duped

I'm also an espresso snob and got the complete opposite take. The idea of decoupling grind size and brew time from yield is super interesting. The only other device I'm aware of that does this is a pressurized portafilter basket but that's only there for people that don't have good enough grinders.

Establishing fast/secure P2P connections between computers.

At what level do you think a business stops experiencing market forces and starts dictating them, to the detriment of competition, consumers, and employees?

Because I don't think you can build a billion dollar home construction empire where you profit $50k per home in perpetuity. You will have to lower your margins, cut others in on your profits to stop them from competing with you, or manipulate markets to never make a loss on a project.

Forensics is the art of manufacturing evidence to convict people.

Ok that's a bit aggressive, but it's important to understand the limits of forensic science, the broken incentives, and systemic lack of rigor in the application of various analyses and products to inculpate/exculpate suspects after the fact.

> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

- Paul Graham, "What We Look For in Founders"

I also want to add my own characterization.

It is my personal experience with YC founders that YC has coached them in business practices and philosophy that could be characterized less than charitably as "how to con people and get away with it."

I understand the PG doesn't believe this himself and every partner has different advice. But there is a consistent pattern of dishonesty and manipulation that is not innate to founders but taught to them directly by YC partners and it is impossible for me to square this essay with how those founders PG has coached over the last 20 years behave.

Maybe it's possible to become a billionaire without cheating. But all I know is YC won't teach you how.

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Aside, it deeply bothers me how tone deaf pg is politically. There is a meta to AOC's messaging that he's not reading, which is that wealth is unattainable for the masses and there are oligarchs in our society manipulating our systems to empower and enrich themselves. You are making a rhetorical error by attempting to debate a single sound bite instead of addressing the systemic problems that AOC and progressive democrats are voicing.

As a means of reducing incidence of drug use, prohibition does in fact work.

The main beef is the noise created around these disclosures instead of sending patches to fix the bugs.

One dude running an X account is not indicative of a community to be honest.

That said, that dude has a point. "Researchers" chasing clout with their names attached to CVEs is kind of ridiculous. Half these CVEs are missing bounds checks that can be fixed with a patch in as much effort as writing up the blog post announcing that there was a missing bounds check.

Hardware and software have to interface at some point. When the people designing the hardware work at the company designing the software it's not unreasonable for them to come to some shared understanding of that interface which may not be standard, portable, or even publicly documented, and certainly not one that is stable.

This isn't incompatible with allowing users to install their own software. There just isn't an obligation on the original designers to make sure that software works. That onus is on the designers of that software.

I don't think it's unreasonable for a device manufacturer to tightly couple it to the software they design to run on it.

Anthropic has pretty consistently been shitty about how they roll out their software. Extreme lack of engineering rigor and thoughtfulness.

The answer is probably as simple as "no one thought not to do that."

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I know different people work on these things so I can't do more than guess about how engineering culture cuts across teams, but given the sheer amount of carelessness and sloppiness in Anthropic's software I have to imagine they're burning investor money in training and inference because the code to do it is as bad as the rest of their software.

You can also pick "none of the above." These things don't need to exist. Not all market demand needs to be met.

Global freedom of movement was an inalienable right until European colonial powers noticed some of their colonies' peoples wanted to move to Europe.

Large scale global movement is indicative of failure to uplift the globe from violence, poverty, and climate change. It makes a lot more sense to me for the global powers who don't want mass migration to do something to fix its causes instead of retreating inward and succumbing to nativism.

> It links to a .so file which reads the executable header, allocates memory, loads the program, gets it ready to run, and starts it. The program loader runs in user space and is unprivileged. This is probably the right way to do it.

aiui this is what exec does, the problem outlined here is the split between process creation (expensive, kernel space, has to be done each time even if spawning the same process "template" repeatedly) and loading (cheap and in userspace).

I'm actively trying to remove my own ignorance of the domain which is why I posed the question! You're not breaking confidentiality by saying "I need X to solve Y problem which is offered by Z and we can't expose even the application layer interfaces." Right now it sounds like you don't have an answer, or even understand the question.

