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cakeface

724 karma · joined December 4, 2008

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cakeface··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
Bluesky strikes a balance between the federated Mastodon and the Twitter walled garden.
cakeface··on Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
More distillation please. This is only good for me.
cakeface··on Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors
I don't think it's right to categorize "no consequences".

Leadership made a decision and that decision was bad. This happens all the time, including allocating budget for staff. Any effective organization is going to judge the outcomes of these types of decisions and it's going to come up in performance and hiring. If this was an isolated situation then possibly they won't fire anyone over it. But you really need the context to judge whether the response was correct.

Wasting company resources and making the company look bad in the press won't be rewarded, and that includes at the board level to the CEO.

cakeface··on Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos
The “all human access” is doing work also. Most access will likely be from AI agents.
cakeface··on Claude Opus 4.7
You used a secret backup test! Truly honored to see the flamingos. We obviously need them all now ;-)
cakeface··on Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf
dot-com bubble companies were not good companies. They either built something that was not novel so it could be copied, or had insufficient value to monetize. We'll see the same with current AI.

Similar to the invention of the web, AI is not a bubble. Real value has been created.

cakeface··on Darwin's children drew all over the “On the Origin of Species” manuscript (2014)
I think of certain types of knowledge as one way functions. In order to acquire the knowledge you have to search a huge key space or experience costly elimination of options. Once you know the answer it feels obvious and intuitive. We have accumulated so much of this knowledge now that we have a hard time intuitively understanding the gap between people without it and us.
cakeface··on Building a highly-available web service without a database
You built a database.
cakeface··on FBI Raids Big Corporate Landlord over Nationwide Rent Hikes
Like air travel and hotel rooms. Even market based approaches like eBay have different prices for the same things. I'm not for dynamic pricing but it's pretty common.
cakeface··on Limitless: Personalized AI powered by what you've seen, said, and heard
Aren't there wiretapping laws that make recording conversations in certain situations illegal? I love the idea of this type of technology but it seems tricky to deploy from a moral and legal perspective.
cakeface··on Sunday service suspended at all NYPL locations
Tax the billionaires. Tax the vacant real estate holdings at the high end. Tax short term rentals.
cakeface··on Heisting $20M of Magic: The Gathering Cards in a Single Request
I'm generally a proponent of soft limits on almost everything. It's better to hit some artificial cap than to end up chewing away on a transaction forever or crashing some service that can't allocate the memory to deal with it. In this case a limit on gems in an account, packs in a transaction, packs in an account, etc.
cakeface··on EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
I suspect your question is rhetorical but I, and quite a few other Marxists, would say yes. Dividends, stock buybacks and other types of profit should be banned.
cakeface··on Twilio’s toll fraud problem
How is this a workable system!? Why would anyone pay them. This seems like fraud on the part of the phone networks for billing for service that was never provided or should have been provided cheaper.
cakeface··on Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
I am more and more worried that shutting down Twitter is and has been the plan. This is about controlling speech a different way.
cakeface··on Database Review 2021
Dynamodb is very scalable and effective at keeping operational cost down. It succeeds at it's goals by trading off on lots of things though. As a developer it can feel almost hostile. Adhoc queries are limited almost forcing you to have a complete second copy of the data. Access patterns must be designed up front and hope you don't need to change much when you hit scale. The tooling is meh. It's easier to make a scalable database when you push all those problems on your devs. Constraints are tricky. Transactions must be carefully designed. It's nice to know that almost definitely read and write throughput will scale and you can reduce the DBA/DevOps staff because AWS handles it.
cakeface··on New Hampshire set to pilot voting machines that use software everyone can see
You can see the source code on github https://github.com/votingworks/vxsuite

Looks to be TypeScript running on node. They have an embedded kiosk browser.

