everforward

I’ve bought some stuff off there and can tease out some aspects, though they may be after the fact rationalizations of subconscious effects.

The first is price. The stuff is cheap, as in so cheap I know it will be terrible and I still sort of don’t care. It’s $2, if I only use it twice I got my moneys worth.

That makes it super easy to hit Buy without thinking much.

The second is that they appear to target verticals that don’t have a natural ceiling to sales. I only need one microwave, so they won’t sell me that. They do sell a lot of apparel, decorations, toys for adults (crappy 3D displays, not dildos), stuff where you don’t think “eh, I already have one though”.

The third is the marriage of entertainment and shopping. I can be doomscrolling, see an ad and buy it without ever leaving the platform. If I remember right, it doesn’t even interrupt your doomscrolling really. Swipe to next video, see it’s an ad, hit buy, confirm Apple Pay pop up, scroll to next video. You can decide you want something, buy it, and be on your next video in 15 seconds. It’s so fast it almost blurs the line where I’m not sure if I’d call it shopping or entertainment.

The last is that they’re really good at luring consumers to start selling on there. The ads for stuff tend to be sort of home made and low quality, which makes it seem attainable for your average person. That tends to mean a huge selection. I had a buddy that randomly decided to sell stickers on there just based on watching other people do it (no idea how that went, I didn’t ask)

It might just not be for you. I use OpenRouter because I do like being able to quickly check whether a new model works better, but mine is a “human in the loop” dev process so it won’t ruin a day of batch processing or anything.

I do like being able to try eg GLM without having to set up a new account. It’s also nice that I don’t have to top up per-model accounts. I think I have a couple accounts with $7 in API credits sitting around.

Probably not something I would do for actual business processing, where the stability is dramatically more important than tinkering with new models.

It cost them more than normal food to maintain the stockpile. I’m not for profiteering but maintaining a stockpile implies excess production that spoils rather than being sold.

It does seem fair to pay enough to cover that at least.

I don’t think so because those both live in the context window and as such pollute it when they’re not performing optimally.

I think having unused or rarely used weights doesn’t influence the results as poorly as RAG injecting irrelevant facts.

It sounds to me like some sort of “dynamic MoE” where you can add/create or remove experts on the fly.

I think what you’re describing is the closest approximation we reasonably have right now though.

Do they do something neat with the colon? I do prefer the shorter keyword syntax, at least in Clojure because of how common they are.

Clojure tends to use them very heavily though, and last I looked it seemed like Racket used more lists (as a matter of community preference, not forced by the language).

I have little faith any of it would stop someone who was a) devoted, b) prepared, and c) had physical access for a reasonable time.

It’s still worth doing because the vast, vast majority of people will fail at a or b without even reaching c.

That’s sort of less so with planes, though. You don’t generally decide to take out a plane without being dedicated at the very least.

The electricity company doesn’t have a contract that says they’ll only give electricity to specific people.

Iron Mountain just doesn’t want to be in the middle, and I can see why. OSS went defunct, PBS files a lawsuit, guy buys OSS so PBS pauses, guy now claims he was defrauded into buying it, and somewhere in the middle nobody from OSS showed up in court so there’s a default judgement to turn those over.

I would probably also refuse to turn over the documents without a court order. The whole situation is a mess and the only way to be absolutely sure you aren’t going to get dragged into it is a court order for specific performance.

PBS probably isn’t going to sue them for releasing the docs, but who knows what OSS will do. It doesn’t sound like anyone even really knows who owns OSS at the moment.

Probably, but LLMs can’t execute code directly. They’d be making tool calls to make bash run ncat or curl or whatever that would be suspicious, as would any attempts to obfuscate it (“why is my agent doing an ‘eval $(base64 -d)’?”).

It’d be much easier to hide sketchy code in an agent harness, but “vendor adds spyware to their software” isn’t a novel issue.

I think the only sort of new issue is people “allow all”ing their agents tool calls, but that’s more or less the same issue as curl | bash

Funnily enough, I would say almost the opposite. CC’s feature set is basically table stakes for an agent these days (does it have ACP yet? Very close to behind table stakes if not) and it has a lot of bloat powering that.

IMO part of it is that the underlying LLMs have gotten better enough that harnesses feel better even if they haven’t changed. I have a toy harness that barely implements the features you’d expect and it works surprisingly well. Like there’s literally nothing clever, it calls tools and that’s about it, and it still mostly does the right thing.

I’m not endorsing the idea, but we could ban printing the card number on the card. New cards would only have a CVV, chip, mag strip and some way to differentiate between 2 cards from the same company (a colored dot?).

