

* Tax on $10M Real Estate Sales to Fund Social Housing

* Gross Receipts Tax on Large Corps to Fund Homeless Services

and so on. These are all genuinely progressive/socialist positions consistent with promoting working class affordable housing and opposing landlords.

It seems like you've just been taken by this well-funded right wing disinformation campaign. I hope you can see the larger point of the article that this is indeed a coordinated political strategy designed to radicalize people like you (and tech industry professionals generally) into fighting to defend the oligarchy and undermine the kind of populist progressive movement we see Bernie/AOC trying to start up again lately, and that folks like Preston genuinely were a part of.

[1] https://www.redbridgewins.com/work

- The real estate lobby funds CA YIMBY and YIMBY candidates, not socialists.

- Dean Preston was a major tenants rights attorney who authored key legislation protecting tenants from evictions, not a landlord.

>What began as the Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) project’s narrow focus on zoning reform evolved into a sweeping pro-growth, neoliberal, and socially moderate brand of politics. “Abundance!” now serves as a rallying cry for a new kind of Democrat: techno-optimistic, skeptical of government, and supportive of a welfare state only when it comes with harsh restrictions.

There was a time when progressive social housing and market rate development advocates were united against NIMBY zoning rules. But these more conservative forces have come to dominate Yimby (through enormous amounts of funding) and direct its ire more generally against progressives that see oligarchy, not just zoning, as the primary problem in our society.

The answer is staring us right in the face.

It’s a catchy slogan and pulling tens of thousands even in deep red MAGA country.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/04/13/fighting-oli...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-04-12/bernie-san...

Your premise is these right-wing anti democratic ideologues are on the fringes of the YIMBY movement. That is not supported by the facts. I quoted just one passage demonstrating the literal partnership between a major tech leader / CA YIMBY / Abundance funder and a Peter Thiel funded right wing “Libertarian” with dark visions of police city states.

They are not at the fringes, they are at the heart of it and provide the major funding for it.

One of the “California Forever” billionaires, Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, looms large in Abundance world. Along with Open Philanthropy, he donated to fund a $120 million “Abundance” grant tied to Klein’s book release. Collison is a key backer and inspiration for the Institute for Progress (IFP), a think tank which works closely with others in the Abundance network, including at the Abundance 2024 conference. Collison co-founded “Progress Studies” with economist Tyler Cowen, born from their Atlantic article, “We Need a New Science of Progress.” While IFP isn’t officially a “Progress Studies” think tank, its mission aligns closely, and it has received funding from both Collison and Emergent Ventures, Cowen’s Mercatus Center grant program established with funding from Thiel. Klein and Thompson were interviewed by Collison on their book tour.

Cowen has his own interest in Network State style projects. Balaji Srinivasan, a cryptocurrency billionaire and Próspera funder, defines a Network State as “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world.” In this alternative governance structure, tech elites would create private, blockchain based enclaves—Srinivasan calls this “tech zionism.” Network States are founded on empty land, or by taking over an existing city—as Network State evangelists have attempted in San Francisco. Srinivasan even called for “ethnically cleansing” San Francisco of non-tech people.

Cowen is an early backer of Praxis, alongside Srinivasan and Thiel. Praxis describes itself as “a grassroots movement of modern pioneers,” aiming to build an autonomous, cryptocurrency city. Initial plans proposed a Mediterranean location, but last fall, the Praxis CEO tweeted “I went to Greenland to try to buy it.” Greenland, however, reiterated that the country is not for sale.

Cowen has been a protégé and friend of Thiel’s, citing him as a major influence. He advocates a form of government called “State Capacity Libertarianism” which, unlike anarcho-capitalism, includes a strong state apparatus. In Cowen’s words: “a good strong state should see the maintenance and extension of capitalism as one of its primary duties, in many cases its #1 duty.” He explicitly credits Thiel for inspiring this idea: “You will note the influence of Peter Thiel on State Capacity Libertarianism,” Cowen writes, “though I have never heard him frame the issues in this way.”

[1] https://www.housingisahumanright.org/why-is-california-yimby...

Sounds like this author didn't watch the whole video. They are completely open about the fact that the editing team collaborated through remoting. At 5:20 an editor specifically says they "remoted into the Mac mini."