cakeface··on Skipping the boring parts of building a database using FoundationDB
postgres has a version of this preempts idea with default values on columns. postgres will fill in the value at query time without needing to backfill the data. postgres is not a horizontally scalable database like FDB so not a direct comparison. In practice this means the migration lock is much shorter and it becomes possible to actually have a default in large tables.
cakeface··on Exploring 12M of the 2.3B images used to train Stable Diffusion
In which I run `order by punsafe desc` and immediately regret it.
cakeface··on A single prophylactic 200mg dose of Doxycyline prevents Lyme disease
Tick bites are not mostly avoidable. It is mostly avoidable to have one on you for > 24 hours by checking constantly. Numbers of ticks have increased the past 2 years in my area of NH. I have gotten them walking from my car to the house. Also if you have animals that are treated with tick medicine they bring the ticks inside and then the tick drops off so you can get them in your house.
cakeface··on Italy’s main University in Milan just banned teaching Dostoevsky
I think holding the citizens of a country responsible for the actions of the government of their country is not completely unreasonable.
cakeface··on Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order
Is it possible for me to request that Clearview remove any pictures of myself that they have? I'd like to do that.
cakeface··on The Big DevOps Misunderstanding
As a developer your stack goes all the way down. An issue with a TCP 3 way handshake to your application load balancer is still an issue. An error in the filesystem that results in customer impact is still your responsibility. We can work with specialists but ultimately it is a team that owns their software running in production.

Many of the things you listed are well known, monitored, and tuned by software engineers operating their software. Especially connection pools and memory settings.

cakeface··on Wirecutter asks users to sit out black Friday
Any recommendations for taming the sea of options? I'm going to buy something and I am not able to research every purchase myself. How can I get a better result than random choice?
cakeface··on Wirecutter asks users to sit out black Friday
What is going on here? And what is Wirecutter union? Also, is anyone else frustrated that Wirecutter went behind a paywall? I thought that the whole point was that they made their money off of affiliate marketing. I was happy to buy things through Wirecutter because they gave great advice and hey, I was going to buy it anyway. But the paywall thing I just do not get. I'm not buying things through the Wirecutter anymore and I don't recommend it either. I'm in tech and so of course random people ask me "which doodad should I buy?" Frequently. My answer used to be "Just get whatever the Wirecutter says, that's what I do." Now no more. It's even more stupid because I have a NYT subscription! But that's not enough?!
cakeface··on Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones
I think that this is a great point. It's also a little scary when you think about the data sets that exist out there for advertising. Any way that someone targets an ad could be the selection criteria for these efficient wars.

My next thought is that programmers do have an opportunity to take moral stands against some of these things. We can't stop someone somewhere from building these terrible things but we might be able to make it harder by preventing huge problematic privacy invading data sets from existing.

cakeface··on Open Source Ventilator Project
OK, can I just take a moment to say that cystic fibrosis sounds absolutely awful and I have a newfound horror of the disease coupled with a whole lot of sympathy for you and others who are living with it.

You are heard. I wish you only the best and I am sorry that you and others have experienced what you have.

One of the things that I am trying to maintain in the face of covid-19 is perspective. Generally this has meant that yes, something awful is happening, but that doesn't invalidate the wonderful things also happening and it's OK for me to feel joy. Now I also have some perspective that there are other absolutely horrible things and we should not minimize those either.

Sending you and yours my best hope and love.

cakeface··on Show HN: A directory of restaurants with links to buy gift cards to support them
Interest free microloans might be exactly what is needed to keep these businesses viable. The ability to spread out the impact over a year could be critical. This might not be enough, but it's good. Better is better.

There are a variety of reasons why letting the restaurant go under is really inefficient for everyone. The overhead of shutting down one business and starting another adds up to waste.

cakeface··on Show HN: A directory of restaurants with links to buy gift cards to support them
There is also https://rallyforrestaurants.com/

Great to see people coming up with creative ways to support the restaurant community. These efforts should be critical to keep the business running and take out and delivery will keep back of house employees working. I'm still really concerned about front of house employees. What can be done for servers, bartenders, hosts?

cakeface··on Builders Ditch Nest After Google Ties Devices to Digital Assistant
I don't think that the devices themselves need to be hackable so much as the protocols need to be open. Any phone I buy works with any router. I think that's the kind of openness we need.
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