grumple

In January 2025 most of us didn’t even consider the frontier models good enough for regular usage.

This is how you get wrecked by malicious packages being published or other breaking bugs. Pin your versions.

If I were China, I would ban US models from being used by my government for the same reasons.

It’s true and I’m not. If the engineers can’t build software for your OS, your users won’t have software to use.

We’re also talking about MacOS, not iOS. Engineers make up a big segment of MacBook users. Apple is only 9.5% of the personal computing market.

Engineers and their companies are super users on whom the whole Apple ecosystem depends. If we can’t run our applications on Apple’s operating system, or they break things for our users, we will leave.

Take that lesson back to your company as well. It is easier than ever to switch between clouds and AI providers. It’s easier than ever to replace any software in house. This isn’t an idle threat; I’ve already moved off of several software platforms this year for other providers, and I’m probably doing the same for millions of dollars worth of business every year in the future as well. And my company isn’t immune to it either - our biggest customers are always looking for options to bring software in house. The more we disrupt them with “small bugs”, the more likely they are to leave.

The response from apple is insane, “please keep trying to reproduce this for us”. That is your job, apple engineer. As a manager of a large software org, a response like that from one of my engineers would drive me insane. Fix the damn problem or provide a timeline for addressing it. When you think the fix is released, then ask them if their issue was resolved.

I believe that is true, but more of it is still a liability. Good code tends to be simple. Bad code tends to be verbose, and verbose code tends to be bad. As someone who has been extremely prolific both before and after AI in terms of output, and who monitors the output of LLMs (including anthropic’s best models) I know that they are usually generating a bunch of junk. It will do what you ask but it’s largely terrible. Yes, you can mitigate that with a bunch of adversarial agents, but it’s still not great. Every line of code can potentially be a security hole or cause other problems.

Seems obvious to me that jobs which primarily require research and thought will be the first to go. The job of a good exec is basically: 1) research the market, 2) make presentations, 3) make high level decisions based on research and input from others and have leaders below you work on those. Ok, 4) is schmooze and maintain relationships but you have an org to do that too.

Fable is behind Opus (which is also much cheaper) at this point in benchmarking.

Surely all of china has the resources to match a single ai lab?

There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed. Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.

The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.

If you’re looking at feeds and posts on LinkedIn hoping to get great content, you’re using it wrong. That is not what the site is for, that was just a sad attempt to emulate Facebook.

Here is how you use LinkedIn: you mark yourself as looking for work. You search for job postings and set up alerts. You apply for jobs. You respond to recruiters. If your friends share a post about a job you’re interested in, you apply. If you have a job opening, you post it.

And stop whining about the feed.

I’m using it a bunch. It saves a ton of time writing or reviewing code. It will catch things I won’t. But I’d express caution about the analysis or evaluation they do - LLMs will often confidently proclaim problems as solved or explain functionality and be wrong about it. Sometimes subtly, but sometimes just completely wrong. This is no different from humans, of course, except for the unabated confidence.

The ICC is issuing warrants against non-members. In fact, the issuance of the warrants against the Israelis even violates the ICCs own rules and precedent: https://www.timesofisrael.com/appealing-icc-arrest-warrants-...

And then there’s the whole bit about the ICC prosecutor who issued the warrants (Khan) issuing them as an attempt blackmail a fellow Muslim ICC employee who he was raping into keeping silent with “think of the Palestinian arrest warrants”: https://archive.is/YrxUF

The ICC itself and its member states believe they have extraterritorial rights to interfere with legal practices elsewhere, which is sort of the whole point.

I’m assuming the reported 22 million dollars worth of tokens used to solve this particular problem is far more than what humans have paid to solve it previously. So I think you’re correct.

A few of my teams use tailwind. As someone who used css directly for years, this just means I have to waste time looking up the tailwind equivalent of things I know (if I’m not vibecoding). Strongly dislike it for that. But css management is really bad without it too. If I knew all the tailwindisms, it would probably be a clear winner.

This law is still worthless. A burden on those who follow it, an excuse to attack those who don't, and completely ineffective at best. You think every child doesn't quickly learn to click "I'm over 18"? I've been doing that since I was 13.

"Protect the children" is the most common refrain of fascists across the political spectrum. It's used, uncritically, to attack your rights, to take away your power, with a fragile appeal to morality. Just like the war on terror. And the war on drugs. And the war on poverty. Funny how all of these efforts have failed while increasing government interference in our lives. We never get the rights back, and we don't improve the situations on any of the above.

A reminder that the fear mongering around children is just that. It is the safest time for children in history: https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/the-world-is-safer-than-ever-s... https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/trends-child-victimization

Typically when a company gets acquired, they get thrown a bunch of terrible initiatives like “change your cloud provider” that distract from their mission, executives saying “more AI!” and they definitely don’t hear anyone in management say “prioritize technical debt”.

Prior to the Gaza war, which the Palestinians started, do you think Israel was overepresented or underrepresented on social media?

Do you think that the much, much deadlier Russian war in Ukraine has gotten more attention or less?

Do you think there are more posts about Israel here, or any other non-US nation?

I might do the math and come back. I’m certain Israel is wildly over presented in attention on HN.

Yeah but this is especially interesting because it’s Israel doing it and Israel bad. Just don’t look at the thousands of other think tanks, universities, politicians and their funding that comes from other sources.

If you use Azure you’d know they are definitely not able to scale up quickly. Tons of quotas and lack of availability.

