bjt

Increased tuition is not primarily going to pay higher salaries to professors. It's mostly going to hiring lots more administrators. https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...

> I have this theory that there's institutional money burning a hole in various institution's collective pockets.

That was very much the case before the Fed started raising interest rates.

The term "zero interest rate phenomenon" was created to describe it.

Now that rates are up, people sitting on piles of money can just put it to work in more traditional lending (e.g. buying bonds) instead of needing to look around for weird startups to put it in.

Create a private right of action. If creator A can show that AI trainer B used their works (e.g. like how we've seen Getty watermarks show up in AI generated pics), then they can sue for $X dollars.

Too simple. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240228-leap-year-the-im...

> As a rule of thumb, leap days come around every four years. But there are exceptions to this rule. For example, at the turn of every century we miss a leap year. Even though the year is divisible by four, we don't add a leap day in the years that end in 00. But there's an exception to this rule too. If the year is a multiple of 400 then we do add in an extra leap day again. At the turn of the millennium, despite being divisible by 100, the year 2000 did, in fact, have a 29 February because it was also divisible by 400.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240228-leap-year-the-im...

Rye wraps uv now.

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/2/15/rye-grows-with-uv/

Factors that I see from the article that are driving up shopping costs/delays:

1. Unexpected problems in key canals. (Houthi attacks on the Suez route and drought on the Panama route.)

2. Possibly some market manipulation by carriers. (The article gestures in this direction but doesn't actually claim collusion to fix prices.)

3. Demand is really high. This drives the congestion in key ports that the article mentioned.

The article text doesn't emphasize factor 3 much, but the subtext of that is everywhere. And that's actually a good thing. Lots of things being shipped means lots of economic activity means lots of jobs etc etc.

tl;dr The world is complicated and sometimes multiple factors combine to make things like this flare up.

My bet: We are going to be fine. The actors in this system will adapt, especially from price signals. Supply of shipping will go up a bit, demand will go down a bit, people will find alternate routes/ports/methods for getting their goods where they want them.

We did a book club on this at work a few years back. I found it extremely repetitive.

You're not just "picking a startup". That early, you're also a big factor in whether it succeeds. Betting on yourself is different than buying a lottery ticket. (Maybe just as irrational for a lot of people, but still.)

I don't think it works if we're narrowly focused just on wages, but I don't know why that has to be the only focus. If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.

I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while minimizing the disincentives for people to work. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-incom...

It's about deterrence. Imagine you're considering committing a crime. You're looking at the upside and the downside. The equation on the downside looks like this:

risk = size of punishment * probability of being caught.

So how do you deter a potential criminal who is unlikely to get caught? You have to jack up the size of the punishment to compensate for that low probability.

Economist Gary Becker started this school of thought in the 60s and it's been implemented and debated in a million ways since then. Example: https://masonlec.org/site/rte_uploads/files/JEP/Readings/But...

Selection effect here. Plenty of old houses weren't built to last. You just don't see them anymore because they're gone.

That's a really weird argument. Copyright is a legal system created by the Constitution and statutes and administrative rules. It cares about whether you are "copying", and it cares about whether you're creating things that compete with the works of the original authors. It doesn't care about potential output spaces.

In this context, I don't see a principled difference between the model weights and really good compression. If I send you a gzipped copy of the latest bestseller book it's still copyright infringement. And it would still be infringement if I shipped it inside a software program that can _also_ reshuffle the words in a bajillion different ways, if there's a "copy" of the original work in there.

From the article:

> Last September, the US Copyright Review Board decided that an image generated using Midjourney’s software could not be copyright due to how it was produced.

> It's the job of a regulatory body to reduce risk.

Sure, and the parent comment's point was that there's a line where further risk reduction doesn't make sense anymore. The agency doesn't have the right incentives to stop at that line.

Plenty of very significant risks aren't regulated to the degree that Viagra and Cialis are. You don't need a note from a doctor or a govt-issued permit to buy kitchen knives or a table saw or a Bic lighter, for example.

There are more options than just "ban" and "don't ban".

You could pass a law imposing strict liability all the way up the supply chain, up to and including the importers.

If a worker gets sick, they could sue for damages, maybe even punitive damages, from their employer, any middlemen, and the importer.

If you align the incentives right, companies will figure out how to enforce PPE usage.

