everforward

I’m not an expert but I started with smaller tasks to get a feel for how to phrase things, what I need to include. It’s more manageable to manually fix things it screwed up than giving it full reign.

You may want to look at the AGENTS.md file too so you can include your stock style things if it’s repeatedly screwing up in the same way.

The studies I’ve seen seem to indicate that tariffs can work but are like running with scissors.

The artificially reduced competition will spur buying domestic products, but can also make domestic producers complacent. They don’t develop new features because they have an almost captive audience, until foreign producers advance enough that people will pay the tariff premium for better foreign products.

Then it’s a catch-22. Domestic producers are behind on technology so killing the tariffs will bankrupt them, but raising the tariffs only leans into their complacency.

Totally, but then you probably don’t want SREs. If you’re okay with 99% availability (~7 hours of downtime a month assuming 24x7 goal), you can get by with much cheaper staffing and won’t have to deal with the turnover from SREs who get bored.

Yeah, that’s valid, there are a few common layouts for SRE. I would call what you’re describing a horizontal layout (each team owns a layer for all apps that use that layer).

It sort of comes back to support levels. Your Infra SRE teams stay small if either a) an app SRE team owns application specific stuff, or b) SRE just doesn’t support application specific stuff. Eg if a particular query is slow but the DB is normal, who owns root causing that? Whoever does needs headcount, whether it’s app SRE, infra SRE or the devs.

I would call what you’re describing Datacenter Operations, with the exception of PXE boot.

You could have SRE do it, but most places don’t because you can get someone to swap a dead drive for way cheaper (it’s not really a complicated operation).

That growth of SRE teams comes from wanting reliability further up the stack. If you’re not on AWS, there’s no Aurora so someone has to be DBA to do backups, performance monitoring, configuring failovers for when a disk dies and RAID needs to rebuild, etc. Same for network, networked storage, yada yada

I work in SRE and the way you describe it would give me pause.

The first is that SRE team size primarily scales with the number of applications and level of support. It does scale with hardware but sublinearly, where number of applications usually scales super linearly. It takes a ton less effort to manage 100 instances of a single app than 1 instance of 100 separate apps (presuming SRE has any support responsibilities for the app). Talking purely in terms of hardware would make me concerned that I’m looking at an impossible task.

The second (which you probably know, but interacts with my next point) is that you never have single person SRE teams because of oncall. Three is basically the minimum, four if you want to avoid oncall burnout.

The last is that I don’t know many SREs (maybe none at all) that are well-versed enough in all the hardware disciplines to manage a footprint the size we’re talking. If each SRE is 4 racks and a minimum team size is 4, that’s 16 racks. You’d need each SRE to be comfortable enough with networking, storage, operating system, compute scheduling (k8s, VMWare, etc) to manage each of those aspects for a 16 rack system. In reality, it’s probably 3 teams, each of them needs 4 members for oncall, so a floor of like 48 racks. Depending on how many applications you run on 48 racks, it might be more SREs that split into more specialized roles (a team for databases, a team for load balancers, etc).

Numbers obviously vary by level of application support. If support ends at the compute layer with not a ton of app-specific config/features, that’s fewer folks. If you want SRE to be able to trace why a particular endpoint is slow right now, that’s more folks.

It should improve ambient temperatures inside the body, allowing for more heat transfer.

It might be marginal, though.

While not dispositive of your idea, I think some portion of people using their personal accounts is because we collectively lack good feedback loops on the effectiveness of “AI addons” like RAG. The corporate accounts can be legitimately less useful than a “stock” account because the AI team integrates everything under the sun to show value, but the integrations become a net negative.

Ie ones that index entire company wikis. It ends up regurgitating rejected or not implemented RFCs, or docs from someone’s personal workflow that requires setting up a bunch of stuff locally to work, or etc.

A lot of tasks are not dependent on internal documentation, and it just ends up polluting the context with irrelevant, outdated or just wrong information.

It could be useful for downstream/AI processes. Eg hand-written code only requires 70% code coverage because the cost for higher coverage is significantly higher, while AI generated code requires 90% coverage because the cost of getting coverage is lower.

Especially if the prompt is attached to the metadata. Then reviewers could note how you could have changed the prompt or potentially point an AI at the bug and ask it to add something to AGENTS.md to prevent that in the future.

I like tmux because it does more than tabs in an emulator. I can detach from a session on a remote host to leave a process running after I disconnect, or to pick the session back up on another PC.

I do use tabs rather than repeatedly switching tmux sessions, but I do end up running tmux for splitting the GUI into side by side layouts.

