ep103

It wouldn't be a difficult situation if these guys were ethical shops from the get-go, but they aren't, they're trying to staple minimally required ethics on afterwards, and it shows.

This is prime HR style lying. The response is: Problem statement. Claim that reality is the opposite of the problem statement, with no justification given, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. Statement that if reality doesn't match their claim, the worker is at fault. End of statement.

Dystopian, infuriating, unethical and immoral.

SWIM worked as a PM at a company that decided to redo their UI. They ran into an issue on internal roll out, where they discovered their support team for years had been doing sql injection on a specific form in the UI, in order to run reports on the company's database. They had to stop the roll out, and productionize the support team's (very valid) use cases in order to remove the sql injection form.

I think you've drawn the wrong conclusions from the history of the web.

The web started out idealistic, and became what it did because of underregulated market forces.

The same thing will happen to ai.

First, a cool new technology that is a bit dubious. Then a consolidation, even if or while local models proliferate. Then degraded quality as utility is replaced with monetization of responses, except in an llm you wont have the ability to either block ads or understand the honesty of the response.

This is already the way my company wants to go.

Put MCP in front of every GET API, and let teams explore on their own

> Now we have fuzzy inputs, fuzzy outputs

_For this implementation, our engineers chose_ to have fuzzy inputs, fuzzy outputs

There, fixed that for you

Yeah, writing a script can be the cheapest part. Developing a full script, and getting that plot vision expressed on screen, blocking the meddling along the way... THAT's expensive.

I think the primary thing I've learned about open vs closed source products this last decade, is that the difference in marketing is huge.

Both Firefox and Chrome are great browsers, end stop.

But most articles on HN about Chrome start with glowing praise.

And most articles on HN about Firefox start with "What's wrong with FF" and condescention.

I'm past the point of thinking that this is actually reflective about the browsers and their organizations.

Chrome is actively ending ad block support in its plugins. Its CEO is actively engaging in the political process. Firefox has always had a messy relationship with advertising, in which it generally tries to walk the line between reality and ideology. There are pros and cons to both products, depending on what you care about. The fact that articles on each browser so consistently fall into the same pattern does not seem reflective of the actual products themselves.

I think the difference is down to marketing.

Yeah, I'm not in the movie industry or anything, but it seems to me like if one was so inclined, they could put together a list of all of the things that have to be done well in order to make a fantastic movie.

If we ignored all of the things that aren't obvious in the end product, like market research and staff salaries, etc, I think it would probably look something like:

  * Plot
      * Well written
      * Inherent meaning
      * Intelligent
  * Acting / Directing
    * Name brand actors
    * Size of cast
  * Cinematography
  * Music
  * CGI / Special Effects / Locations
  * Props / Clothes / Styles / etc
  * Action budget (choreography, explosions, etc)
  * Marketing / Marketability
  * Release logistics

Its rare that someone, usually a director, becomes a large enough force in Hollywood that they can actually get the funding and political pull to invest in every category. Most films sacrifice a few of them to put out a lower quality but hopefully still acceptable product.

What's interesting to me about a list like this, is that they are by no means equal in terms of cost and profit.

Marketing and Releasing internationally have major ROI, so every film leans as heavily into both as they can afford.

After that, Cinematography, music, CGI, props, and action budget are all far, far cheaper than the other items on this list. Which is how you wind up with so many beautiful looking movies that you leave wondering "really, did no one spend 5 minutes thinking about X in the plot? How do you spend this much money on a movie and not consider X?"

Similarly, Plot is probably the one thing on this list where creators can exchange time for capital. If you are low on capital, you might be priced out of better actors, and you won't be able to buy them on layaway, but you might be able to survive off of ramen for a few years while really building out a fantastic script. Hence why we see so many interesting indie films invest heavily into this aspect of their movies.