The second half of the post raises an arguably good question about the need for fancy Macs when cloud-based workflows only require glorified terminals. But that too may misplaced here -- it's entirely possible that the team members each do local editing work and then host their own collaboration sessions.

So let’s consider this comment with that in mind:

* Meta is pissed off it doesn’t have more user data access inside Apple’s walled garden

* Meta makes more affordable VR glasses

* Meta released a high quality, developer friendly AI model

In other words, these are all Meta-friendly points.

I’m old enough to remember the Mac vs PC days when people would get utterly tribal on the internet about it. Maybe that’s where HN is at now. You can see why a startup focused third party developer community might lean towards busting open walled gardens.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/apple-meta-european-union-digital...

Not even remotely true.

Top voted comment is complaining about not being able to run Linux on the iPad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40207322

Top voted comment is wishing the US would do the same as the EU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773883

I theorize this is due to the overall startup versus incumbents focus as well as the hacker ethos of being opposed to more buttoned up closed systems meant for the general public. Like for example recent posts on EU regulation of Apple get generally favorable reactions and little analysis of actual consumer experience impact, of which Gruber is more keenly analytical.

E.g. most of us on HN would generally appreciate having opt-in side loading and whatnot onto our Apple devices, like macOS. So Gruber just sounds like some kind of apologist when he says this would hurt consumers in the large. We more advanced hacker types are quick to say PEBKAC.

But it’s a shame because his analysis actually offers really good insight in how to build successful consumer products the Apple way.

It is in fact a solvable problem. The binaries are indeed available for self hosting in a virtualized PCC node for research purposes.[1] Auditors can confirm that the binaries do not transmit data outside of the environment. There are several other aspects of the architecture that are designed to prevent use data from leaking outside of the node’s trust boundary, for example TLS terminates at the node level and nodes use encrypted local storage so user data is unreadable to any other node / part of the organization.

[1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

But there is a major difference that is germane to the topic of Apple’s investment in US server manufacturing: The hardware root of trust. Hardware tampering is the weak point and afaik AWS doesn’t describe any process to certify their supply chain integrity. I think the most they’ve done is commission a review of their architecture document.[1] PCC actually has an auditor sign each server node in the datacenter.

Thank you for mentioning them though. It’s an important advancement in generally available confidential computing infrastructure.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-nitro-system-gets-i...

I would go out on a limb and say Apple would love to also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they too as an organization cannot get away with planting a secret back door — not because they have pure angelic hearts, but because this is good for their privacy-differentiated business model. And PCC certainly makes a huge leap in that direction. But it’s not the problem it’s primarily targeting nor an easy one to solve completely.

As another example, Apple has an implementation of OHTTP onion routing[1] called iCloud Private Relay. It’s really cool and easy to use. The point is to make it so nobody but you can tell what website your IP address is connecting to, not even Apple, the operator of the relay. But bottom line, Apple picks who they collaborate with for the gateways and there’s nothing stopping them from colluding out of band to de-anonymize you if that’s what they wanted to do.

Does this defeat the purpose of iCloud Private Relay? No. Its purpose is to better protect you from common privacy attacks, better than a traditional VPN would. It happens to also narrow the trust you need to place in Apple, namely that they would need to collude with another company to defeat the system as opposed to some rogue lone wolf SRE deciding to access your logs. But it wasn’t put in place to make people who fundamentally distrust Apple as a company start trusting them.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9458/

PCC is designed to handle extensive personal data, and the auditing is attested by cryptographic proofs provided to software clients, not just white papers read by humans. It is significantly different from what we’ve seen before in the industry, and highly worth the effort to understand it if you are at all involved in server engineering.

PCC does actually prevent Apple from switching things in between audits to a high degree. It’s not like a food safety inspection. The auditor signs the hardware in a multi party key ceremony and they employ other countermeasure like chassis tamper switches. PCC clients use a protocol that ensures whatever they are connecting to has a valid signature. This is detailed in Apple’s documentation.[1]

See, this is why I think privacy engineering is low key the most cutting edge aspect of server development. Previously held axioms are made obsolete by architectural advancements. I think we’re looking at a once in 15 year leap - the previous ones being microservices and web based architecture.