Getting all defensive and not answering it doesn't really help your industry's case here.

I'm not interested in hypotheticals. In AAA games that you have worked on, concretely what 3rd party code did your servers rely on that would prevent you from distributing either the server itself or sufficient description of the servers' behavior to allow a reimplementation?

And even if we're talking hypotheticals: stupid example. I haven't worked on a backend where the actual server infrastructure wasn't open source, trivial to open source because it was first party, or irrelevant because the only thing that matters would be the API and protocols, which again, trivial to make open.

s/web/networked computers/g

What I'm saying is you have programs running on user machines, and programs running on your machines. There's an interface between those two over a network. There's a problem that consumers face today where they pay to play games that are not functional without data flowing over that interface.

There's a claim that implementing the backend side of that interface is so complex and impossible or too difficult/time consuming/etc to design in a way without 3rd party dependencies.

I'm asking: what are those 3rd party libraries doing? And why can't you design server APIs and client code in a way to provide a different backend if consumers need to do it themselves when you stop supporting the game?

The "server" being the computer program not running on a user device. The intent of the initiative is to allow people to substitute or replace that program to allow the game to continue to function even if the original publisher/developer disables access to it.

It's pretty obvious to me as a gamer and engineer what the intent and design constraints are here, so I'm just wondering what makes this seem impossible?

This is kind of needless aggression that doesn't help non domain experts understand.

I've worked on a lot of complicated and deeply optimized networked applications. They're almost all closed source. I know exactly how I would design a system to support these kinds of initiatives. What I'm curious about is why that's impossible for game developers, because either I'm missing something, or game developers are just bad at software design.

I mean it absolutely is, but that's not an answer to the question.

I guess what surprises me here is how much of this is 3p code that couldn't possibly be distributed. Like why would you not be using an open source web server, or widely available message broker? Things like chat moderation/match making/anti cheat/etc seem like add on services that would be implemented per game (well, maybe not match making) and aren't relevant to the problem that the "stop killing games" people are trying to solve.

Sure but you don't link in Oracle/MS's database cluster orchestrators to your server, right?

On the web backend?

Genuinely curious - what third party closed source dependencies are they using? Like what is their purpose?

So this might be controversial and I'm unable to phrase it better, but you can't always engage in good faith to address claims when the claimant themselves are incapable of engaging in good faith to make them.

I could be convinced on negative environmental impact of data centers in a few ways. I could believe there's additional strain on water purification infrastructure if the open loop cooling systems are using additives and creating additional volume of water that existing treatment plants weren't designed to handle. I could believe that additional power demand and on-site generators using fossil fuels could create pollution where it didn't exist before. I could believe that in a rush to build quicker, construction crews take shortcuts.

Basically all industrial activity on this planet creates waste that can harm people. That's why we create zones for it away from residences, and why land closer to it is cheaper.

This is all stuff you can engage with good faith. The problem is these are not the claims that the crazy people are making, and not the ones it sounds like the author of TFA is bothering to investigate. There's a large group of people that will believe "thing bad, thing hurt" with zero evidence besides vibes, and you can't meet with psychosis on shared ground.

I'm as big of a skeptic on these AI companies and question deeply the long term value of data center buildout as a land use policy in the communities where they're being built. But:

> So let me ask the question directly: if AI data centers are such a tremendous benefit to communities, why are so many of them being built without meaningful community input?

Because of this (emphasis mine):

> They’re watching their utility bills climb, finding sick animals they can’t explain, and worrying about the long-term impacts on their health and property values

How are you supposed to have reasonable discussion about land use, economic impacts, zoning, etc when you're getting flooded with input from crockpots?

Bills are not hard to read. Especially the closer to local government you get. The problem is that bills are worth the paper they're written on until courts affirm what the language means in the context of the legal system.

It makes me sad to read someone rejecting humanity.

Why do you deliberately misread my comments? I am not talking about your "experience."

Investors would never give billions of dollars to liars