The info would still be on the mag strip, but the vast majority of people would be unable to pay over the phone anymore. Or the internet.

That’s pretty normal though, and has been for ages. A lot of states have random laws around the things you can sell there, even though it would prevent an out of state entity from selling the product there.

Liquor laws come to mind, you usually need special distribution stuff per state.

It would be a wild expansion of the commerce clause to prevent states from regulating what can be sold inside the state.

Go is relatively easy to learn, and the semantics of the language make it more difficult to write "clever" code that's difficult to understand.

That's the main selling point, with a secondary point that it statically compiles so you don't have to do a whole Python/JS distribution thing for CLIs.

Java feels like the closest contender here, although it really sucks for CLIs due to start up times. I don't think it's the easiest to learn either, but I've never tried all that hard.

It only really makes sense to me at org-scale, though. I think you raise a very good point for individual projects, I too normally don't choose Go for that (unless I need compilation to make distribution to myself easier on corporate laptops).

The outcome in Iran was obvious to anyone paying attention. We knew Iran would close the strait, but we also haven't truly won a guerrilla war yet. Vietnam went poorly, Afghanistan went poorly, we've only historically done well in the more economically-defined traditional wars where there's an obvious target to fling a billion dollars worth of arms at.

Iran isn't stupid, they know there's not much point in building massive arms factories to make complicated weapons. The factories will just get bombed, and the weapons will probably still be inferior. They can just sort of stand there, though. We don't have the appetite for a boots on the ground invasion, and even then they can just kind of wait til we leave and go right back to it. We don't really have a winning hand here without resorting to war crimes, and the costs of that vastly outweigh any successes. We'd be international pariahs to a degree that I don't think most Americans realize is possible.

Others can cause damage, but your odds of being hit by an Amazon driver are dramatically higher than most other companies because of the number of drivers they run.

They found a sort of loophole in the law. It's supposed to be self-regulating in a way, because being enormous means a lot of drivers and a lot of accidents so businesses get very picky about who is allowed to drive and how they drive. That falls apart when there's a bajillion drivers but they're made up of thousands of separate "delivery contractors" running fly-by-night businesses that the owners fully expect to die at some point and so don't leave any cash in and don't put improvements into.

E.g. I hear Walmart's trucking side is actually fairly nice and difficult to get into. They pay relatively well for the work and it's a cushier kind of trucking (more local, I think), which means everyone wants to work there and they have exacting standards for their drivers. They don't want insurance payouts.

Amazon seems notably different because it is _weirdly_ common to hear a story that goes something like "Amazon driver gets arrested for driving double the speed limit while high". The kind of thing that would trigger fleet-wide drug tests at most businesses, but is sort of a normal hum over at Amazon.

There is _some_ prior art here, though it’s not direct. This is very similar in concept to the joke Python extensions that replaced the global exception handler with one that invokes an LLM.

There are “workflows” that are very similar. Ie I can invoke a Python function that doesn’t exist and the exception gets handed off to an LLM to make it work by making that function exist.

This is functionally similar from what I can gather. Invoke a tool that doesn’t exist, we’ll make it exist for you.

It’ll probably get a patent issued, though, the patent office seems asleep at the wheel in the tech space at least.

Do you find the permanence of a full VM useful? I’ve wondered about something like this but always defaulted to Docker for much the same reasons people use stuff like Ansible. I’m afraid the LLM will heavily customize its environment and I’ll be unable to replicate it when my laptop dies or I can’t upgrade the OS or whatever.

Then again, I guess GUI is a pain in Docker. I tend to operate through Zed and an ACP harness though, so my GUIs are sort of “inside the container” anyways.

Am not a lawyer, but I follow these kinds of things.

Many states have a catch all law like this, probably all of them to some degree. If you google for your state, the charge is usually either “public nuisance” or “disturbing the peace”. They’re virtually all like this, so broad that you violate it just by being alive.

They usually only get used either in plea deals (ie a DUI gets downgraded to disturbing the peace), or on people who are being a pain in the ass but not technically violating any specific laws. Someone having a mental health crisis and screaming at people on the sidewalk might get picked up for it, or a drunk that won’t stop singing at the top of their lungs at 3am.

This is way, way beyond anything I’ve ever seen as far as impact, though. Public nuisance is usually a slap on the wrist charge. A day or two in jail, $100 in fines, something like that.

This is sort of a wild route for the state to go. These laws are super vague, but the penalties are usually so low I think the courts let it go. I suspect now that they’re pushing for a billion dollars in fines the courts will want to take a closer look.

I think the person above you is referring to CP, which I think is a very different harm than you’re talking about.