[1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

You’re right, security is a matter of degrees not absolutes, but open source software requires considerably less trust than closed source. Right?

PCC applies this principle by making the binaries it runs public and auditable by you or anyone in the security community. (In some cases the source code as well.) The craziness is in the architecture that provides cryptographic proof to clients that the server they’re connecting to is running an audited binary and running on secure hardware. It even does TLS termination at the shard level so you can have high confidence that if the binary isn’t connecting to anything your data will be unreadable by any other server in the org.

So it goes way beyond trusting what the whitepaper says. Data center hardware deployments are audited by a third party that signs the servers in a key ceremony. That ultimately undergirds the cryptographic attestation that servers provide to clients that everything has been audited. And it’s also the element that tighter supply chain control helps shore up.

If you’re new to security the architecture documentation I linked to is a very friendly read and a good intro to some of these threats, countermeasures and rationales.

Why is PCC driving Apple to spend billions to build servers in the states? Because it is insane from a security standpoint (insanely awesome).

PCC is an order of magnitude more secure server platform than has ever been deployed for consumer use at planet scale. Secure and private enough to literally send your data and have it processed server side instead of on device without having to trust the host (Apple).[1] Until now the only way to do that was on device. If you sent your data for cloud processing, outside of something exotic like homomorphic encryption[2], you’d still have to trust that the host did a good job protecting your data, using it responsibly, and wasn’t compromised. Not the case with PCC.

To accomplish this Apple uses its own custom chips with Secure Enclaves that provide a trust foundation for the whole system, ultimately cryptographically guaranteeing that the binaries processing your data have been publicly audited by independent security auditors. This is the so called hardware root of trust.

It is essential then that the hardware deployed in data centers has not been physically tampered with. Without that the whole thing falls apart. So Apple has a whole section in their security white paper detailing an audited process for deploying data center hardware and ensuring supply chain integrity.[3]

You can imagine how that is the weak point in the system made more robust by managing it in the US. Tighter supply chain control.

[1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

[2] Fun fact, Apple also just deployed a homomorphic encryption powered search engine! It’s also insane!

[3] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

No, it's much broader than that. The UK is asking for a backdoor to your data and backups in the cloud, not on your device. Why bother with searching physical devices when they can just issue a secret subpoena to any account they want?

It's actually pretty amazing that Apple made ADP possible for the general public. This is the culmination of a major breakthrough in privacy architecture about ten years ago.

Traditionally you had to make a choice between end-to-end encryption and data recoverability. If you went with E2EE, it's only useful if you use a strong password, but if you forget it then Apple can't help you recover your account (no password reset possible). So that was totally unsuitable for precious memories like photos for the average user.

Apple's first attempt to make this feasible was a recovery key that you print out and stuff in a drawer somewhere. But you might lose this. The trusted contact feature is also not totally reliable either, because chances are it's your spouse and they might also lose their device at that same time as you (for example in a house fire).

So while recovery keys and trusted contacts help, the solution that really made the breakthrough for ADP was iCloud Keychain Backup. This thing is low-key so cool and kind of rips up the previous assumptions about E2EE.

iCloud Keychain Backup makes it possible to recover your data with a simple, weak 6 digit passcode that you are virtually guaranteed never to forget, yet you are also protected from brute force attacks on the server. It is specifically designed to work on "adversarial clouds" that are being actively attacked. This is... sort of not supposed to be possible in the traditional thinking. But they added something called hardware security modules to limit the number of guesses an attacker can make before it wipes your key.

And crucially it ensures you don't forget this passcode because it's your device passcode which the OS keeps in sync with the backup key. This is part of the reason your iPhone asks you to enter your passcode now and then even though your biometrics work just fine.

It is a true secret that only you know and can keep in your brain even when your house burns down and nobody (hopefully) can derive from something they can research about you. This didn't really exist for the general populace until smartphones came along. And that ultimately was the breakthrough that allowed for changing the conventional wisdom on E2EE.

iCloud Keychain Backup came out about a decade ago and it has taken this long to gradually test the feasibility of going 100% E2EE without significantly risking customer data loss. The UK is kind of panicking but when people see how well ADP protects their most personal data from breaches, I think they will demand it. It just wasn't practical before.