And that's before you start factoring in things like trying to make a plot that is accessible to world-wide release in every culture, or factoring the plot requirements particularly restrictive governments and cultures (China) will have about your movie in order to access their markets.

So yeah, most of the time when I see a movie now, I've noticed I'm more or less giving a score into how much I think the movie producers invested into each of these categories, to bucket the overall film. You invested 3/10 in every category, but tried for 10/10 plot? Okay, indie film, we'll judge you accordingly. Or, oh, this is another all-cgi-all-cinematography-all-big-actor-no-plot movie? Okay, judge it against the other AAA marketed B movies.

This is what we used to do, because in one friend group there would be 3 mikes and 2 steves. At some point, you have to use nicknames or last names.

Okay, so how do I set up the sort of agent / feedback loop he is describing? Can someone point me in the direction to do that?

So far all I've done is just open up the windsurf IDE.

Do I have to set this up from scratch?

So basically the current system? I say that mostly, but not entirely, jokingly. : )

They did. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that while the President is in charge of foreign policy, and can deport people however, these people have to see a court room before they are deported. Yesterday, Trump made various statements that heavily leaned towards not obeying that order. The rest of the Republican Party supports these actions.

That's where we're at at the moment.

Oh, that's easy. I choose #3

3: The top of the economic ladder reacts to worsening conditions by switching from promoting riskier growth based economic policies from which they might glean opportunities from new wealth, to allowing only status-quo reaffirming policies in an attempt to protect their already aggregated wealth and positions of economic power.

This leads to worsening economic and social conditions for all non-elite parts of the population, as their economic and social issues are left unaddressed and thereby worsen under the status-quo.

This leads to more pressure for the body politic to act to solve those problems, but as the top of the economic ladder now only endorses policies that support the status quo, a new political movement will need to grow that focuses only on stagnating and blocking any attempt for the government to act. All proposed reforms that allow the government to act for the benefit of the masses are blocked, all existing abilities of the government to help the masses are hollowed.

This worsens economic and social conditions, which then means this becomes a catch-22.

The political entities that are responsible for this dynamic, out of quiet guilt, instead begin lauding themselves that their actions are not the cause of worsening conditions for the masses, but are instead the realization of the representation of the ideological soul of their nation. This leaves these individuals intentionally deaf to the possibility that they might be wrong, and further reinforces their inability to compromise or present solutions that would challenge the current status-quo. This also becomes a catch-22, and can reach the point of fetishization. It also increases the tendency of this political class to promote policies that are ideologically driven political projects that hurt the country economically, because they fundamentally arise from a position that large parts of the population are not true citizens and deserve punishment.

If this trend continues unchecked, as things continue to worsen, merely rendering government unresponsive becomes insufficient. So it results in the election of strong-men type characters that sell themselves to the populace as being the only ones capable of breaking the political deadlock that prevents solutions to issues within the country, while simultaneously promising to their richest funders that they will actually use their power to further entrench the positions and wealth of the existing economic elite.

This creates a new group of politicians that seek power for themselves by exploiting this new dynamic, where they compete by their willingness to break cultural norms in order to service these two groups, and much later, a reactionary progressive cadre that functions similarly on the opposing side.

This new dynamic worsens the economic and social issues at play, as the crumbling competency of hollowed out social norms and institutions lose their ability to function as effectively for the mass populace until the standard of living has fallen sufficiently to match the capabilities of the country to support it, and an increasingly deaf and authoritarian political class is far less effective at managing the needs of the people than in the previous more-decentralized state. Quality of life continues to drop, either slowly over time, or violently.

At this point, the new political class will consider usurping power and wealth from the rich elite, as there are no longer legal norms to constrain them.

Regardless, with decreased capacity in an ill functioning state, where the new political elite has acquired power by servicing an elite class focused on maintaining wealth instead of driving growth in the nation, the country loses its ability to compete economically with rival nations, and begins falling further and further behind, thereby worsening the above cycle.