For what you’re talking about, I’ve heard a couple of explanations.

The first is one you pointed out, a largely religious objection to non-traditional sex. They find any sort of fetish immoral and worry porn will push children into fetishes as adults.

The second one you missed and I find reasonable, I just don’t see porn bans as the solution.

The theory is that porn will make children aware of more “extreme” or “unusual” varieties of sex, but it doesn’t endow them with the ability to have an open dialogue with a partner about wanting to do that, whether their partner is comfortable with it, etc.

The fear is that young adults will accidentally pressure their partner into sexual acts their partner isn’t comfortable with. They either see it often enough on PornHub they overestimate how normalized actually doing it is, or they’re young enough that discussing sex with their partner is still uncomfortable.

To be clear, this isn’t a puritan stance. It’s not saying that eg BDSM is bad, but that participating in BDSM should be prefaced by a conversation about safe words, boundaries, likes, dislikes, etc. Without the context of having been sexually active, it’s hard to know what parts of PornHub are “normal” and implicitly agreed upon by agreeing to have sex, and what parts really need a separate conversation.

To me the solution is mostly sex ed, though. Open communication solves most of this. The only ones I think would still be a bad idea mostly hinge around control. Eg CNC is probably a bad idea because the lack of control is part of the appeal, but it could also cause someone inexperienced to not speak up and say they aren’t enjoying it.

Maybe I underestimate the younger folks and times have changed, though.

I’m doubtful, I think you’re reading it too much as plain English.

“Lawful” in a legal context means “in accordance with the law”. You are immune to this law if you are operating under authority granted by law. It would be generally understood that the intent is to immunize police officers, ambulances with sirens, highway construction, etc. People granted specific authority over something by law.

Meta has very little lawful authority, and the little they have would only apply to their own property. Even that is severely curtailed relative to private citizens, there are a _ton_ of things you can do as a citizen that you can’t as a business (eg I can refuse to allow Rastafarians into my house if I want, a business cannot).

Phillip Morris is fundamentally different as a product because it lacks network effects. I can start smoking, quit smoking, change brands, nothing outside of me really changes.

Facebook doesn’t have that. I can’t go down the street and switch to Twitter without either convincing everyone else to switch or giving up on them. My mom plans parties as Facebook events. She won’t switch. Ergo I am forced to use Facebook to participate in family events. Phillip Morris lacks that. Family events aren’t suddenly invisible because I smoke Djarums now (although they might avoid me before I start ranting about “the man”).

That’s why Facebook is a nuisance in a way Phillip Morris isn’t. Facebook isn’t nearly as optional for many people, they get roped in by circumstances largely outside their control.

I don’t think any of those are nearly at the scale of Meta, at least in terms of how many people they touch.

Meta allegedly has 3.6B daily active users across their products; something like 1 in 2 people globally is a daily user of one of their services.

Meta is also in the business of interpersonal relationships, which is a nightmare. Banks, telcos, etc mostly deal in simple things that are complicated by doing it at enormous scale.

Interpersonal relationships are complicated even at small scales, and at large scales it’s virtually impossible to predict what behaviors will emerge. They took a complicated thing and scaled it into a globally ubiquitous process, and just gave up on doing it well at some point (because they can’t, and I don’t think anyone can).

I believe the BLS tracks all of these. I know they measure people who gave up on finding a job (they call them “discouraged workers” in stats normally).

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen underemployment charts too that seemed to track something like “people with degrees or certifications outside their field”.

They don’t normally make headlines, though. The charts and stats for those are clearly for economists and not formatted to make good headlines on the news.

Are you editing outside Zed? That’s the only time I see this issue.

Eg Pi has its own tools for editing files and ignores the ones Zed sends over ACP. If I used Zeds AI pane to have Pi change a file, I can see the edits in the ACP window but the editor view doesn’t update.

I end up having to use something from the command palette to force refresh it, something like “Editor: Reload File”.

It happens to me across Windows, OSX, native ArchLinux and ArchLinux via WSL.

I don’t think containers, as normally used, provide that much security because so much of what you want to secure is at the boundaries between containers (the network) rather than inside the container itself.

There’s not much point in preventing hyper visor escape style exploits if the agent can just SSH or psql log in to an adjacent container. Likewise there are near infinite ways to do weird things with the network to make stuff happen in another less controlled environment (eg sign up for AWS free account, make VM, do everything on that VM where controls don’t apply).