Maybe? That gets sort of awkward for frequently updated things like Reddit where there might be 10 dictionary versions between what you have and the current version. You’d need something that decides whether to get an incremental update or a new dictionary, and the hoster has to store those old dictionaries. Feels like more trouble than it’s worth.

You could compress things with gzip if the dictionary doesn’t work well, but to my understanding gzip compresses repetition. There’s less repetition in smaller chunks, so worse compression ratios. Eg compressing each comment individually has a worse net ratio than compressing all the comments at once.

It would also be annoying to merge a bunch of individually compressed blocks back together, but certainly an option

If the version control hash changes you have to re-download the dictionary, which is similar to redownloading the whole page.

Reddit/NYT would have to publish their changes without changing the dictionary, meaning some portions would be largely absent from the dictionary and have worse compression than gzip. Probably fine for NYT, something like Reddit might actually have worse ratios than gzip in that case.

That would be an incredibly risky escalation, and it would be a stupid ultimatum to issue.

The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.

A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.

> American cities could solve their housing shortages in short order but it'd piss off too many people who are "invested' in housing so we accept dead bodies in our streets and social instability instead.

I agree with you about fixing the housing market, but I think you underestimate the instability caused by changing housing prices rapidly.

If housing prices drop by something like 25%, a lot of people are going to be upside down on their loans (outstanding principal exceeds the value of the asset). The banks now have mortgages that aren’t fully secured anymore, and borrowers are heavily incentivized to allow a foreclosure unless they’ve paid down the principal by a lot.

We’re talking the 08 recession all over again.

You are really running with scissors there. If anyone with less scrupulous morals notices, you’re an outage away from being in deep, deep shit.

The best case is having your credit card processing fees like quadruple, and the worst case is being in a regulated industry and having to explain to regulators why you knowingly allowed a ton of transactions with 0 due diligence.

Rice’s theorem applies to any non-trivial semantic property.

Looking at the docs, I’m not really sure CodeQL is semantic in the same sense as Rices theorem. It looks syntactic more than semantic.

Eg breaking Rices theorem would require it to detect that an application isn’t vulnerable if it contains the vulnerability but only in paths that are unreachable. Like

    if request.params.limit > 1000:
         throw error
    # 1000 lines of code
    if request.params.limit > 1000:
         call_vulnerable_code()

I’m not at a PC right now, but I’d be curious if CodeQL thinks that’s vulnerable or not.

It’s probably demonstrably true that there is syntactically a path to the vulnerability, I’m a little dubious that it’s demonstrably true the code path is actually reachable without executing the code.

Sort of. So far as I can tell, you can withdraw to buy housing but I don’t think you can pay rent out of it.

The loans are also 75% max loan-to-value so I think until you can get 25% of the purchase price in your account you have to pay CPF and rent (or live with family).

Also, not an economist, but I suspect the forced savings has a wildly inflationary effect on housing prices. You can’t do much else with the money until you retire, so I would guess the price of housing rises up to match the forced savings rate.

SS is different mostly in that you’re not really loaning money to the government. The money coming in today mostly goes right back out as payments.

There’s also an upper limit on SS taxable income. I forget what it is, but basically the entirety of the top quintile isn’t paying SS on their entire income. I want to say it’s like 90k, but it’s been a while since I looked.

Without digging into this too far, I do think it’s possible but it does require starting early and sticking to the plan. I’m not one of those people, but I know people who are.

The mean household income for the 4th quintile is 115k a year. The mean of the middle quintile is 70k. There’s a theoretical 45k a year spread if you earn like the 4th quintile and spend like the 3rd (evidently possible since a lot of people live in the 3rd quintile).

Even ignoring compound interest, if you can hit that 4th quintile at 30 and you lose half the spread to taxes, by 55 you have 25 years of saving 22.5k/year for 562.5k in savings.

It’s probably not the most fun thing, but I do think it’s doable.

To me it sounds like a tax structured in a strange way so it doesn't obviously read as a tax.

It's essentially a forced loan to the government at subpar rates. The "tax" is the delta between what the government pays out for the bonds vs what a bond of equivalent risk in the free market would have paid.

The magnitude of the investment also probably makes it impractical for anyone but the very wealthy to retire before that starts paying out. Most other countries have lower rates on their retirement schemes, which makes it feasible for more people to live on their savings for a few years before the government retirement scheme kicks in. E.g. in the US it's pretty feasible for the upper middle/lower upper classes to retire a few years before Social Security kicks in, especially if they're willing to live frugally.