But what you have to remember, is its all worth it, because the alternative includes potential taxes, promoting policies to raise wages, or reinvesting in your fellow countrymen, and those things are all worse than what I just described /s

> Scientist: Hurrah! We have created an algorithm that can mimic human speech!

> CEO: Fantastic! I've already fired all of the doctors and nurses, how soon can it start doing surgeries?

> Scientist: ...

A few years after a greenfield rewrite, the codebase is going to go back to the same level of quality it was before the rewrite, because the level of code quality is a function of the competency of the team, not the tech stack.

The only time it really makes sense to do a rewrite, is when either a new architecture/technology is going to be used that will impact team competency, or the team's competency has improved significantly but is being held back by the legacy application.

In both of those situations though, you could and should absolutely cut the application into pieces, and rewrite in place, in digestible, testable chunks.

The only time it makes sense to do a wholesale greenfield rewrite, is political. For example, maybe you have a one-time funding opportunity, with a hard deadline (rewrite before acquisition or ipo, etc).

Right, its because a law should be passed regulating this sort of data for the good of all citizens, but our congress can't / won't pass that, so they only stepped in when it became an obvious national security concern.

It'll come back as an issue in a less obvious manner next time, and every time until they pass such a law.

Which, imho, won't happen while our overall political environment remains conservatively dominant.

tl;dr: AI is looking to convey words. A good author is looking to efficiently convey information.

Because that's literally what it is. Its an algorithm that is continuously asking itself, 'what is the most likely word I should say next?'

Whereas an author that is intending to communicate a point, will start with an idea, write a passage to explain the idea, and then edit their passage to the minimum number of words that most precisely, accurately, and succinctly communicates that idea.

Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Sounds like the sorta thing AI would write

I try to eat meat to minimize the formula of:

cruelty_cow = IntModifier * Animal_Intelligence /(AmountOfProvidedMeat/Deaths) * FrequencyOfEatingThisAnimal

Solve for:

Min (cruelty_cow + cruelty_pig + cruelty_octopus + ...)

Where AmountOfProvidedMeat > NeededMeatForHealthyDiet

And Cost * AmountOfProvidedMeat < Food_Budget

I've generally found that maximizing on Fish, Chicken, and Cow (in that order) seems to be the best bet. I tend not to touch veal, lamb, or octopus.

USA is being left behind while regressives try to move us back to a time when cheap oil could be easily exploited from the ground.

How the heck does regulation even continue to exist in a post-Chevron world?

I was saying this as a tounge-in-cheek way of calling Thiel evil. But also, Thiel is a LoTR geek, who took all of the wrong lessons from the novels, literally writing fan pieces that argued that Sauron was the good guy in LoTR to justify his personal authoritarian and fascist ideologies. Its literally why he named his company Palantir.

Sauron does have a habit of consistently appearing, and consistently appearing where least expected.

child porn?

I know the OP didn't mean it this way, but after reading HackerNews for the last decade or whatnot, it never ceases to surprise me how often developer complaints stem from developers just not doing their damn job.

"Almost nobody ever sees it.... nobody reads anything other than the first 50 chars of the headline."

On the one hand, I get it. If a tool makes something difficult, people are less likely to do it, and as engineers we want to make tools to cause people to fall into the pit of success. So, improving this part of git makes sense.

On the other hand, just do your damn job. If a coworker doesn't understand a code change, because they didn't bother to read the commit message, they're a bad developer. If they didn't write a git commit message because "no one is going to read it anyway", they're a lazy engineer. These things aren't excuses, they're incompetence, and not everything needs to cater to the least competent people in our profession.

FWIW, Homeworld 3 is coming out in 2 months, and I, for one, and psyched up about it

Anyone want to try to figure out the gas costs for deploying 30GB worth of smart contracts? xD

And yet companies are founded every day in France, and their economy is doing just fine.

If a business cannot afford to do business in a country, then that business should not be allowed to do business in that country.