* Homomorphic encryption is nothing short of dark magic that makes it impossible for the server to know what you are searching for or what it’s responding with (at considerable greater computational expense).

* To make it scale they added differential privacy techniques that generate fake queries from clients to hide which shards are being queried. So rather than always querying every shard (private but expensive), clients precompute which shards are most likely to hold the nearest neighbor match for their query. By itself this would leak the nature of your query but then they bury these queries in a sea of noise across the fleet.

* They also slightly randomize and batch the queries into epochs so that they can’t even identify time-based traffic patterns.

* It’s all routed through an OHTTP-like private relay that anonymizes requests by stripping IP addresses. It does this by having the client connect to a relay that’s sort of like a VPN except the client passes it an encrypted destination address. The relay then hands this to a second relay run by another company which holds the decryption key, but doesn’t know your IP. So no one party can associate you with your destination. (This is actually the least groundbreaking part of the system.)

Academic paper here with all the details: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.06761

"A randomly generated UID is fused into the SoC at manufacturing time. Starting with A9 SoCs, the UID is generated by the Secure Enclave TRNG during manufacturing and written to the fuses using a software process that runs entirely in the Secure Enclave. This process protects the UID from being visible outside the device during manufacturing and therefore isn’t available for access or storage by Apple or any of its suppliers."[1]

But yes of course, you have to trust the manufacturer is not lying to you. PCC is about building on top of that fundamental trust to guard against a whole variety of other attacks.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-enclave-sec5...

There is actually a third party auditor involved in certifying hardware integrity prior to deployment.[1]

But yes, the goal is to protect against rogue agents and hackers (and software bugs!), not to prove that Apple as an organization has fundamentally designed backdoors into the secure element of their silicon.

[1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

Just want to point out that Apple has designed in a certain degree of protection against this attack, and they talk about it![1]

In a nutshell they do two things: supply chain hardening and target diffusion. Supply chain hardening involves multiple verification checkpoints. And target diffusion greatly limits the utility of a small-scale compromise of a few nodes, because users are not partitioned by node. Together these mean the entire system would have to be compromised from manufacturing to data center and across all or most nodes. Which is certainly possible! But it's a significant raising of the bar above your "run of the mill" state-sponsored shipment interdiction or data center compromise.

[1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

I would not say "plenty." The protocol that clients use to connect to a PCC node leverages code signing to verify the node is running an authentic, published binary. That code signing is backed by the secure element in Apple's custom hardware (and is part of the reason PCC can only run on this custom hardware, never third party clouds). So to attack this you'd really have to attack the hardware root of trust. Apple details the measures they take here.[1]

Having said that, it would be a mistake to assume Apple is trying to cryptographically prove that Apple is not a fundamentally malicious actor that has designed a system to trick you. That's not the goal here.

What they are providing a high level of guarantee for is that your data is safe from things like a rogue internal actor, a critical software vulnerability, an inadvertent debug log data leak, or a government subpoena. That's a huge step forward and nowhere near what other architectures can guarantee in an independently verifiable way.

[1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

That is incorrect! The binaries are public and inspectable by anyone. The tools for doing it are bundled right into macOS -- like literally on every consumer's machine.[1]

Furthermore the protocol for connecting to a PCC node involves cryptographic proof that it's running a published binary.

[1] https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

I mean that’s fair but I don’t think the goal here is to offer that level of guarantee. For example their ceremony involves people from 3 other Apple organizational units, plus the auditor. It’s mostly Apple doing the certification. They’re not trying to guard too heavily against the “I don’t trust Apple is trying to fool me” concern.

What this does protect you from is stuff like a rogue internal actor, software vulnerability, or government subpoena. The PCC nodes are “airtight” and provably do not retain or share data. This is auditable by the whole security community and clients can verify they are communicating with an auditable binary. It’s not just a white paper.

That’s an enormous step up from the status quo.

You can also audit that the binaries don’t leak any data in, say, debug logs, which is definitely possible on GCP/Borg. PCC nodes are “cryptographically airtight.”