If you know which type of uuid you have (v1, v4, etc) then you can take a look at how many bits of randomness it has, how many total items you have, and compute the probability of a collision if you just take a subset of the bits and use that as an ID.

In theory it's definitely possible. The 128 bits you get in a UUID is a LOT of randomness for an identifier. Postgres BIGINTs are just 64 bits. Instagram's sharded IDs are just 64 bits. (See below.)

You can test it. If you're using uuidv4 (which is 100% random bits, minus a few for the version), you could make a new column in your table in Snowflake, populate it with the first 64 random bits of your existing uuid column, then see if you have any collisions.

https://instagram-engineering.com/sharding-ids-at-instagram-...

I think the most important place to start is appreciating the distinction between authentication ("is the person trying to use my application really the person they say they are?", abbreviated "authn") and authorization ("is this person allowed to perform the action they're trying to perform?", abbreviated "authz").

Most of the comments on this page are referring to authentication. It's important to know, but also the piece you're likely to spend far less time on. It's where most of the heavy lifting will be done by some vendor or tool you set up instead of by your own code.

Authorization is far less likely to be something you get off the shelf and far more likely to be where you spend significant time. It can be very intimately connected to your business logic. Active Directory roles and groups are one authorization solution for a particular class of problems but I have only seen them used for controlling business internal assets (mostly file servers); not public-facing applications.

I really like Oso Academy as a resource for authorization topics. It's structured like a progressive course, though I don't know if they have the kind of exercises you mentioned.

https://www.osohq.com/academy

> something fun or more interesting

I think that's the key point really. For someone with even a mild interest in this stuff, the task of running ethernet cables is very approachable and feasible. At that point the time spent on it is a plus instead of a minus, and paying someone else is no longer competitive.

I remember at the time there was a "Silicon Valley rides to the rescue" subtext. Though a Silicon Valley person myself, that rubs me the wrong way.

I appreciate the author resisting that framing, and admitting that on that first day, the contribution of the new team was basically to ask "Can we install New Relic on the servers?" The response to that question really illustrates the root of the problem, in my opinion. It's not that the people who built the original healthcare.gov were stupid people. It's that they were operating under constraints and incentives that emphasize rules and compliance over making the whole system work well.

Potentially valid concerns, but not what copyright law was designed to address. Mazda can easily prohibit their own customers from doing this kind of thing in their terms of service if they want.

It's a balance. If you get too specific then your laws quickly become outdated as technology and society evolve. Or you miss corner cases by not enumerating every little scenario.

So there are different tiers to deal with this.

- Constitution - Very abstract and very rarely changed.

- Statute - Sometimes abstract, sometimes specific.

- Administrative rules. Very technical but still intended for broad application.

- Individual court cases. Can be hyper specific.

At least in the US, it's not the drafters' intent that matters, but the intent of the legislators who voted on it. (Legislators actually have lawmaking power. Drafters are usually unelected staff or even lobbyists.)

When a statute is ambiguous, courts do sometimes look at the congressional record (eg floor debates) to determine intent.

Books are one example on the spectrum of types of content here. They're not enough on their own. A book is a poor source for an in-depth look at pending legislation, for example.

Essays, short stories, deep investigative news stories, etc. also all fall into the "long form" bucket. A lot of those had their natural homes in magazines and newspapers, and those have taken huge hits as people's attention has turned to short, viral, online things instead.

Though I'm no fan of the LDS church's dominance in Utah politics, your assessment of their stance on the environment seems off base.

Example: This recent donation of agricultural water rights that they owned, to divert the water into lake preservation instead.

https://naturalresources.utah.gov/dnr-newsfeed/church-donate...

It's a good point but also not that cut and dry. Chrome started as Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which was part of the very open source KDE.

Has Google benefitted more from other people's open source contributions, or have we benefitted more from Google's open source contributions? The answer is not obvious to me.

At a startup, the employees are also shareholders.

I'd add the biggest risk of over-engineering: Building the wrong thing. Very often, the needs we anticipate end up not being realized.

> I can't imagine any state or religion banning caffeine.

Coffee and tea have been banned for practicing Mormons for a long time. Caffeinated soda was kind of an "extra credit" ban for decades until the church more recently started pulling back on that.

https://www.npr.org/2016/01/03/461843938/can-mormons-drink-c...

It invented an answer for something that AWS actually can't do right now.

https://imgur.com/a/0IYZ2WV