There are tools to do this, but I’ve never seen anyone package them up in a way that was pleasant to interact with. It’s got the SELinux problem of being useful, but annoying enough that everyone just disables it the second it gets in the way. It’s surprisingly hard to manage what should be able to connect to what as you start scaling out the number of things on the network. Whoops, you forgot that random software embeds its own DNS over HTTPS resolver so the normal DNS profile won’t work and everything crashed kind of issues.

Sure, but this is about IP law instead of physical goods.

This is like if you left your door wide open, and a neighbor peaked in and told another neighbor about your decor or what posters are on the walls.

You didn’t lose anything tangible, but something you wanted to be secret isn’t anymore. Where the balance of blame falls is up to you, but I do think to some degree that if you want to keep a secret and can’t put in the bare minimum effort to even try to protect it then you own some of the blame.

You can’t fail unit tests you don’t have because your agent “fixed” them by deleting them. You have to go full galaxy brain for it to work lol

They’re not bad if you give up on being able to reproduce arcane bugs. Don’t pin versions, pull everything from latest, CVEs are just a rebuild. Certainly not an amazing idea, but it solves the problem of the day.

The funnier, Kafakaesque problem of the day is interactions with mandatory cooldown periods on new versions because of supply chain risks.

I’ve had a couple tickets get stuck because the CVE scanner says I have to update, but the cooldown enforcer says the version hasn’t been out long enough.

> "I want a sketchy NP to just sign off on whatever drugs I want from the menu"

That’s my impression but they absolutely cannot say that. Admitting that would almost certainly invoke DEA charges and impacts to prescription privileges for everyone involved.

They have to at least maintain a facade that a professional looked and decided the meds were appropriate.

Selling ketamine prescriptions like that is wild though, if they’re doing that. I can see the DEA looking the other way on viagra and hair meds but ketamine feels like jamming a stick in the DEAs eye and asking what they’re gonna do about it.

That doesn’t match my experience if your bar is really as low as “won’t throw you out for not buying anything”.

Obvious anecdata, but within an easy walk or bike radius of me (a couple miles) there are 3 public libraries, something like half a square mile of parks, a few public basketball courts, a few public tennis courts, a public baseball field, a bar over the baseball field that welcomes children (it’s one of the veterans things and has board games and what not), at least a dozen other businesses that don’t care if you buy anything, and your usual litany of Walmart kind of places that can’t be bothered to track who is buying and who isn’t.

I don’t have any issues finding places to hang out for free, and I use them, but they’re pretty sparsely used so it’s not as 3rd space as it used to be.

Eg I walk my dogs most mornings, and I rarely see more than 1 other person at the park or dog park at 7 or 8am.

It feels to me like 3rd spaces are disappearing because people don’t use them, rather than people don’t use them because they don’t exist.

Depends heavily on whether we're measuring in practical terms, or in "no medical intervention" terms.

If we're measuring in a vacuum without medicine, then absolutely, the measles is dramatically more infectious.

If we're measuring in the real world where medicine exists, the measles has a safe, cheap and effective vaccine. New case rates dropped 76% between 2000 and 2018 due to extensive vaccination campaigns, and new cases of the measles globally sits a hair below TB right now. The WHO has a plan to eradicate it (and rubella) just like polio.

Meanwhile TB is now the leading cause of infectious death in the world, and the WHO estimates 1 in 4 people globally have either active or latent TB. Despite having similar new case numbers, TB kills 13 people for every 1 person the measles does.

I would describe a disease that 1 in 4 people globally have and is the world's leading cause of death as "shockingly infectious". I doubt it is the most infectious, but I think shockingly infectious is apt.

> i lived with someone infected with TB.

If they were latent, no one would expect you to have contracted TB. Latent TB isn't infectious. If they had active TB, I would personally get tested for latent TB. Not showing symptoms isn't dispositive of contracting TB, it can lay dormant for a long time or forever. I'm not saying you would definitely have contracted it enough, but the odds are high enough and risks serious enough that I'd want it treated before it became active.

Tuberculosis is different, in a very dark, utilitarian way. 4% of new TB cases are multi-drug resistant (19% of recurrences).

Once it’s multi-drug resistant, if you’re poor then you get an incredibly depressing choice. Rich countries pay for expensive drug resistance testing.

Poor countries have to answer an impossible question. You either do nothing and see if they live, or you try to guess what drugs will work and give them those. However, if you’re wrong and the treatment doesn’t work then the risk that you’ve just made the strain immune to one or more of the drugs in that cocktail skyrockets.

They get asked to either do nothing, or do the best they can today knowing it will make tomorrow worse.

TB is also shockingly infectious, which is sad. You can at least take steps to dramatically reduce HIV risk, it’s much much harder to avoid TB.