Shredding is the first step in most recycling processes (ie excluding reusing). Like if they were going to make them into this seasons fashion, I think the first step is shredding. The cut and color of style changes, and I don’t think you can do either without shredding first.

It means they’re still using the fibers, which is an upside. It does waste some CO2 for the original cut and dye.

I’m sort of dubious of the value of trying to limit CO2 like this, but that might be the goal. Whether they burn them now or sell them, they end up as atmospheric CO2 either way. It’s the same as lumber; it ends up back in the atmosphere (although not burning them does reduce PM2.5 particulate).

I like functional code, but part of the issue with React in that regard is that it likes to hide state from you.

Eg all those providers that are inputs to your component but get hidden away.

It really diminishes the value proposition of functional code because the implicit inputs make the output feel non-deterministic. Eg you can have bugs because of state in a provider that is a transitive dependency of a downstream component. You never pass it through explicitly, so it’s not readily apparent that that state is important and needs to be tested.

I find imperative to be a mess because of bugs in teardown (eg someone added a div, that div isn’t properly removed when re-rendering, problems only appear when there’s 3 or more left over divs). Unless you tear everything down and rebuild it on view change, which sounds pretty functional to me (though probably not pure, but what is outside of Haskell?)

Most of the clutter I would complain about comes more down to Discord making it really easy to bloat a server (and a cultural expectation to do so).

I’m in more than one Discord that has more channels than routine users. Like there are 4 people that use it on at least a weekly basis but there’s a meme channel, a pet photos channel, a news channel, yada yada. Managing notifications is a lost cause because the server owner redecorates the server every other week into new channels and what not.

Profiles have gotten weirdly wild, to sell Nitro stuff. Statuses, emojis for the status, now flairs from a server, profile pictures, etc.

Constant notifications for junk. Nitro is on sale, some game I don’t play has a quest, etc.

It’s fine, but it feels like Discord wants to be more than a carrier for voice and chat and I really just want them to do that. I don’t need “Facebook with VoIP”

I don’t think that solves the issue they want to fix. The issue is brands that are stylish destroying clothing that’s now out of style (preserving brand value).

The price point is already high enough that taxing raw materials doesn’t really push the needle on price, they’ll just pass the costs on.

Utilitarian brands already don’t want to destroy clothing because their customers are price sensitive.

This forces the brands to do something with excess clothing. I suspect they’ll do whatever is the closest to destroying the clothing, like recycling them into rags or shredding them for dog bed filler or something. Maybe even just recycling them back to raw fibers.

I got some decent mileage out of aider and Gemma 27B. The one shot output was a little less good, but I don’t have to worry about paying per token or hitting plan limits so I felt more free to let it devise a plan, run it in a loop, etc.

Not having to worry about token limits is surprisingly cognitively freeing. I don’t have to worry about having a perfect prompt.

A lot of writing (maybe most) is almost the same. Code is a means of translating a process into semantics a computer understands. Most non-fiction writing is a means of translating information or an idea into semantics that allow other people to understand that information or idea.

I don’t think either is inherently bad because it’s AI, but it can definitely be bad if the AI is less good at encoding those ideas into their respective formats.

Their business model is ads, which doesn’t inherently require storing information the government would want. Some of that data probably isn’t useful in that space, others might reduce efficacy by a tiny margin but it wouldn’t shut them down.

Eg I can’t think of a reason why they’d need to store your exact location. Do people target ads down to a precise GPS location, or even a street? I can’t imagine they need things more granular than a ZIP code.

That also doesn’t absolve them of supporting autocracy. The difference between the morally upright and the morally bankrupt is what they do when doing the right thing will cost them, not what they do when the right thing is free.

There’s a difference between “this concept has value” and “a company can capture that value”.

I do see value in this, but like you I think it’s too trivial to implement to capture the value unless they can get some kind of lead on a model that can consume these artifacts more effectively. It feels like something Anthropic will have in Claude Code in a month.

I think it’s a) volume of scrapers, and b) desire for _all_ content instead of particular content, and c) the scrapers are new and don’t have the decades of patches Googlebot et al do.

5 years ago there were few people with an active interest in scraping ForgeJo instances and personal blogs. Now there are a bajillion companies and individuals getting data to train a model or throw in RAG or whatever.

Having a better scraper means more data, which means a better model (handwavily) so it’s a competitive advantage. And writing a good, well-behaved distributed scraper is non-trivial.

It reflects even worse on Google for vacuuming up and keeping the data.

They can’t really refuse to hand over the data, but they could purge and stop collecting identifying data on Americans. As is, they are tacitly complicit by collecting data they know will be used against protesters.