Nah, this isn’t true at all. You can run an agent in a container or vm on a dedicated host, limit the network and access it has, and otherwise let it run wild. With ai agents we’ve just thrown away even the most fundamental restrictions or isolation. Docker Sandbox came out to address this recently, though I think VM isolation is better. A few controls to limit repo access or the ability to deploy / spend money in a cloud can help you keep things under control while still fully utilizing AI. I don’t think every part of the security bureaucracy is great, but to treat it like it’s a binary is just not accurate.

What conspiracy theory is this that you’re pushing that these were not Moroccans? You think there’s some other large group of people who live in Morocco and were just ready to run into Ceuta within a day of this Spanish ruling?

They were there for the fun of looting and harassing the Spanish at the direction of their government, not to actually settle. I might call them agitators, raiders or invaders, not migrants.

If you watch the videos or interviews with the “migrants”, these are clearly just agitators and looters trying to have a good time by harassing the Spanish. None of them expect to suddenly become Spanish citizens. It’s like flash mobs or organized looting we see in the US organized by social media.

The funny thing is that the prosecutor for the ICC (Khan) who issued charges against Netanyahu was just removed today over sexual assault allegations, which had previously not been reported because the Muslim victim was worried that the charges against Netanyahu would be dropped. Khan literally messaged her “Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants”. Palestine has been such an effective political tool for the Muslim oligarchs and patriarchy. So anyway… more bad guys.

Here I am before my morning coffee after a night out. Forgive my orneriness, rambling, and errors.

This is not good. This is a transparent political attack on universities and programs perceived as hostile by an administration and political party that has spent the years attacking higher education. "I love the uneducated", indeed. They have attacked science within the government - from the CDC through the EPA. And just last week they were taking down governmental advice on how to conserve energy during a heatwave because they didn't want to support a political opponent who had the audacity to give appropriate advice that matched the federal guidance. If you're taking this action at face value, I have a bridge to sell you. 10 million dollars, you get the Ben Franklin Bridge! I'll mail you a certificate and everything. I digress...

But let's go ahead and look at the merits of the program and what government should be doing in terms of education. Here's the announcement: https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of...

> If a program fails to show at least this modest financial return on investment for its graduates in two out of three consecutive award years, it will lose eligibility to participate in the federal Direct Loan program.

I saw some other comments that seemed to have a misunderstanding here. This 3 year period is about evaluation of the program, not graduates earnings in the 3 years after graduation. The evaluation in any year could be "20 year earnings outlook", for example, but is not specified here. The proposed rule is here: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/earnings-and-accountabilit...

Claude summary of the actual test: "When earnings are measured for an individual cohort:

The Department looks at median earnings in the fourth tax year following program completion (i.e., graduates are given a few years to enter the workforce before their earnings count). Only people who were working (not enrolled in school) during that measurement year are included.

Cohort period / averaging across years:

For small programs, the Department doesn't rely on a single graduating class — it aggregates completers across multiple years into a single "cohort period" to get a large enough sample and to smooth out one anomalous year (e.g., a COVID-affected earnings year) from swinging the result."

But we have a deeper problem here - well, a couple: 1) education is not just about employment and 2) the design of our education system, and how it's funded, is absolutely insane and fucked up for a plethora of reasons. We don't want a culturally bankrupt society. The examples used by the administration are silly (cosmetology, really? I've never heard of a college offering that to begin with). As noted, only 1% of bachelor's programs are worse off than high school anyway. Those philosophy grads actually do really well financially (I'm one of them!), but so do the English majors. The more artsy of the arts are where there's no financial future? Yeah, maybe those need to be cheaper programs. But in reality, it means that rich kids get to study and practice art and the rest of society has to actually work for a living. That's basically how things have been for 2000 years.

Now on to the economics around American universities. The loan issue has been covered elsewhere in the comments. Yes, it's fucking nuts to not allow loans to be discharged, and this has been a huge contributor to the rising costs of education. I may come back after coffee and drop a few other sources here, but maybe some of you can do that instead. But it's not the only contributor: the establishment of a degree as a gate to prevent employment is another. Two more: universities felt the need to compete on lifestyle to woo students (not employment) and finally, the way that bureaucracies tend to continuously grow when they have no natural predators. All of these have contributed to the growing cost of higher education in the US (and I'm sure there's more), but those are the big ones. I think we do need to push on universities. But I think we do that with cheaper universities, with online programs, and with free, federally funded education for fields that are projected to have growth. The total cost to fully fund higher education is about 10% of our yearly military budget: https://educationdata.org/how-much-would-free-college-cost - maybe I'm crazy, but that seems like a great deal to not saddle our best, brightest, and youngest people with a ton of debt.

Unfortunately this rule is going to add more administrative overhead while only eliminating 1% of degree choices. People will still attack the philosophy degrees even if those graduates make far above average income. The administration and anti-education crowd will continue to attack critical thinking, and they'll focus on those majors most likely to create people who oppose them (biology, chemistry, other sciences, humanities, anything outside of business).

To any students out there, do yourself a favor: go to community college, do online courses for a degree and masters, do anything you can to avoid paying $50,000+ a year to a university. The "experience" is just summer camp for almost-adults. Focus on your knowledge. Especially with AI having arrived, make conservative financial decisions.

Bankruptcy must be filed with a court and the creditors get a say. You don’t just wake up and say “I declare bankruptcy!”. A judge would look at your income and tell you to get bent, or at best set up a payment plan. They aren’t going to let a financially solvent person get out of debt. Here’s a quick summary:

https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education...